I found a way to fix the low dialogue volume.

[torgosPizza]

No problem. I do have another question. You said:

Literally every 3 or 4 minutes I'd have to pause the DVD for a couple of seconds to restore sync--all the way through both movies.  This TOTALLY distracted from the funny and would actually have been near-impossible if I had been appropriately intoxicated for the endeavor!

This is usually caused by downloading the wrong mp3 file. A PAL movie, which is usually reserved for other regions outside of North America (Europe, Australia, etc.) and it has a higher framerate than NTSC (U.S. and Canada), thus giving the effect that it runs a little bit faster. If you downloaded the PAL version of the mp3 file, but you had the U.S. version of the DVD, then the mp3 would tend to keep getting ahead of the movie by a significant amount every few minutes, resulting in the issue you encountered.

So, the question is: Did you download an mp3 file that has "PAL" in the filename? And if so, is there a way we can make it clearer what this means? If you second-guessed it even for a second, is there something we could place somewhere that would give you more insight as to what that actually means with regard to the video or mp3 speed?

Did you download the file through the link in your email? I think that's where a lot of the confusion comes from. Perhaps I should add a little bit of text in the email to warn customers what the differences are between mp3 files.

I'm saying this because, an issue like that should be fairly obviously not the way things are supposed to work.   At least, I'd hope. The mp3s are designed to be played "in perfect sync" with the DVD - so I would imagine that, when you don't get the desired result, you would come to the site's FAQ or the forum - or even the site itself, which does contain pointers - and try to troubleshoot the issue.

The manual syncing process is really easy, so I wanted to make sure that the issue wasn't so much a technological downfall as opposed to something like a syncing issue (which usually takes a try or two to get the hang of, anyway). I could understand the frustration though, and trust me when I say you're not the only one who has encountered the "playback timing is wrong" issue - so I'd like to do whatever I can to help out.

Thanks for your insight!

[prunebush]

Hi again:

I wish the solution were that easy, but  I'm very clear on the NTSC vs. PAL format issue, and I was playing the NTSC-synced MP3 with an NTSC DVD.

Is there any substance to my speculation that different physical MP3 players, such as an iPod vs. my Sansa player, might have slightly different "clock speeds" or something that affect the accuracy of their playback speed?

BTW, The e-mail link led me to the download page on my account, and I downloaded from there.

Twilight, for example, came packed as Twilight_Rifftrax.zip, and the mp3 extracted from that  is Twilight_Rifftrax.mp3.  (No PAL in the title.)

Oh, one more bit of evidence that it's not somehow a PAL/NTSC issue:  Now that my RiffTrax software player is fixed and working, the riff and the DVD stay synced-up perfectly--same riff mp3 I used on my Sansa player, and same DVD as before.

Thanks for your interest.

[torgosPizza]

Hmm very strange. It could very well be due to a playback speed issue with either the DVD player or the mp3 device. Not really sure exactly why that could happen. Did you notice any difference between the two? Do you have a different mp3 device you could try? Something like that which isn't a known issue (to us, anyway, at the moment) would be great to have on file - that way we can save others the trouble in the future.

Thanks for your additional info, it's really helpful.

[prunebush]

When I have some spare time, I'll try these movies with my wife's iPod manually synced to our hardware DVD deck and see if it stays synced better than my Sansa mp3 player did.    Will also try using the laptop as an mp3 player, using WMP or iTunes, synced manually with our hardware DVD deck.

If different mp3 players actually play at slightly different speeds, that's a whole new can of worms for you!  (Oh, goody!)

I'll let you know how it goes!

At the moment I'm satisfied with my software RiffTrax player, though it took some work to get there.

[Earthbound_X]

Heheh, maybe they should give me a little name under my forum name that says King of Rifftrax, haha.

Glad to see this is still helping some people.