Foreign DVD plays on computer but not on DVD player

[johnharlin]

My relatives from Belgium sent me a DVD with movies of them that I cannot get to play on my one year old Panosonic DVD player. The DVD disc says "Princo, 1-4x speed, R4.7, 4x/1x." In any case, I can play it on my computer but I cannot play it on the DVD player.

I then copied the DVD film files over to my computer and copied it to a blank DVD disc. I have done that many times and films have always played on my DVD player. But not this one. I did it a second time using DVD shrink but that made no difference. It still couldn't play it on my DVD player. The problem is obviously somehow with the movie files film format rather than the DVD disc.

The disc itself has a title which is Sony DVD Recorder Volume. Gspot says the film format is MPEG-2 Demultiplexer.

Does anyone know what the problem could be and how I could maybe convert the DVD film format in such a way so that it would be able to play on my DVD player.

[manono]

Hi-

It's probably PAL 720x576 rather than your NTSC 720x480. Do you know that your player can't play PAL DVDs? Have you looked for a hacked firmware to allow it to play PAL DVDs?

If it's really a PAL DVD, and if your player really can't play PAL DVDs, then you'll either have to buy a player that can play PAL DVDs (they're plentiful and cheap), or convert it to NTSC. There are plenty of programs around that can do the conversion of the video (if not the menus), among them FAVC (which can create new but very basic menus).

[guns1inger]

Use a newer version of g-spot, if you haven't, and look at the resolution and framerate to confirm the format. I suspect that Manono is correct - it is PAL, you are not.

The best solution is to get a cheap Chinese no-name brand player that plays both formats. FAVC would be the next best solution

[johnharlin]

Thank you all.