what audio settings do you use?
 

when editing , what settings on the audio side of things ( Dolby Digital, PCM, MPEG1?)do most of you use if your final product is going to be DVD.

I use TMPGE and Cineform Codec and seem to be experiencing troubles when set to Dolby Digital , atleast when trying to play the final MPEG2 in Windows media.

I use either PCM stereo or AC3 5.1 surround.

I do the AC3 encode separately from the DVD authoring - i.e. I pull separate mpeg2 video and ac3 audio streams into the authoring app.

What kind of problems are you having - are you using the TMPGEnc Plug-in AC-3? (I gather that only does AC3 2.0 - right?)

Yeah Graham I think thats it.
Im doing DD 5.1 in Vegas and Irender via Cineform codec and from that do the MPEG in TMPGe 3 express which I bought the plugin but it seems it only does AC-3 stereo ( whats the point?)

It seems it plays on a DVD player but not on any of my computer programs like Windows media, Real player, Creative

Nero plays it but its broken up bad

It's odd that your audio plays OK on a standalone but not on your computer - it is usually the other way around! Have you tried the disk out on anyone else's computer - just in case your directshow filters are somehow out of whack?

It might be worth installing/reinstalling a software DVD player (PowerDVD or WinDVD) - as that can be a fast way to restore playback capability.

(I doubt your problem has anything to do with HDV as such. Good luck with it.)

Oh - meant to say...."the point" of 2-channel AC3 is just that its smaller than uncompressed PCM. So if you have a lot of footage to go on a disk, using AC3 gains you some extra space for the video.

MPG audo does as well, of course, but MPG audio is actually not an official part of the NSTC DVD spec (even though virtually every DVD player I know of supports it).