Anyone ever experience this (sync-related)?

So I had recorded the TV Show/Mini-series Political Animals in HD when it was on. Unfortunately, the show was only released on DVD and never on blu. I recorded the on-demand version when it was still available because it did not have the station bug in the corner. The only problem is that the on-demand version had 2.0 audio (192kbps) as opposed to the original 5.1 mix. Although there is an HD iTunes version, mine has significantly less compression and I'd really rather not go down that route.

So I purchased the DVD version to get the 448kbps 5.1 track. To my surprise, of the 6 episodes, only 1, 5 and 6 synced up. When I lined up the other 3 episodes, they immediately became wildly out of sync, as if the on-demand version I had recorded was sped-up. My immediate thought was that they possibly used a PAL master or something for the on-demand but that just makes no sense. I checked the iTunes download as well as the original TV broadcasts (from torrent) and none of them synced up either.

Has anyone ever encountered something like this and did you ever find a solution? Am I just going to have to manually go through and line it up? Any suggestions?

It's possible that the TV airing was sped up slightly to fit its timeslot, and that the On Demand version was just copied from the broadcast version.

In that case the only realistic "solution" would be to timestretch the audio, which causes some artifacts or a pitch shift.

No. That's the weird thing. It's the opposite. The TV airings were fine. It's the OD version that was sped-up.

Could this be a 59.94 vs 60 frame rate issue.

Moth3r said:

Check to see if the video on the DVD lines up frame-for-frame with the on demand version, if it doesn't, you might have a clearer idea of what's going on and where it goes out of sync.

Moth3r said:

So, the on demand video is about 30-45 seconds shorter than the video off your DVD?

It sounds like this is because of missing frames rather than a 60fps/59.94fps mismatch (as an audio speed up didn't fully solve the problem).

You will need to line up the two videos in an editor and find out where the on-demand version is missing frames, then make the corresponding cuts in the audio at those locations.