PAL to NTSC Conversion with DD

[cottage]

I am completely frustrated.

I have a PAL DVD with Dolby Digital that I am attempting to convert to NTSC with DD. However, I'm having a little trouble getting the DD 5.1.

I've spend about 4 days working on this but here is the main thread of what I've been trying....
Using Sony Vegas, here is what I'm doing...
-Insert DVD in drive
-In Vegas, File/Import/DVD Camcorder Disc...
-Vegas converts the VOB files to MPG files (plus a lot of "sfk" files)
-I then want to input the converted MPG files into the time line and render it as NTSC.

However in the timeline, the converted MPG files seem only to contain a stereo downmix soundtrack (actually 5 separate tracks, English, Spanish, Director's commentary, etc).

I then tried to extract the AC3 soundtrack using DVD Audio Extractor. My intent was to combine the video and AC3 soundtrack in Sony DVD Architect and produce the DVD. However, Architect will not recognize the AC3 files created by DVD Audio Extractor. As part of my exploration, I also extracted the soundtrack to a WAV file. This file was also not recognized by Architect and would not play in my normal audio player. I also extracted to an MP3 file and this file worked in my Audio player.

How can I get the DD 5.1 soundtrack out of the original PAL DVD into Vegas for NTSC conversion?

[victoriabears]

Why are you converting it?

If you just want to view/play it, get a Philips dvd player.

[guns1inger]

Demux with DGIndex so you have a video stream, and a 5.1 AC3 audio stream.

Using AVISynth and HCenc, resize the video to 720 x 480 (NTSC) and encode at 25 fps. Use DGPulldown with the 25fps - 29.970 fps option to create a playable NTSC video stream.

Author the new video stream with the original audio stream to create a new DVD that will play back as NTSC.

This method produces a playable disc without the risk of audio sync issues because the actual running time of the video is not changed. This is different to older methods that did alter the video running time and therefore resulted in complex audio re-encoding to get the final result in sync.

[cottage]

Why are you converting it?

If you just want to view/play it, get a Philips dvd player.

Thanks for the suggestion victoriabears,

However, it's a long and boring story but much to my wife's frustration, I have almost every conceivable piece of A/V hardware (but not an NTSC/PAL DVD player). My wife would probably leave home if she had to learn how to use one more piece of hardware. Despite this, I don't have any spare SPDIF inputs on my A/V receiver.

I can normally accomplish most forms of A/V conversion without too much trouble but this one has me stumped!

[manono]

Then do as guns1inger suggests.

[victoriabears]

Good luck then.