Early last year, my cable was out for a few weeks, and I can't remember the exact dates, so I had a friend record some shows for me. I usually rip something I want to watch down to divx, and discard the raw file after a few weeks. With my friend helping me out, he would put them on DVD, then I would rip them down to mpeg, then to divx. Now, here is the problem - one of the files, near the end of the month, is without sound. I don't know whether it's one that I ripped at home, or my friend recorded at his place. I have a time stamp for the file, but that doesn't help much when you don't know the date you are looking for (I had to create a new cable account during the outage, so I have no way for ringing the cable co. and asking about an invoice - tried that)! Let me see if I can explain the problem more simply: Had a cable outage for about 3 weeks-1 month, from about the middle of 1 month to the middle of the next Had my friend record some shows for me while I had the outage Normally I delete them once they're watched, but since he was recording them onto dvd (instead of onto pc like me), the discs would be back home somewhere Sound is missing in one of the shows, I want to know if I am screwed or not (screwed=if its one I did myself and goofed with the sound, not screwed=searching for 3-12 hrs for the disc my friend did for me, since his definately had sound and would have just been my putting it on the hard drive that made it lose the sound) Compound this with the fact I'm overseas, getting over culture shock, and you can see how my figuring this out with rational thinking might be compromised. He has a pretty screwed dvd recorder, so I looked for artifacts, different resolution, anything that might tell whether or not it came direct from my cable box, or if it went friends' cable>dvd>my player>computer. You may think this is the last thing one would think about when working overseas, but trust me, there is very little for a single male to do over here after work and on (thursday/friday) weekends, other than the occasional compound party (sometimes with forbidden alcohol) or a neighbor putting a western movie onto their mini-cinema. If anyone is a lateral thinker, thinks outside the box, any way to solve this "problem", Then you can call on me for a fairly big favor!
I can't really conceive of getting a divx without sound, if there was sound on the original file. If you are missing a codec during conversion, divx will tell you and refuse to convert the file. If the original file simply didn't have a soundtrack, divx would convert the file, but not if it was a codec issue. If the file was corrupt, it shouldn't play at all. It is somewhat possible, since you are talking about ripping from DVD recordings, that your friend was using Dolby sound codec, and you have the divx maintaining the AC3 codec for dolby sound, but you don't have that codec on your current machine. I'm not even absolutely certain this could happen, how would he be recording off the TV in Dolby? But theoretically that would do it. Do have the K-Lite codec pack or similar installed on your current PC? What OS are you using? With 64 bit OS a lot of 32 bit codecs won't register properly.
There's actually a very simple reason that I didn't get sound (and the most likely) - I tripped the line input cord from the dvd player to the pc sound card. The sound doesn't get modified or anything, until I turn the mpg file into a divx - and if there was no sound on the mpg, there won't be on the divx.