PAL DVD to an NTSC DVD-R

[pinovecs]

Hi all,

I hope someone out there can help me with how to do this, or if it is even possible. My wife is French and the selection of NTSC movies available for her are somewhat limited but there are plenty of PAL discs we can buy.

Is it possible to RIP and PAL DVD and then export it to a NTSC DVD-R, that we can watch on our home theater system, and what software would I need to do this?

Thanks,

Chris
pinovecs@yahoo.com

[Xesdeeni]

I've been trying to do this myself, and the gory details are below.

However, my DVD player (and many others) will do a rough conversion of PAL to NTSC. The image is a bit squashed vertically, but it's very watchable, and much easier than doing the conversion yourself. However, you will probably have to hack your DVD player to allow adjusting the region as I did.

Gory Details

The DVD in question is a DVD9 with 6 30-minute television episodes and a 15 minute extra, so I not only had to convert it, I had to re-encode at a lower bit rate. I ripped with cladDVD. I used DVD2AVI to create a wave file from the AC3 stream and to create a project file for use by VFAPI. I used AVISynth and the MPEG2DEC.dll plugin to load the ripped VOBs and an AVISynth script I wrote that uses the Area-Based Deinterlacer to do the PAL to NTSC conversion. Then I used TMPEGEnc to encode the results.

My 1.1GHz Athlon took about 7 hours to do all this for one 30-minute episode. I burned the resulting file and tested it. I have only tested my AVISynth script with DV files, which seem to be OK, but the field order of the MPEG must have been different, because the video constantly stuttered.

So I switched the field dominance in TMPEGEnc and proceeded to encode again. This time I stopped after 15 minutes to check the progress and burned the 1 minute of video to test. It looked very good! So I started the conversion again and went to bed.

The next day I burned the resulting file and tested it. As before, the start was perfect. But a few minutes into the episode, it started stuttering again as it had before. Somehow it looks like the field order had changed in mid stream!

I didn't think this was possible, so I have no idea how to correct for it.

Also, had this been a movie instead of television video, the field issue wouldn't have been a problem. In that case, it would have been a simple matter of extracting the 25fps frames, slowing them to 23.976fps and re-encoding along with the audio (also slowed).

In any case, after all that, I just gave up and hacked my DVD player. It works fine and I saved loads of time.

Xesdeeni

[Dave B]

It is likely that PAL DVDs will play OK on your DVD player as is. Most PAL DVD Players will play NTSC DVDs and vice versa.

If you want to proceed with the conversion you will have to entirely reconvert the video with an MPEG encoder such as TMPGEnc. A good NTSC to PAL guide can be found on this site at http://forum.vcdhelp.com/userguides/78178.php. Just swap the values to do a PAL to NTSC.