sending dvd to europe - PAL questions

[cduval04]

my mom went to france for a week and took pix...when she got home I used windows movie maker to make a slideshow production with effects and music....I used windows vista's dvd maker to burn the dvd for us (and her U.S friends) in NTSC..... looks good on our dvd player

my first question is she has to send one to france and one to austrailia - they both use pal, right? (just curiuos cuz I read something about a format called secam in france, but I think they stopped using it...not sure though..)

my second question is I dont think vista's dvd maker can burn in pal (can it?), so what i did was burned a regular NTSC dvd with the dvd maker, then ripped it to my computer as an mpeg4 with the xvid codec, and imported the ripped content into TMPGEnc DVD Author 3 and selected the PAL option for my project, added the video (changed it's aspect ratio to PAL 4:3) and burned the dvd on a dvd+r - with a menu....

is this the right way to do it? ive never had to send a dvd overseas so I don't know anything about this stuff. will this look ok on their tv or will it look really shitty cuz I did something wrong?...cuz I played it on my DVD player and it looked really shitty quality, but they have a different framerate or something, right?

please help me confirm these questions before I send them out. thanks

[guns1inger]

DVD Maker can make PAl or NTSC videos. It will probably default to your local format, but that can be changed.

Most (the vast majority) of European and Australian DVD players will happily play NTSC discs. There is no SECAM for DVD. If the player is playing on a SECAM TV then the signal is changed by the player during playback.

Why on earth would you rip the disc to Xvid, then convert it back to DVD ?

[DB83]

You've got 'shitty' quality because you converted your mpeg-2 video from the dvd to mpeg-4 (xvid) and then converted it back to mpeg-2 to make the PAL dvd.

There is probably no need to make a PAL version. Most European dvd players (including Australia) - in fact any country that can play a PAL disk out of the box can play an NTSC one as well.

SECAM is the analogue tv standard for France. French DVDs are also in PAL.

[cduval04]

I dunno...maybe cuz I'm an idiot...well..thats why I asked before I sent the dvd's off..thanks for your help

[guns1inger]

Every time you encode video with a lossy codec, and mpeg is lossy, you affect quality. If you then throw into the mix resizing the video down, then up etc, you can quickly reduce the quality to something very low.

Even if it turns out that you needed to convert the NTSC video to PAL, there are ways to do it with minimal quality loss. However I would start by sending NTSC versions over and see what happens.

[jman98]

Europe is the land of multistandard TVs and multistandard DVD players. While it is theoretically possible to find people (usually only in the UK) who have TVs and/or DVD players that can only play PAL DVDs, it is quite rare. There probably was no need to convert the DVD to PAL from NTSC. The same is true for Australia where multistandard TVs and DVD players are common.

Secam has nothing to do with DVD, so don't worry about it. Just send an NTSC DVD to your friends the odds are very high (I'd put it at 95%) that both of them can play your NTSC DVD with no problems.

[tomlee59]

What guns1inger said. Every transcoding operation degrades the video. So, if quality matters to you, then you have to minimize the number of transcodes. And if you must transcode into an intermediate format for some reason, use high resolution/high bitrates to minimize the conversion loss.

As jman98 observes, many European DVD players will handle both NTSC and PAL (unlike here in the US, where DVD players will generally choke on PAL), so there's a good chance that you don't have to do any operations at all. So, first check whether or not that's true for whomever you'll be sending the DVDs. It might save you a ton of grief.