I recently found an old video on YouTube where someone was extracting audio from a DVD. He basically added a file called avformat-52.dll to his library. After much searching around, I found a file called avformat-55.dll, I’m guessing that’s the version that’s just out now.
I followed his instructions, and I noticed when he did it, the soundwaves looked kind of normal. He didn’t play the extracted audio in the video, but I imagine it sounded fine. When I did it, the soundwaves were extended all the way to the tops and bottoms of each channel, and I heard a bunch of static noise, and it seemed to be on a certain drum beat of the music. It made it unlistenable. It was basically a loud static noise.
Is there any way to get rid of this and make the audio listenable?
Was his a home-build DVD and was yours?
If commercial DVD, was yours region friendly?
When we were making these, we would sometimes run out of room (we could only burn single layer) so we would skip the large PCM sound and only use the smaller AC3 track. Never had a client complain. Audacity may need you to install the FFMpeg software to open AC3.
Scroll down for optional downloads.
https://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/
Do you know which of the copy protection schemes yours has? It can have more than one. One favorite trick is to produce normal-looking DVD tracks and pathways that are trash. DVD players “know” to correct the trash by searching for “hidden” tracks which is where the movie is. Rippers have no clue. That sounds like what you have.
The Los Angeles Library System got stuck with a DVD movie a while back that was so well protected, a bunch of us couldn’t play it at all. We searched enough branches and eventually found a different issue of the same movie which would play. We turned it in to the library administrators.
I would feel a lot more fuzzy-warm about this had the demo actually played the music. For all you know, his track was a clear male voice saying, “This movie is protected by the fairplay music system.”
Koz
Can you play the VOB file on your computer? If you can play the file (audio & video) from your hard drive then it’s not copy protected (or the copy protection has already been cracked) and you should be able to extract the audio.
avformat-55.dll is just one of the FFmpeg files. Follow Koz’s link and downwnload and RUN ffmpeg-win-2.2.2.exe to install the whole package.
Also, DVDs are split into multiple VOB files (1MB maximum) and if it’s a musical DVD, odds are the splits are in the middle of a song. So, you’ll have to join the files (before or after extracting the audio) and then you can optionally split into individual songs.
The DVD of which I’m trying to RIP is part of a set called AC/DC Backtracks. The first two CDs are audio and the 3rd disc is a DVD, that’s the one in question. In fact, here is the DISCOGS site for reference: https://www.discogs.com/ACDC-Backtracks/release/2021647
Regarding region, well, I don’t quite understand this one. On the disc itself on the underside, there’s a number printed, and there’s also a website to an Australian website. At the same time, the DISCOGS page states that it’s a US release, which would make sense, since I’m in the USA.
I was able to rip the DVD with handbrake (I could either choose M4V or MP4, I went with M4V), and while playing the video, the audio sounds just fine. I’m not too familiar with the legalities of all of this, but I’m not looking to make a profit, I just want to get away from physically having to dig out a disc to play something. That said, I’m looking to make audio tracks out of the DVD, if that’s even possible. Is there a way to extract WAV audio from a M4V filetype? That would solve my problem. I can handle splitting and combining WAV tracks with Audacity pretty easily. I did see at least one VOB to WAV online file converter. It worked just fine for one of my files, but for others, it had a file size limitation.
I did attempt to play the VOB files from both the CD (then I realized that wouldn’t have worked, oops), and then by copying it to the hard drive. Neither of which worked.
Regarding a installing the full FFMPeg package, I tried that yesterday and I think that’s eventually how I got ahold of the file avformat-55.dll.
Any other thoughts?
I wanted to come back and inform you all that I actually figured out how to do this. It may not be the most direct way of going about it but it works.
In fact, Audacity was not even used. I assumed that I needed to use it to do this, apparently not. I only decided to come post here after finding a video on YouTube on how to do this with Audacity but was having problems. But I will be using Audacity to split the file later on.
To go from a Video DVD to a WAV:
- Rip the DVD with Handbrake. Note that my version of Handbrake, I specifically customized based on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQV5RX2YUiY
- Install MMFPeg. I used this video, there’s a download to MMFPeg in the description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjtmgCb8NcE
- Open the Command Prompt, then type in ffmpeg - “sourcefile.m4v” “destinationfile.wav” and press Enter. Credit for finding the command from this site: https://vitux.com/how-to-convert-m4v-to-wav-format-in-ubuntu/
The insanely loud static sound I would hear on each drum beat when attempting to use Audacity to convert from VOB to WAV was not present and the audio was perfect. I went ahead and tested another live music DVD as well and I got that same noise.
So in a nutshell: DVD>M4V (or MP4 probably) using Handbrake>WAV Using the Command Prompt.