Did HandBrake leave you with a unplayable movie in QuickTime or Muffled Audio in VLC?

I ripped The Wire: Season 1 using HandBrake’s “AppleTV” present, and was left with one file where the video was fine but the audio was not.

When I tried to launch the file (THEWIRE_S1_D4-1.m4v) in Quicktime, I received the error:

The movie could not be opened.
An invalid sample description was found in the movie.

Ok…. Thanks?

VLC would play the audio but it was so badly muffled you couldn’t hear anything.

All the rest of the audio on all the other episodes from the same DVD were fine. It was just that one.

I re-ripped it directly from the DVD, and still had the problem.

Since it was an audio problem, I decided to look at HandBrake’s audio settings. Normally I never touch HandBrake except to use the presets. But, desperate times and all that.

Here are the default settings for this particular episode:

I’m sure there are nice people out there who speak this language, but to me it’s complete nonsense.

However, I am quite adept at doing comparisons so I looked at the default settings for another file from the same DVD, one that worked. And this is what I saw:

Ok, now I’m looking at two things I don’t understand, but I see that in the 2nd one “Track 1” is listed as “5.1 ch” and in the first one it’s listed as “3.0 ch”.

Sure enough, all the working episodes have “5.1 ch” but the one not-working one was “3.0 ch”.

What does that mean? I have no frakking clue.

There was one other option for English audio, so I chose it:

I re-ripped the episode with those settings, and it worked in VLC, QuickTime, and it copied to the AppleTV.

Why is one episode on the DVD mastered with different audio than all of the others? I haven’t a clue. But now you know how to work around it.

How ironic is it that a show about audio surveillance would end up with audio problems on the DVD?

Oh, just shut up.