Removing Audio Delay From Videos

by Aleksandar Micovic

I’m often amazed at the things that can be accomplished with a single command. Seriously. A show I had recently downloaded didn’t have its video and audio synced. I don’t know about you, but for me, this is incredibly annoying. So much so, that I couldn’t watch it.

Luckily, there is a way to fix this. If you’re suffering from the same problem, you’ll need mencoder. If you use Ubuntu, it’s in the repositories. Here is the command:

mencoder -audio-delay 0.5 -oac copy -ovc copy TARGET.mpg -o OUTPUT.mpg

If your audio is too fast, this example slows the audio down by half a second. The -oac copy and -ovc copy are so that we preserve the original quality of our file. You can change them if you’d like. TARGET is your target file, and OUTPUT is obviously your output. Make sure that you add the proper file extensions. In the example above I used .mpg.

Anyway, you’ll probably have to run this a few times, changing the delay so that it matches your video, and then testing it. It took me three tries to get it synced properly.