Playback of PAL DVD at correct speed ?

[MacEachaidh]

G'day all,
I'm new here, so if my ignorance shows, please bear with me!

I'm hoping someone can suggest a way of playing back PAL video (and especially audio) without the associated 4% speed-up.

I've got WinDVD Platinum 8, which has a feature called "PAL Tru-Speed" which is supposed to do the job of correcting the video frame-rate and audio pitch, but it doesn't work. On my system (WinXP SP2 with 1 Gb RAM) it makes absolutely no difference at all whether this feature is turned on or off. I've posted in Intervideo's WinDVD forum, but the only people who've replied have said it doesn't work for them either. Intervideo's tech support has no information on the feature; ditto their knowledgebase and FAQs. Even the WinDVD user manual doesn't mention the feature, so I figure it's a bit of a lost cause. (Though if anyone here knows the secret of making it work, I'd be glad to hear !)

But does anyone know of any other method of achieving the same thing ? Of somehow playing back PAL DVDs without the 4% speed-up ?

Maybe I'm being picky (wouldn't be the first time), but I'm a singer and musician, and the pitch shift of the audio in particular drives me kinda nuts. It's annoying to hear soundtrack scores where not a single note is on-pitch.

Thanks for any help any of you can offer.

[Chris K]

Your post isn't exactly clear to me. If you want to playback on your computer then this will play both PAL and NTSC "as is" and there is no speed up. Unless your source is already converted from NTSC to PAL without pitch correction.
If this is the case, you can demux the audio and video and use a Avisynth script that corrects the audio pitch. Then mux the video and corrected audio back into the original format/container. But you have to go through the whole process of re-authoring your DVD's. I suppose this isn't what you're up to.

I am wrong to think Australia is a PAL country?

[manono]

Hi-

Of somehow playing back PAL DVDs without the 4% speed-up ?

I've never used it, but ReClock is supposed to be able to do this:

http://reclock.free.fr/
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=99404&highlight=reclock
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=117613&highlight=reclock

Unless your source is already converted from NTSC to PAL without pitch correction.

Which is usually the case.