The demuxing process in detail...
Yeah, I've been doing things over the past few days with video that I had never done before!... It's been quite a learning curve! I've very grateful for this forum (and your help, ChickenMan) for easing the learning curve!...
Let me go through the entire process of changing the original MPEG-2 file in detail, so you can understand what I'm doing... I might begin by saying that this MPEG-2 video file is not the result of a DVD rip, but has come from the video capture by a Hauppauge WinTV-350 PCI MPEG-2 video capture card. I use it to record satellite television programming. The audio in this MPEG-2 file that I'd like to alter is fairly simple: in the original file, there is commentary that talks over the end credits of a TV show. I have an audio track from a different television episode that doesn't have such commentary, so I am going to replace the end credit audio from the original recording with a new one; the replacement audio was recorded directly to a .WAV file.
Starting off in Womble's MPEG-VCR... I will choose to demultiplex the target MPEG-2 file. Once choosing which file I want to demux, MPEG-VCR automatically chooses the file names for their separate video and audio parts; the video becomes a .MPV file, and the audio file becomes a .MPA file. (How in the world I was describing it as a .WMA file, I have no idea; I think I was up too late last night playing with this stuff!) So, I let MPEG-VCR demux the file into its video and audio components.
Because I only have Adobe's Audition installed (since it was a free upgrade for me from Cool Edit Pro 2.1), I am required to transcode the .MPA file to something that Audition can import. Since BeSweet can transcode the .MPA to a .WAV file, I'll do that process.
So now I'm on BeSweet GUI. It converted the .MPA file to a stereo .WAV file (no 5.1 support); I also specified no output bitrate, nor whether it was be for NTFS or PAL video. This was done using BeSweet.exe 1.4. The transcode process goes fine.
Now I open Audition, and am able to open the newly-created .WAV file without any problems. I make my minor edit, making sure that the resulting .WAV file is the exact length as the original file was. I save this file as a standard PCM WAV file.
Now I go back to BeSweet GUI. Using tooLame.exe from within BeSweet GUI, I select the altered .WAV file and specify to transcode it to a .MP2 file. This is also done by BeSweet.exe 1.4, and goes without a hitch.
Now I go back to MPEG-VCR. I choose to multiplex the video and audio segments into a single MPEG-2 program stream. I do no offsetting between the video and audio, since they should be the exact same length, and the section of the audio I had replaced in the .WAV file is the exact same length as it has been in the original. During the MPEG-2 multiplex process, I choose that I want to create a MPEG-2 program stream (not a transport stream) using variable bit rate. This process seems to go without any problems, and I now have a new MPEG-2 file with my altered audio.
When I try to play this new and altered MPEG-2 file (using any software media player which can read MPEG-2, such as Divx Player, the Hauppauge media player, or Windows Media Player), everything seems fine. The video and audio are in synch, and it plays as smoothly as if I had not done anything with it; note that this is being played off the hard drive, and has not been burn to any CD or DVD. But when move the play bar to some other location in the video (or go backwards on the play bar), the audio drops off. Ocassionally when I do this I might hear a slight pop in the audio, but nothing more.
This is the problem I am having... The entire process seems to go smoothly, but my resulting MPEG-2 file cannot be skipped in time; it only plays well if you let the video play from beginning to end.
Any ideas how this happened, or how I might be able to fix it?...
As always, I am most grateful for your input!...
