.mkv files to a PAL DVD?

[Will94]

I have some 640x480 .mkv files with a 30fps frame rate. I want to share these with a friend in England with no computer. She has a DVD player and an HD TV.

I know that I need to convert the frame rate to 25 fps and upscale the resolution to 576i to make a proper DVD for her. Is this necessary? I'm largely ignorant about what formats she likely has available to her.

I've never messed with PAL before. I thought that DVDs were essentially MPEG2 files, but doesn't MPEG2 max out a 480 lines of resolution?

How should I go about this? I'm a Linux user, but I also have a couple of Windows 10 machines in the house if that makes things easier. Thank you!!

[hech54]

Only Americans need to worry about PAL/NTSC....people who live in PAL countries can easily play NTSC material.
As long as the DVD has no region code(all homemade DVDs have no region code), people in PAL-Land can play it.

[Will94]

Thank you very much. I went ahead and ordered some DVDs and will get to authoring as soon as they arrive.

[Spiny Norman]

I am not at all sure if 640x480 is supported as a width for either NTSC or PAL. So even if the mkv file contains an mpg codec, it will have to be re-encoded anyway.

It is true that most PAL equipment will play NTSC. So if you choose NTSC, then the frame rate could stay at 30 (or 29.97) and she'd still be able to play it.

One extra idea: Although I've never undertaken a comparison, my own PAL set plays NTSC in distinctly inferior picture quality. The following trick solves that: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/166266-PAL-NTSC-DVD-Conversion-%28patch-method%29
Once you have an NTSC video-DVD, you could apply that.

Did the files originally come from an NTSC video-DVD? If so, then the above would make slightly more sense than converting to true PAL.