[MacDV] MP3 Audio Extraction From MPEG Movie?

[Steven Rogers]

On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 11:02 PM, Thubten Kunga wrote:

> I'm stumped. I have downloaded a 55.4 MB 5:34 minute Music Video MPEG 
> movie (i know not what flavor) that plays in QuickTime. But when I try 
> to use my QuickTime Pro 6.1 to export the audio as an AIFF file, I get 
> no option to do that. In fact no audio extraction option is shown.

Right - MPEG audio is like a unfathomable enigma to Quicktime. It 
plays, but if you do anything with the movie, the audio is history. 
Most of the edit functions are disabled with MPEG.

>  So I downloaded Extractor .95 from the internet and it won't 
> recognize the MPEG movie as a file it can deal with. I did already 
> export the original MPEG movie as a QuickTime Movie. But Extractor 
> doesn't see that file either.

Strange. I looked at the type and creator code of some MPEG files that 
Extractor likes on my machine, and they're MPEG and TVOD. I think 
Extractor expects MPEG-2 and your file might be MPEG-1 - that's one 
guess.

> I have a Judeth Stern and Robert Lettieri Visual QuickStart Guide to 
> QT Pro 5 book that says that I am supposed to be able to see audio 
> export options that don't show up in QTP 6.1. Did Apple remove the 
> audio extraction options in 6.1 Pro?

I don't think so. They're just absent for MPEG.

> How do I get the audio out of the MPEG movie and ultimately into an 
> MP3 file?

Another option is BBdemux (I think its on Sourceforge) - I haven't 
found it as reliable as Extractor, but its an option.

Other programs like MediaPipe, FFmpegX, etc. should be able to extract 
audio, but they're in the "dicey" category that Jim mentioned. It seems 
to take boundless twiddling to get them to work. Audio is the hitch 
when working with MPEG. I don't know enough about MPEG to know the 
technical reasons behind it, but it seems like there aren't any 
programs for dealing with MPEG as an integrated stream like other AV 
formats. It seems standard procedure to "demux" them (i.e. split the 
audio and video) and deal with them as separate entities. There are 
more freeware programs for the PC - maybe the Mac will catch up.

SR