PAL To NTSC DVD conversion takes 6+ hours???

[lnong]

CORRECTION: My bad, the software I'm using is DVDSanta, NOT STOIK Video Converter as displayed below.

I ripped a PAL DVD into its DVD components (Video_TS folder with IFO, VOB files). Then I found that the "STOIK Video Converter" software can take these components as input and convert them to another set of the same IFO/VOB files as output which are NTCS (29.97fps and 720x480 resolution). If all goes well, these can be readily burnt into a NTSC DVD.

In normal play, the video on the DVD is about 2hrs and 55 min.
So STOIK started its conversion process at 3am, and when I woke up at 9am, it's still processing!!! It looks like it was on its last VOB file, but still, that's 6+ hrs!! Is that normal?

How long do other software take to convert like this? or from DVD->MPEG or from DVD->AVI?

My other question is if I use the more traditional method of conversion using more steps and software in between, is it better to convert the PAL DVD into an AVI file or to an MPG file as the first step?

Also, what the best (fast & accurate) software for ripping a DVD to a raw AVI file? and for DVD to MPG?

[jagabo]

I don't know those particular programs but 6 hours to convert a 3 hour movie doesn't sound unusual depending on the settings and the speed of your computer.

[guns1inger]

I wouldn't use DVD Santa for any video related work, but that's just me.

You haven't filled in your computer specs, so there is no basic for judging how long a task might take. The single most influential part of your PC when encoding is the CPU. Slow CPU, slow encoding. Memory and HDD play a part, but the CPU does most of the work.

You cannot rip a DVD to 'RAW avi' (if there is a such a thing). The native format for DVD is mpeg-2 video (although mpeg-1 is allowed under certain conditions). It is very simple to demux DVD content back to mpeg video. If you want an avi file then you have to re-encode everything. Which is the best avi format depends entirely on what you intend to do with it.

[lnong]

As for the specs of my computer, I have:

2.4 GHz P4 Processor
1.5 GB PC3200 RAM
2 IBM SCSI 10000 RPM harddisks in RAID 0 configuration

It's not a very powerful computer by today's standards since I put this system together back in 2000 (and it was damn expensive, especially for the SCSI-RAID controller!)

Ok, I guess I forgot that the native format for DVD video is MPEG2. I was trying to determine what format to rip a DVD to in order to retain the most accuracy and quality, thus my desire for the "raw" format. So with AVI out of the question, what's the best software to extract the "most raw, least compressed" MPEG2 stream from a DVD? I will then convert this PAL MPEG2 to a NTSC MPEG2 somehow, with some software that I have yet to find.

When I found out that DVD Santa can take IFO/VOB files as input, and outputs the same formats while doing the PAL -> NTSC conversion, I thought I'd give it a try since it could save me the extra steps of manually converting to MPEG2 first. I've seen a bunch of methods for converting PAL to NTSC DVDs and they seem rather involved so DVDSanta could be a quicker alternative if it does work. But I did tell myself that I shouldn't expect to see the best quality with DVD Santa.

[manono]

Hi-

So with AVI out of the question, what's the best software to extract the "most raw, least compressed" MPEG2 stream from a DVD?

You use the untouched DVD video as a source for the conversion to NTSC. There are lots of ways to do it right (as opposed to using some all-in-one DVDSanta type app). I demux using PGCDemux, make a D2V project file using DGIndex, and then an AviSynth script for frameserving into my MPEG-2 encoder (CCE, usually, but HCEnc is a free and very good encoder). There's more information here:

http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/QuickStart.html

The resize is in the script, and I encode that now 720x480 file at 25fps. When done I take the MPV and run it through DGPulldown set for 25->29.97fps to produce a fully compliant NTSC M2V. Doing it that way, you can use the untouched AC3 audio, and subs, if any. If you don't need or want menus, you can author using Muxman. If you want to make menus, you can use the freeware GUI4DVDAuthor ot DVDAuthorGUI. Or any authoring program with which you may have had experience. Here's the Doom9 HCEnc guide:

http://www.doom9.org/mpg/hc.htm

But you'll have to know where to make some changes, since what you're doing is a bit out of the ordinary (a standards conversion).