best way to convert PAL DVD to NTSC keeping 5.1 sound and subtitles

[dr_m]

I've been hacking away at this for a while now on my own, and have had some success, but I need help. I bought a DVD while on a trip in Mauritius (find Madagascar on a world map and go east). It was labelled NTSC, but when I got it home (USA) I discovered it is in fact PAL and it won't play in my Sony DVD player.

I have been able to rip the movie using handbrake and then burn that to a DVD using Toast 7, and imo the quality is pretty good, but the soundtrack is stereo only. I would like to keep the 5.1 soundtrack if possible. Also, I want to keep the subtitles either burned into the image (as I did with handbrake) or selectable. In addition to handbrake and toast, I've been fiddling with Mpegstreamclip and ffmpegx and MTR.

Incidentally, there seems to be a timecode problem with the DVD. When I've tried ripping the DVD with MTR, I get a 43 minute long movie, but it is actually 90 minutes long. Handbrake ripped the whole move. I opened the vobs in mpegstreamclip and did the fix timecode breaks, but the fix doesn't seem to stick when resaving as vob.

So, any suggestions? Thanks.

Anthony

[ffooky]

If you select either of the AC3 options in the Destination dialogue when encoding with Handbrake the 5.1 audio is passed through.

As to maintaining the 5.1 audio when doing the PAL->NTSC conversion with Toast, this post on the Roxio forum may be of assistance.

[3lutz3toe]

Don’t even bother wasting time to convert to NTSC. (I was also looking around to convert but then found out about region free dvd players that weren’t too expensive)

Instead, get yourself a region free DVD Player or one that plays both formats.
I recently got a Phillips dvp642 dvd player and it plays just about anything that I have burned so far, including PAL and NTSC. (My older panasonic would play some burned disks and not others. And it definitely didn’t play PAL disks.)

There is a trick that you have to follow if you read some of the posts from Amazon. Just search in Amazon and read the comments (I can't remember exactly but you have to push some numbers sequence on your remote to make it region free. I doesn’t come automatically region free. But it's very simple to break the code.)

And I got it online from Circuit City for about $50 US!