Multilanguage DivX

Yes, that's right! It is possible to have as many audio tracks as you like with your DivX or Video CD's. The only player that supports a second audio track is MicroDVD. BSPlayer is messing about with multi-tracks but we will stick with MicroDVD for the moment. With MicroDVD all you need to do is specify the secondard audio track in the ini file, and that easy enough to do.

Getting the Second Audio

If you used FlasKMPEG to get your DivX movie you will be unfamiliar with how to grab just the audio from a DVD. This is important because it may only take half an hour to grab the secondary language audio track from a DVD with most programs, but the only way to do it with FlasKMPEG is to encode a whole Vob file into another DivX video! As you can imagine this will take ages! But if you have that kind of time to waste it is just as easy to use a Flask videos alternate soundtrack. All you'd need to do is extract the audio from your video with VirtualDub. Anyway, to learn how to extract any audio file from a Vob file without Flask you should read the audio extraction methods explained in my 'Ripping with Mpeg2avi' guide.

Compressing the Audio

By now you should have extracted an secondary language track from the DVD and converted it into PCM Wave. The trick now is getting it compressed and synched with the original movie. To do this follow exactly my multiplexing guide under the 'Ripping with Mpeg2avi' section. Don't worry if your original DivX movie has perfect audio already we are making a new DivX movie out of it. So at the end of all this you will have:

The reason for all this is only so we can know that the audio is perfectly synched and also it is the easiest way to compress it too. For those of you that want to use other programs such as Xing's Audio Catalist etc., that is fine too since we are not multiplexing the secondary audio back to the video. Why? Because there is no need and it plays better this way.

One or Two CD's?

If you are making a 2 CD DivX then you must make it as a single whole movie first. Then add the secondary audio track, and then cut it in half with VirtualDub. Go to my cutting & joining AVI guides to see how to cut movies. The reason for this is that the secondary audio track must be split in the exact same place the original movie was.

Extracting our New audio Track

This is the easy bit. Open your second audio track movie/s in VirtualDub.

Select: File > Save WAV...

Don't worry, this will not extract the audio to PCM wave, it just calls it a wave. What you will get is your compressed audio such as the Mp3 file or the WMA audio but you can call it what you like, sound.wav, sound.mp3, sound.wma etc. You can extract just about any other audio formats from an AVI using this method too.

Okay, now you will have:

Now you can delete the DivX with the secondary audio track and end up with:

That's it! MicroDVD will allow you to select this secondary audio track at any point in your movie. But for information on creating DivX CD's for MicroDVD continue to read my 'Multimedia DivX' section.