VCD: PAL to NTSC Conversion Frustration

[petergoode]

I have met my match, and would very much appreciate any help which anyone can offer.

I have a Marillion Genova '94 vcd in PAL format...I sent a clone to someone, and they cannot get it to play on their DVD player or computer (Media Player)...I thought the conversion to NTSC would be feasible, but I have hit a dead end....let me outline the available steps taken:

1. The vcd plays in my Panasonic stand alone DVD player, which I suspect to be capable of all regions, but it will not play in my Sony standalone DVD player.
2. I cannot play the vcd on my XP system, i.e. Media Player...it shows "connecting" and freezes there
3. I tried loading the .dat file into TMPGenc, but it freezes and describes the file as being in an incompatible format or corrupted file
4. I tried renaming the .dat file as .mpg and running that in Media Player, or loading into TMPGenc, but received the same error messages.
5. I tried converting the .dat to mpg using vcdgear, but ended up with similar error messages about incompatibility.

I have not yet tried Isobuster or EasyVCD for dat to mpg conversion...someone else suggested obtaining new mpeg-4 codecs.

If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know! In fact, I would gladly send an image of the disc, or a clone of the disc, to anyone "out there" who would like a challenge...

Thank you in advance for any help.

Peter G.

[teegee420]

Definitely extract the mpeg with ISObuster. Simply renaming a dat to mpg won't do the trick and vcdgear doesn't always work in my experience. Once your mpeg is created, open it with Virtualdub MPEG2(just in case it's svcd) and post the resolution and frame rate.

[petergoode]

Thanks, Teegee....well, I tried Isobuster, and right clicked to extract per their web page instructions, and ended up with a 720 kb file, which makes no sense.

In the meantime, I realized I had the original avi file (PAL format), so I am now trying to convert IT to NTSC...unfortunately, when I ran WSOLA, I kept getting an error message, so I will just use TMPGenc Plus and see how distorted the sounds comes out.

I wish the world had one format...<g>

Thanks again, and if you have other thoughts, please let me know...it has become as much a mental challenge as anything else to figure out why the PAL vcd had a dat file which won't play on my Media Player....and why it is causing every other conversion program to screw up...or maybe it's just me.

Peter

[teegee420]

One more method to extract the mpeg, download DAT2File. Unzip to a folder and run "dat2fileGUI.exe". First brwose for your avseq.dat, then name your destination file but make sure to add the .mpg extension. Once you click convert a command line will pop up until the operation is complete. Hope that works. If it doesn't, I suspect that something is wrong with the cd.