How do I go about making dual channel VCD's?

I have some VCD's that I bought from Hong Kong and it's possible using my DVD players to select either the left channel which has the Cantonese language soundtrack or the right channel which has the Mandarin soundtrack. Which ever channel is selected it is played back in mono over both channels.

I would like to do this with some of my own where the left would have the main film soundtrack whilst the right would have a commentary, music only or another language. I've used Goldwave to put the one audio track on the left channel with the other on to right channel and then selected dual channel in the audio options of TMPEGEnc.

My problem is this though. In Windows Media Player2 it is possible to select either the first channel or the second channel under Settings>MPEG Audio Decoder, but when I burn my encoded VCD to disc and play it in any of my DVD players I cannot select the left or right channel like with the retail discs bought from Hong Kong. Instead, both channels are played so I have both audio tracks playing at once.

I was wondering if any one knows what to do so that I can select the left or right channel? Would it be CD burner dependant, or authoring software dependent? I'm using TMPEGEnc Plus 2.59 to encode and VCD Easy v1.1.7 to author them to disc .

-- John L (theone_uk@emailaccount.com), October 12, 2003

Answers

There are 3 valid choices in the encoder/decoder; Stereo, Joined Stereo, and Dual Channel. Most s/w packages have [as well as DV camcorders] will let you record two separate stereo audio tracks. I know that in making a VCD using Stereo, it ignores the 'music' track, therefore the primary track is being recorded to the VCD file. This is how you created the audio file and should work. There is also a De-emphisis option of none and 50/15 uS. If the latter is being used, the codec may be combining much of the audio into a mono track with a little stereo preserved for appearances. I have not tried to see what the Dual channel option really does. Once I read it means more compression and figured that was useless :)

-- Tom Dee (abdesign@teleport.com), December 07, 2003.