Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Playing Dolby 1.0 DVDs on a PC

This is topic Playing Dolby 1.0 DVDs on a PC in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-27-2005, 10:11 AM:

I recently ordered the Warner NTSC DVD rereleases of Clash by Night, Mildred Pierce and Out of the Past from the US Amazon site. The transfers are all great, and compared to some studios who seem willing to let dodgy independent publishers put out shitty transfers of equally shitty 16mm prints of their older titles, I'd give a big thumbs up to Warner - these discs look great and show that the studio is willing to put money into looking after its back catalogue and presenting it the best way possible.

The audio is Dolby 1.0 - track on centre channel only. I guess the decision to use Dolby 1.0 was to free up extra bandwidth for the picture: that makes technical sense, but it gives me a problem. When watching the discs on my PC the centre speaker on its own isn't loud enough to hear the soundtrack comfortably, even with the volume cranked right up. I've played around with the settings on Power DVD and can't find a way of telling it to send the audio to the L and R speakers as well (most of the other mono DVDs I have are 2.0, duplicating the same track on L & R, and they don't give me any problem).

Question - is there a way of doing this in Power DVD that I've missed, or if not, is there another DVD playback program out there which will send a 1.0 track to more than one speaker? Many thanks in advance...

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 11-27-2005, 02:15 PM:

Plug headphones into the minijack out on your sound card. Don't let it go out and Pro Logic. My guess is that the audio was mastered at a very low level.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-27-2005, 03:51 PM:

Or play it in WMP and use the internal graphic EQ to boost the level. I don't know how much boost is available (it just says "1...14" but I doubt those are dB steps), but it might be enough. My PC has AC97 onboard audio which came with an audio configuration tool which allows another 12dB boost. Maybe your system has a similar tool. One of the two is usually enough for low level sources, but you may of course run into distortion problems.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-28-2005, 05:02 PM:

quote: Joe Redifer
My guess is that the audio was mastered at a very low level.

Correct - it seems stupidly low.

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll try the Windows Media Player boost route in a couple of weeks time when I'm back from the US.

Posted by Bernard Tonks (Member # 809) on 12-18-2005, 03:59 AM:

For those interested in the UK "Mildred Pierce" is being screened on BBC 2 TV Wednesday 21st December at 1.10pm.

IMDb

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 12-21-2005, 08:05 AM:

I wasn't able to boost the level using the PC alone to anything comfortable. In the end, I stuck a standalone phono preamp in between the sound card and the speakers... it was a bit bass heavy because of the RIAA curve, but for the soundtrack of a 1940s film, it did the job.