The VideoLAN Forums

Windows XP Pro SP2, VLC 0.8.2 official release version. I'm trying to convert a .AVI file using 10 Mbps MPEG-IV video and 320 kbps MPEG audio, as created by a capture programme, into a .MP4 file using MPEG-IV video at 1.5 Mbps and MPEG-IV [AAC] audio at 320 kbps.
I use the following sout string:
The file as it comes out has no audio stream. Now, I assumed that since AAC [= mp4a] is available through the GUI, that I could actually output it. Looking at the "streaming features" list, I see that to encode AAC requires compiling ffmpeg with libffaac support. Is this not done for the Windows binary, and if not, how would I go about doing it myself? I have never been able to get AAC to encode with VLC.
When I did not transcode the audio from mpga, I got a nasty error trying to play in QuickTime, all about the audio data being invalid and the Decoder Configuration Descriptor corrupted. Transcoding it to aac, I get no audio at all. I am going to try a couple of others and see what happens.

Puzzlingly, when I try encoding at 192 kbps video and 16 kbps mono audio, it comes out fine [looking bad, but I mean it works, the audio actually exists]. Oddly the audio bitrate claims to be 720 kbps. I must explore further. Stream 0 is the audio track, and stream 1 the video track; whereas with the higher-bitrate file both streams were, identically, the video track.
With 1536 kbps video and 16 kbps stereo audio, I again get picture and sound: the audio bitrate is displayed as 1536 kbps.
Results for 1536 kbps video and 128 kbps stereo audio are substantially identical as for 1536/16.
With audio set to 192 kbps stereo and 1536 kbps audio, the file size produced is exactly the same as for the 1536/128, and I have to begin questioning what is really going on. It still plays audio, though. Just the same happens with 1536/256 selected.