Can I burn an out of region, PAL DVD to my DVD-R?

[mpme]

I've been unsucessful finding a similar thread (if it's here, I apologize for missing it).

I've bought a few DVD's from England and Australia (racing DVD's) that Iwant to burn straight to my Toshiba DVD-R, but here area few questions before I start:

I have a cheap DVD player that'll play either PAL or NTSC, but not discs that are out of region. I'm looking to buy one of the modded players that is region free, and will play either PAL or NTSC format.

I haven't seen any macrovision-style warnings on the discs I bought (low dollar, low volume stuff), and am curious if my Toshiba DVD-R will recieve a signal it can recognize or record, knowing that it's being sent from a modded DVD player that work with both formats. My goal here is to make discs that I can play anywhere I want, and not just on a special DVD unit.

This is likely an easy thing to answer for the gurus on the forum, but I'm in over my head here. I'll buy the modded player today, but only if I'm told this process will work. I'd have no other need for the modded player otherwise.

[ZippyP.]

Alternate suggestion:

Rip and copy the DVD on your computer, this will remove any region coding or copy protection (if any). Use an RW if you don't want to waste a disk. Play it with your PAL/NTSC player and record it with your recorder. No extra hardware required.

[jman98]

While you haven't seen any macrovision warnings on the discs, you should be aware that doesn't mean that it's not there. Most discs use macrovision, whether they advertise it or not. If you bought DVDs from the UK or Australia, there is very little chance that they don't have macrovision unless they were made by somebody who really doesn't know what they are doing in terms of making DVDs.

Some DVD players can be hacked to turn off macrovision and to play discs in any region, but it is getting a lot harder to find players that will turn off macrovision than to find players that will play discs from any region. Macrovision has been very litigious and sued a lot of people for a lot of things, so most DVD player manufacturers are now too scared to make turning off macrovision an option. You will just have to look to see if there are still players that let you turn off macrovision. You could do this with a lot of old Apex players, but I don't think Apex is in business any more. The guy who owned the company got into big trouble with the authorities in China (I think over taxes) and they jailed him.

[dcsos]

Zippy P has it right:
Ripping to the HARD DRIVE with DECRYPTER removers the region code.
No More work.


As long as the VIDEO is PAL if you want to ACTUALLY convert it to NTSC this will mean reencoding the MPG VIDEO entirely.
You must recreate MENUS, CHAPTERS etc --if you go this route it's labor intensive..

[mpme]

Cool. I can do the decrypt and region-free part, but the MPEG-2 conversion is where I'll get lost.

I'm not actually concerned about menus and titles--I just want the video/footage on DVDs I can watch.

The only thing I've heard that's a pain is the software conversion from PAL to NTSC, and the resulting audio sync issues. Is there an idiot-proof software tool that'd do this .VOB conversion I could use?

If someone can help me here, or point me to a guide oneasy (newbie) level PAL to NTSC DVD conversion, and have the audio/video on the same timeline, I'd jump right on it.

Thanks for all of the help here!

[dcsos]

I've only done the REVERSE conversion, by putting the extracted decrypted stream on the TIMELINE in VEGAS 4.0 which was adequate to my EYES to OUTPUT a "HIGH QUALITY " CBR STREAM of PAL MPEG II from NTSC INPUT FILE
THE Audio Stayed in Sync over the course of the MOVIE
SPRUCE UP was used to author a PAL DISC (it worked)
it ws a region free PAL disc I had made

Don't extract into VOB's for this conversion use the stream output method in decrypter. My DVD was not AC-3 originally so I had no audio issues convertng PCM (actually, no conversion). You may find that VEGAS doesn't like the audio stream till its preconverted
if it originated as ac-3