FINALLY!

I finally figured out a way to get the audio out of a dvd in seperate channels.

A little background:
When we make trailers, we want to remove everything but the dialogue, so that we dont have the discontinuity of the music changing every two seconds during the trailer. Then we add our own music over the whole thing to tie it together.

DVDs have surround sound on 6 channels. 1+2 are the front left and front right, which contain a nice mix of music, dialogue, and sound effects. 3 is the front center, which is just dialogue with the occaisional important sound effect. 4 is the subwoofer. 5+6 are the rear left and right speakers, which are just the music. Ever watch a movie on tv and you had trouble understanding what a guy said because of the music or background noise? That's because it's audio made for surround sound, mixed down to stereo. The seperation into so many channels makes it easier to mentally seperate words from sounds, so you can understand dialogue despite the background noise.

This also helps us in our trailer projects. As mentioned above, dialogue is on channel three, so if we just pick that one off the dvd, and leave the rest, we magically have the dialogue, without the music. Thanks to the wonderful people at the MPAA, who put copy-protection on DVDs, this is more difficult than it seems.

I ended up using windows software called DVDAudioExtractor.exe to seperate the channels. Here's the result:


Viola, dialogue with very little else. This part of movie has loud rock music, rain, and thunder noises-- NOT ANYMORE!!!

The full wav (sorry) file is on it's slow way to sharedspace now, under grd4400>300>