Forced Film

[squeed]

A few of my PC friends have told me that all of our syncing issues would go away if we had a tool called "Forced Film". Is anyone working on it and is this a true statement ?

-Squeed
VCD & SVCD Support For Mac
http://www.squeeds.com

[sterno]

I can't speak for the Mac side of things since I don't use my Mac for DVD ripping, but I can tell you what "force film" is. Considering how many PC users have sync problems, I think the people telling you that such a setting would fix everything are probably wrong.

Most movies are shot at 24fps (NTSCFilm), but video has to be sent to your TV at 30fps (NTSC). Most current DVDs are encoded at the original 24fps with a pulldown flag that tells the DVD player to do that conversion on the fly. On Windows, the standard way to convert a DVD after ripping is to run the VOBs through an intermediate program called dvd2avi, which has a "force film" option to ignore that flag. If it's disabled, dvd2avi does the frame rate conversion for you just like a DVD player would and the MPEG encoder sees a 30fps video stream. If the whole movie is at 24fps you can enable force film to just ignore the flag and pass the movie through as-is, and then create VCD/SVCD at 24fps which will be telecined to 30 when you play it (like the DVD).

The opening logos and credits are often at 30fps even when the rest of the movie is at 24fps, but usually that's not enough to cause problems. Some DVDs actually do have a mixture of 24fps and 30fps, though, and enabling force film on those can cause sync problems and jerky motion.