PAL to NTSC DVD Player - correcting for speedup?

[dutchdummy]

I have a region free LG LDA-531 DVD player which has a built-in PAL to NTSC converter. I recently purchased the Australian 10th Anniversary Edition of Muriel's Wedding and discovered that it was nearly impossible to enjoy because of the 4% PAL speedup. The funny thing is that I hadn't noticed the speedup on the other PAL DVDs I own, but I'm afraid that I will from now on. My question is: are there any DVD players out there that not only convert PAL signals to NTSC, but process them so that the DVD plays at the NTSC speed?

Thanks,

Bob

[victoriabears]

am i imagining things or could it depend on the disc?,,how much compression was used etc?

Some of mine seem to play better than others on all my dvd players which convert (Philips,daytek,rj tech)

[Krispy Kritter]

Some players, such as the Oppo 971, allow you to adjust audio delay, which could help correct your problem. I've only played a few PAL discs in mine, but I didn't notice any issues.

[dutchdummy]

Some players, such as the Oppo 971, allow you to adjust audio delay, which could help correct your problem. I've only played a few PAL discs in mine, but I didn't notice any issues.

Unless I'm mistaken, the audio delay option only corrects audio sync issues; that's not what I'm experiencing. I'm referring to the fact that encoding a film to PAL entails changing the original film's 24 fps running speed directly to the PAL video standard of 25 fps without adding extra frames, making the video run 4% faster than the film version.

What I'm trying to determine is whether or not a DVD player exists that slows the video down along with the audio to the film's original running time even when decoding to NTSC.

[jagabo]

I'm not aware of any players that will automatically slow PAL video down to 23.976 fps and telecine to 29.97.

Some players simply display every 5th frame twice to create 30 fps, some will perform a 3:2:3:2:2 pulldown. But both those options leave the 4% speed increase.

[jman98]

I'm not aware of any player that does this, but I have read that sometimes authoring studios can do some pitch shifting in software that even though the PAL film is 4% faster, it sounds the same as NTSC. This might be why this effect is not always noticed. I have Futurama Season 1 from the UK because it came out there way before it came out in the US. Season 1 has a very noticeable 4% speedup in the voices of the episodes and commentary. It does negatively effect the episodes in my opinion. I stopped buying PAL versions of Futurama as a result and just waited for the NTSC ones to come out much later. I read that apparently there were some complaints about the sound being too fast on Season 1, so the authoring studio fixed the audio to sound the same as the NTSC version for Season 2 onwards.

[RowMan]

I notice the pitch change in the audio as well on PAL DVDs. My Mintek DVD-2580 allows me to change it a half-step down with its "pitch control". The movies themselves still run 4% faster, but I don't notice because everything sounds OK.