"It's a nice idea... but personally I don't think it's worth the effort. I still can't hear any problem with the music (though perhaps a "correct" mix would sound better), and it wouldn't be as simple as dropping in the rear channels from another country's DVDs - the echoes in the Death Star (is that what you meant by the chasm, ADM?) would still have to come from the English soundtrack, for example. I know there's a lot of leakage of dialogue from the center to the fronts, but I'm not sure about the rears, generally."

I was under the impression that the foreign soundtracks were correct - pointing to an obvious flaw in the "creative decision" reasoning. Perhaps Neil could verify this?

And since nothing I know of edits AC3 files, my scenario would be to transpose them to wavs, load the surrounds into a sound editor, replace any french dialogue with english (leaving as much of the French musical soundtrack as possible), and then re-encode with the english fronts into a new AC3.

I could actually do this quite easily, if someone could get the foreign soundtracks to me. I know that re-encoding AC3 tracks after converting the original AC3 to WAV isn't the greatest scenario, but I think the final product would sound pretty good to all but the most sensitive of ears.

"The interesting thing I've discovered from doing the DVDs is that the audio on all DVDs seems to be ~80ms (two frames) in advance of the video, so don't try and sync it up externally and expect it to stay in sync once you've made the DVD. True DVD players play back in sync, but DVD player software on PCs seems to keep them out of sync."

Some DVD mastering programs, like DVDLab-Pro, allow you to add or subtract the necessary milliseconds to sync up the audio and video, if necessary. That being said, I've always edited my audio and video to be in sync in Vegas (with soundtracks, commentaries, and mixes), so this was never necessary for me to do. Other programs may be different.