ntsc or pal

[steel155]

this may be a dumb question but that is why i'm a newbie. can someone tell me how i would know if a movie i have downloaded is pal or ntsc thanks in advance

[vitualis]

PAL and NTSC refer to TV systems and aren't really relevant on the PC.

From the perspective of authoring VCDs, the most important difference between PAL and NTSC is the framerate. PAL: 25fps, NTSC: 29.97 fps.

Regards.

[steel155]

ok so if i want to burn the mpeg onto a vcd it doesn't matter if i encode it with pal or ntsc? and one more question if i want to tkae that same mpeg and put in on a svcd what program do i use and do i have to convert the file to mpeg2? thanks steel

[vitualis]

It's not that simple...

If you live in an NTSC area (North America, Japan), you should create NTSC VCDs (otherwise, you will need your TV/VCD/DVD player to be able to handle both NTSC and PAL).

If you live in a PAL area (everywhere else), you should create PAL VCDs.

HOWEVER...

If your source is PAL (25fps), I strongly suggest you create a PAL VCD.

If you source is NTSC (29.97 fps), I strongly suggest you create an NTSC VCD.

This is as framerate conversion is annoying and often doesn't not turn out well.

In summary:
- you should only do a PAL <--> NTSC conversion only if it is absolutely necessary (i.e., your TV equipment doesn't handle both systems)
- otherwise, you should encode to your local system.

As for converting to SVCD, most MPEG-2 encoders (e.g., TMPGEnc) should be able to do it. However, there is little/no point in encoding a SVCD from a VCD source.

Regards.

[steel155]

thanks

[steel155]

i thought that would make the quality better. i took an avi file and used avi2vcd and converted it to an mpeg and then i used nero to burn it and i watched it and i was disappointed in the quality of the picture. i could see the pixels, could that have been from the source or was it something i did, also using tmpgenc how long should it take on average to convert an avi file over

[macky31]

It should take about 6 to 7 hour's to do a full film encode
thats 1gig +
these r my setting {mpeg-1 352*288 25fps cbr 1150kbps/layer-2 224kbps}
quality is only has good as the file u downloaded