Bilingual VCD to DVD
Recently my mum wanted to replace her stack of VCDs to DVD. The VCDs are bilingual which is one language on each of the stereo channel. Since DVD supports VCD's MPEG 1 PAL (352x288) format as described in the mencoder manual , I thought I could just easily copy the video stream and transcode the audio stream to AC3 with the following mencoder recipe: mencoder -ovc copy -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf AVSEQ01.DAT -o AVSEQ01.mpg However, after burning the first disc with DVDStyler, I found that my Phillips DVD player does not allow switching between left and right channel for DVDs although language switching works fine with the original VCD. Thus, I have to split the single track stereo channel into two separate mono audio channel. After some experimenting with mencoder's audio filter, here's the recipe: mencoder -nosound -ovc copy -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf AVSEQ01.DAT -o video.mpg men...