When I open the video with virtualdubmod it says some msg about the header and how the audio is VBR. So I decompress the whole audio stream and recompress it with lame at 128. Then I add the video and audio back together and use DivxToDVD to turn it into DVD format. When I pop it into my player (a good LG one) the sound is very quiet and when you turn it up the guys voice sounds...almost like if he was talking into a fan (sure we have all done that as kids). I've tried reencoding the video also and encoding the audio in other bitrates. I have a huge stack of junk DVD's now =/ Does anyone have any suggestions? Do you think its having DivxToDVD convert the video to 29fps (required by the player) that could be doing it? The picture looks fine.
Stop recompressing the audio. Lame MP3 may be fine for audio CD's but it doesn't work well for DVD at all, and some players wont' even play it. Uncompress the audio to .wav in vdubmod as you have been. Use that as the audio source in Divxto DVD, or...you can make it .mp2 or .ac3 in Ffmpeggui, then use that in DtoDVD.
If you build the DVD with AC3 audio (this is DVD spec), then it's only playing back what it got in the first place... If the source audio sucks, then the DVD audio will suck. VBR MP3 is the worst. Here's a roundabout fix: Decompress audio in virtualdub. Open it in Goldwave, or Audacity, or any other good audio editor, and double the volume. Save it as .wav Use that as the source during encoding.