Mpeg to DVD

[wee haggis]

Never tried to convert mpeg to DVD so not so familiar with it.
I have several mpeg music videos that I would like to convert and burn on DVD.
These videos are 352x288 PAL approximately 50mb in size.
My questions are:
If using TMPGEnc to encode,will the resulting convertion be region free?
or
Will I have to convert it to Ntsc ?

I also have Tmpgenc DVD Author. I do not see an option for Region free in this software either (unlike one of my faves DVD Shrink)

[reboot]

Region has nothing to do with it.
They are in PAL format.
You have some choices:
1.) Encode "as-is" author and burn, see if they work on your NTSC television, and on your dvd player.
2.) Convert from PAL to NTSC, author and burn.
3.) Convert from PAL to NTSC, including changing the video size/aspect, author and burn.

I would convert to NTSC (23.97 with pulldown) at 352x240, encode to half D1 (352x480), author and burn.

[andyp1]

Wee Haggis , can I assume you are in Scotland.

If your Mpegs are all 352x288 they are already vcd spec converting them from Mpeg1 as they are now to Mpeg2 will not improve the quality and it may make it worse so it would be best to just author a DVD with the files you have.

Region codes are only on commercial pressed DVDs if the files are on your HD they are region free and any DVD you burn will be region free.

PAL is for the UK so no you wouldn't convert to NTSC because PAL is what you want.
(If you live outside Europe then you may need to of course.)

You can just drop the files into TMPGenc DVD Author , the only thing that is out of spec for a DVD is the audio sampling rate , at the moment it will be 44.1K however TDA will automatically convert this to 48K for DVD.

The output from TDA can then be burned to DVD-R

BTW You can get up to 7.5hours of VCD Mpeg1 on a DVD-R.
(That's a heck of a lot of 50MB music videos)

[wee haggis]

Thanks guys I will try your suggestions.
(btw...I'm in Canada)

[reboot]

See, I knew that, which is why I typed all that stuff about NTSC.

If your standalone player can do PAL, then just author and burn. They're already in an mpeg standard aspect.
If it can't play PAL, then convert to NTSC framerate, but keep the aspect.

[dqtus]

Just curious, I do a lot of mpeg-2 to DVD conversions and I always choose NTSC just because my DVD players only play NTSC. Is there a difference though if I chose like NTSC low motion or the other option. Like under what circumstances would I choose those?

[reboot]

In TMPGEnc, NTSC Low Resolution, is for input videos of 352x240 (or any other low resolution) avi.
Most web downloaded content is low res, most capture content is high res.

[dqtus]

In TMPGEnc, NTSC Low Resolution, is for input videos of 352x240 (or any other low resolution) avi.
Most web downloaded content is low res, most capture content is high res.

oh ok, but would it hurt to use a low resolution video with the high resolution option or would this just be a waste of time and processing power since the quality won't get that much better?

[reboot]

There's no point in resizing a 352x240 video to 720x480. It's just going to get worse. Keep it at a resolution/aspect that is as close to the original as possible, and you have less fuzzies All you're really doing is increasing the chances of getting a very "blocky" video, and using up processing time to resize it. You can't make video quality "better". The best you can hope for is equal, and rarely does that happen.
All 352x240 video I have (99% of what I work with), I use NTSC low res to encode at half D1 for dvdr (352x480) or if it's really low quality, I encode to mpeg1 (non-standard) VBR to completely fill a CDR.

[GregN]

how, if at all, does bit rate come in to play here?

I can understand now about keeping resolution as close as possible to the source material, but I often read that you should use the highest bit rate possible. I think I was confusing the two..

[reboot]

Bitrate determines the size of the file.
High bitrate gives a bigger file, usually at a better quality.
You can lose quality by encoding at a high bitrate, and resizing to a larger aspect/resolution, so...
Keep the aspect/resolution as close as possible to the original, then encode to the highest bitrate you can manage, and still fit the video on the burned medium.

[GregN]

aspect/resolution first, highest bitrate possible next. got it. thanks.

[dqtus]

Ok I know this may be a bit off topic but it is somewhat mpeg to dvd conversion so I'm going to bring this up. I usually rip the mpeg-2 file from my svcd and I create a d2v and a mpa file with dvd2avi. I then load the d2v as the vid and the mpa as the audio and encode it into a proper dvd mpeg-2 but for whatever reason, tmpgenc will sometimes allow me to load the d2v while at other times it gives me the not supported or can't be loaded error. Anyway to work around this?