TooLAME mp2 audio error w/MPEG-2

[rubyeye]

I found in the mrk2 version of the Technical Guide, the section on “Compressing Audio for MPEG files” to help improve the audio quality of my MPEG-2 video for convention submissions. It shows to use tooLAME.exe as an external program for better mp2 encoding.

However, in writing my AVS file following Scintilla’s Encoding Your AMV to MPEG for Convention Submission, and applying it to TMPGEnc, I get this error message:

Illegal MPEG audiostream

Everything in the AVS script works. It’s just in trying to use tooLAME as an external program for “better” mp2 encoding - it does not work. I’ve tried testing this out using different variables, with and without the external SSRC.exe sample frequency converter, stripping the AVS file down to just 2 lines - the Video and Audio source, and testing if I can even create an MPEG-1 version. - Still the same error message.

So I’m just wondering if anyone else had this problem? Is tooLAME even still useful for this operation? Is there another/better program?

[Qyot27]

toolame was superseded by twolame a few years ago, actually (and even twolame hasn't been updated since January of '08). However, I don't believe twolame works with TMPGEnc...at least, that's what I recall from when I actually used TMPGEnc. I switched to HCenc for my MPEG-2 needs almost two years ago.

Alternately, you could forgo using MP2 and switch to AC3, in which case, go with aften. Although I would guess it depends on the version of TMPGEnc you're using and if it allows you to encode to AC3 and use an external encoder for it, to boot (even at that, it would also have to support aften as that encoder). Even the old versions of TMPGEnc do allow to you specify an already-encoded AC3 file to use as the audio stream during encoding, which does save an extra muxing step.

[Mister Hatt]

How about encode audio separately altogether and just use an mpeg muxer? ffmpeg -i video.mpg -i audio.mp3 -vcodec copy -acodec copy muxed.mpg