Convert NTSC MPG to PAL

[Soggy Shorts]

I have some mpgs that were encoded on DVD in NTSC format, and would like to convert them to PAL so that I can send a copy to a friend of mine in Europe. If I want to use TMPGEnc to do the encoding, do I just load the PAL DVD template to burn the DVD for him, or is there something more to it? Your help is appreciated, thanks!

[Borgster]

First,

Your friend in Europe, i'm from europe, can probably play your file NTSC or NTSC film fine on his PC / VCD / DVD player. (just send him the file / disc)

Second,
If you use the PAL template there will be an irritating stop in video every second, Yes you've converted the film to PAL, but PAL requires more frames/sec TMPGEnc wil stop
the video to correct the problem. (do not use this option
if you want your friend to stay a friend.

I suggest you send the NTSC(film) file.

Good luck

[Lars17]

Hi there!

Well, I have found a way to go around the whole NTSC - PAL conversion problem. If you use Panasonic MPEG-1 Encoder you'll be able to add black borders to the movie you want to encode. Therefor you can add black borders so that the 352X240 can become 352X288 without streching the movie. Besides that, there's also no problem with the fps-problem, because Panasonic MPEG-1 Encoder lets you use 23,97 as fps when making PAL VCD.
This way you can make a PAL VCD that is exactly the same as the NTSC without having to raise the fps.

Hope this helped you something...

-Lars17-

[porto]

borgster,

I don't know what you're talking about.
Since I've found tons of movies on the Net my main hobby is to transcode 23.876 ntsc divx to 25.000 pal VCD and I NEVER have the problem that there is a stop every xx sec; the end-result plays smoothly with minimal loss in picture/audio quality.

I use TMPGenc with manual pal settings, thus no template.

[agzz]

hi.

i think moast players will handle the NTSC. so probibly no need to convert.

Lars17. if you code to 352x288 @ 23,97 fps you wouldnt get a PAL with wrong bitrate but rather a NTSC with nonstandard size, right?

[Lars17]

No, you won't get a NTSC, because I (who live in Norway, Europe) am able to tape directly from my VCD to VCR. The only way this is possible is if the file is PAL. Besides, I use the PAL template which means that the horizontal lines are PAL and not NTSC standard. I don't quite remember how many lines NTSC or PAL has, but I know that PAL has more. This is the reason why you can't call the file made with the options I mentioned above NTSC.

I hope you understood what I meant here!

-Lars17-

[Lars17]

And this is for Porto:

If you've converted a NTSC-file with 23,97 fps to PAL 25 fps, you have got the freeze-pictures. The thing is though, that most people don't see these freezes, because they only last for a micro second or something. I'm a perfectionist, so I notice stuff like that immediatly. If you look closely, you'll see those glitches yourself. My friends don't understand what I'm talking about when I get all crazy during movies that are encoded the way you do, but the glitches are there - just look for them. Or maybe you shouldn't, because if you first start to notice them... YOU WON'T STAND TO WATCH THOSE MOVIES EVER AGAIN.

I used to have the same problem as the one borgster's talking about, until I understood what the problem was. A movie with a fps under 25, can't suddenly get 25 just by converting, for then to expect that the movie will run smoothly. The reason why you don't notice the glitches is because the difference between 23,97 and 25 is only 1,03 fps which is very little and to many people the movies therefor seem flawless.

-Lars17-

[Borgster]

Lars,

Your're absolutely right. I notice these freezing frames
also. (TMPEG is adding frames)and Porto, look more closely
you will see the tiny stops.

Borgster.

[porto]

Hi,

you could be right but I never noticed those glitches. Maybe I'm not such a perfectionist like you are but I will certainly look closer to those movies... and yes, i'm sure I will leave those damn movies to 23.976 if I notice those glitches anyway... if you know it's there you will watch for them how hard you try not to...
my friends never notified me of those glitches, maybe they didn't notice it either.

thanx for the advice, it's worth an inspection

[TheDiggler2001]

I would like to add a question related to this thread. What happens in the reverse? Take a PAL and convert down to NTSC. I have a PAL SVCD I want to convert down to NTSC SVCD.

Thanks, hope nobody mines me jumping in with a question.

[dumwaldo]

ok i am a little confused about something so maybe you guys could explain. where are you getting NTSC Film standard mpg's from? everything i have is NTSC standard.

NTSC is 29.97 FPS
PAL is 25 FPS
NTSC Film is 23.976 FPS

the NTSC Film standard is rarley used in my experiences so i was just wondering where you got them from. do not assume if you see 352x240 that the frame rate is 23.976 because in most cases it is the higher frame rate of 29.97.

Lars & Borgster
i am not sure what the cause of the phenomenon you explained would be but i can assure you it does not have to happen. i have captured things at 15 FPS then using TMPGEnc converted it to NTSC 29.97 FPS with no jerking stuttering of freezing in the picture. i am a constant tinkerer so i honestly cant tell you what i have changed from default settings since i installed TMPGEnc but i can tell you this, you can definatley convert a lower frame rate source into a higher framerate VCD with no video problems.

[bubblept]

There IS a way to convert NTSC Film to PAL with no flaws. I live in europe too and used to do this with DivXs I would get from the net and turn them into PAL SVCDs. Works great. It's been some time since I last did it, but here's basically how I did it:

To turn 23.976 FPS or 24 FPS into 25 FPS you need to SPEED UP the movie. This is always what happens when playing back 24 FPS movies in PAL system, thus European DVDs always have like 5 mins less in each 2 hours of film.

To do this, I frameserve the film in VirtualDub, changing the FPS to 25. Of course, you might be thinking, this gets the audio out of sync. Well, you need to speed up the audio too. So demultiplex the MPG or use virtualdub to save the AVI audio in a WAV file (this before changing to 25 FPS...).
You'll have to open the audio file in such a program like sound forge, or another that lets you change the sampling rate WITHOUT resampling the audio (sound forge has an option for this called 'Aply sampling rate only' or something). You have to do some calculations to figure out the new sampling rate. Here's some examples:

Basically, use the formula

New_SamplingRate = (New_FPS * Old_SamplingRate) / Old_FPS

48,000 Hz at 23.976 FPS
(25 * 48000) / 23.976 = 50050, so Use 50,050 Hz

44,400 Hz at 24 FPS
(25 * 44400) / 23.976 = 46250, so Use 46,250 Hz

And so forth...

Now save this new audio file, and encode the frameserved video at 25 fps with the new audio file (you'll have to change the sampling rate back to 44,400 in the MPEG encoder).

Well, that's about it. Hope *someone* is able to undestand this

[Borgster]

Bubblept,

Thanks for the info, i'll try this later this day.

Borgster.

[Lars17]

Bubblept,

The conversion method you mentioned sounds really interesting... I will look into it, though as long as I can copy my VCDs to VCR-tapes still keeping the fps at 23,97 I don't think I'll use so much time to get the fps to 25.

Now this answer is to TheDiggler2001:

You didn't let us know if you wanted it to become a standard NTSC or a NTSC film VCD.
Standard NTSC: 29,97 fps
Film NTSC: 23,97 fps

-Lars17-

[surgeon]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-12-18 07:08:35, Lars17 wrote:
Hi there!

Well, I have found a way to go around the whole NTSC - PAL conversion problem. If you use Panasonic MPEG-1 Encoder you'll be able to add black borders to the movie you want to encode. Therefor you can add black borders so that the 352X240 can become 352X288 without streching the movie. Besides that, there's also no problem with the fps-problem, because Panasonic MPEG-1 Encoder lets you use 23,97 as fps when making PAL VCD.
This way you can make a PAL VCD that is exactly the same as the NTSC without having to raise the fps.

Hope this helped you something...

-Lars17-
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Hi Lars,
Could you plzz explain this method of yours a little bit more, because I also live in Europe and have the problem that every movie I download is in NTSCFilm or NTSC, my DVD- PLayer does support NTSC, but my tv doesn't so the result is that I can play the VCD's but only in black and white, so if you could explain to your method, then I would be very thankfull!

[bubblept]

Just a small correction, the second example shold read

44,400 Hz at 24 FPS
(25 * 44400) / 24 = 46250, so Use 46,250 Hz

[bubblept]

ooops, HTML is off...

44,400 Hz at 24 FPS
(25 * 44400) / 24 = 46250, so Use 46,250 Hz

[dumwaldo]

if anybody is interested i just took a 3 minute avi file that was encoded with NTSC Film frame rate of 23.976 and converted it to a PAL VCD compliant mpg using TMPGEnc. the result has no stuttering or jumping so i took screen shots of all the setting tabs in TMPGEnc. i put the sample source and output vcd as well as the screenshots into a folder together. if you would like to download this folder leave a request in this thread and i will send you a PM through this froum with the information you need to download it.

[Truman]

bubblept is right. The best method is to speed up the video. If you simply change the framerate from 23.976 to 25 fps, TMPG will add / duplicate ~1 fps. If you notice that or not, it is no smooth playback. You can speed up the video with TMPG. Check "do not convert framerate" at the advanced tab. But you will end with sync problems, so you have to change the audio sample rate with a seperate audio tool. Same procedure if you use VirtualDub. The tool, that do both at once is -once again - Avisynth.

#source avi 23.975 fps / target 25 fps
AVISource("c.\file.avi")
AssumeFPS(25,sync_audio=true)

#source MPEG-2 23.976 fps / target 25 fps
#create a dvd2avi project
LoadPlugin("MPEG2DEC.DLL")
mpeg2source("c:\file.d2v")
AssumeFPS(25,sync_audio=true)

#source MPEG-1 23.976 fps, open MPEG-1 file in VirtualDub, start frameserver, save file.vdr, #sorry at the moment I don't know an easier method. DirectShowSource reads MPEG files, #but does not support audio.
AVISource("c.\file.vdr")
AssumeFPS(25,sync_audio=true)

AssumeFPS work for 23.976->25, but not for 25->23.976.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Truman on 2001-12-22 15:07:07 ]</font>

[dumwaldo]

ok i am a colossol bone head. during playback i honestly can NOT detect any stuttering or jitters in the video however if i open the video in VirtualDub and look through it frame by frame it does indeed achieve the proper frame rate by just duplication 1 frame a second.

please disregard EVERYTHING i have said here as apparently i have no idea what i am talking about.

[Truman]

hey dumwaldo, no offense to you. You said it, conversion from 23.976 to 25 fps will duplicate ~1 frame per second.
Conversion from 25 to 23.976 fps will delete ~1 frame per second (that is even more noticable than duplicating). That is it, what we are talking about. Damn perfectionism.

[Truman]

Bad news, TheDiggler2001. Conversion from 25 to 23.976 fps does not work as expected. I will edit the post above.

[dumwaldo]

i hate you all, i can no longer watch smr movies because the droped framed when it is knocked down to 20 FPS. you all suck and thanks for making my eye that much more critical. i used to enjoy crappy video but NOOOOOOO you guys had to go and teach me something and now i cant enjoy crappy video anymore. you all suck dammit

[jubilex]

Bubblept --

I used your method of changing the sampling rate of the audio to match the new length of the converted video. Seems to work great, BUT -- everytime I try to encode the audio and video together to make the final file, it gives me an audio decoding error when it hits 95% complete. This happens with every video/audio I try to do this with, no matter the length. If I abort at any point before that, the mpg plays back nicely in sync, so I can't figure out why 95% is the magical breakdown point. Ever had this problem, or have any ideas on how to fix it?