Handbrake Not Finding Audio Tracks on DVD

Question

I'd been running Handbrake 0.95 (and earlier versions) on OS X Snow Leopard (and earlier versions) for some time and it's been working great. However, recently my Mac gave up the ghost and I replaced it with a new one. After updating to OS X Lion, I downloaded Handbrake 0.95 but for reasons unknown to me it's not able to see audio tracks on DVDs anymore.

I've noticed that it takes a very long time to scan the DVD titles, and while that's not a big deal I suppose it may be a related symptom. But on the tab for audio there are no tracks found on the DVD.

I don't really know much about codecs and whatnot, but does anybody have any ideas why this might be the case? Is there additional software I should install on my Mac that would be used to support Handbrake?

Answer 1

Looks like the root cause of this turned out to be kind of silly. Apple's DVD drive on my new Macbook Pro had a Chinese region set. (I'd forgotten that "regions" were even still a thing.) Looks like applications like VLC and HandBrake make great efforts to read and decipher what they can about a source when there's something standing in their way, and for all I know they may have been indicating in some way unclear to me that this problem existed. But ultimately it was a region encoding issue.

For reference, the HandBrake forums helped me out here.