PAL to NTSC Conversion w/menus

[jrenfro]

I bought a DVD from my friend in the UK and it won't play in my dvd player. It is in PAL format and I am in USA with NTSC format. How can I take this dvd and convert it to NTSC format with the menus or is that possible? I understand how to rip the disc and coverting the main movie but want to keep the menus if possible. Any help appreciated.

[jbenj01]

Quoting dennis1968:

<Try this trick. I have successfully ripped and converted sereval UK issued DVDs to play on many different US only/ non firmware upgradable DVD players. after ripping the contents to the HD using Smartripper 2.41, i used IfoEdit .95 to remove the region code restriction and replaced the PAL header with NTSC headers. Them Burn them onto a 4.7gb DVD+R. So far have not ran across a DVD player that will not play them. In therory, NTSC to PAL should hav the same result.>

there's a thread that goes into detail of changing the headers in IFOedit.. it's title is somehting like, "PAL to NTSC using CCE". it's a very long and enlightening thread that includes a manual conversion method and the above shortcut, which btw, may not work, but so far, has worked for me on a couple of discs..

good luck

[FOO]

"PAL to NTSC using CCE"

CCE is an encoder. How did you avoid the
resize and 4 hour encode ?
Does this mean 720 x 576 will play on a NTSC player ?

[Vejita-sama]

It's like the header trick. You change all of the IFO info (by manually in IFOEdit) from PAL to NTSC. No re-encoding, then burn. This seems to work pretty well on some (most?) players. But if I'm remembering the tread correctly it didn't work for all players.

Once possible confounder is that so many DVD players will play either PAL or NTSC, and a fair number will actually do the converison on the fly. My old Apex AD-600A could play PAL DVDs (I didn't know anything back then and didn't reset/change anything it just did it, I assume it produced a NSTC output from the PAL signal).

[FOO]

Amazing If the player wasn't PAL compatible I would expect
at least that the picture would be cut off Top or Bottom - where
would the extra lines go ?

[jrenfro]

I'll try that. What if it doesn't work? I have read several things about taking just the movie portion and converting it from PAL (25fps right?) to NTSC format but what is the easiest method of doing this? And can this be done to the neat menus that are on the DVD? I read that the menus are just movies too with shortcuts or links or something.

[garryheather]

Foo - it's not just a matter of losing a few lines at the top and bottom, the frame rate is different, the colour space is different as is how it's actually encoded as far as the video standard goes, the audio then plays at a slightly different rate...

It gets pretty messy in the standards conversion universe. You probably don't want to go there !

[FOO]

Yes I wasn't thinking Even if the player completely ignored
all the formatting info in the video I don't see how the audio
could possibly stay in sync It would seem to prove that the
player is indeed recognizing PAL and doing the conversion.

In that case why change the IFOs ? The Mpeg2 stream itself
contains the picture dimensions and the frame rate and the audio
rate.

[jbenj01]

FOO..

the original thread was about converting PAL to NTSC using Avisynth/CCE.. it went off a bit on a tangent with using IFOedit header trick... and yes, sans re-encoding.. here's the original thread:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=164104&highlight=


Yes, there are some minor 'glitches' using the IFOedit shortcut method, but well worth it, imo, as it allows you to retain ALL menus and extras on the PAL DVD..

but i suggest you give it a try and judge for yourself..