PAL VCD -> NTSC Video for NTSC DVD Authoring!!

[Mickey79]

Ave,

I was looking at the PAL/NTSC Conversion thread but it seems to be quite old ... I'm not sure if the software/tools/utilities are the same or updated.

Anyhow, here's my case. I have some PAL VCD's (Video CD's) and I need to create an NTSC DVD using the videos on that VCD. How do I go about doing this?

I believe the best method would to be to extract the Video as AVI or something from the VCD, then convert the video to NTSC, then author the DVD. If this is correct, authoring the DVD is not an issue - but what do I use to extract the Video out of the VCD, and how do I then convert the PAL to NTSC videos?

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[guns1inger]

The best method is to use the videos as they are to create a DVD using something like Tmpgenc DVD Author, then buy a cheap no-name player that is capable of playing PAL. The quality is already low enough as it is, so you really don't want to have to re-encode if you can avoid it.

[Mickey79]

The best method is to use the videos as they are to create a DVD using something like Tmpgenc DVD Author, then buy a cheap no-name player that is capable of playing PAL. The quality is already low enough as it is, so you really don't want to have to re-encode if you can avoid it.

Well, I'm in a situation where I can't avoid it. Let's just keep the playing PAL Capable player out of the scenario.
For the PAL Video to NTSC Video conversion, I guess I do have a few choices, including Canopus Procoder & The Film Machine, I believe. I'm not sure though how to get AVI video off the VCD.

[jman98]

VCD has nothing to do with AVI. VCDGear can extract the MPEG-1 video from VCD for you. Look at the MPEGAV directory at the *.DAT file(s) for your video. VCD video is valid as is for DVD, but you must convert the audio from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz. There's no real good way to do this and many DVD authoring programs won't accept MPEG-1 video for DVD, even though they should as the standard for DVD allows it. You could maybe extract the video, convert the audio, and look at one of our guides on doing header patching to convert PAL video to NTSC or vice-versa. That doesn't always work, but it doesn't require you to re-encode the video. The next choice would be to convert the video from PAL to NTSC by re-encoding it. If I had to do this, I guess I would consider using Procoder as I've seen posts in the past where people swore that it was as good as it got for PAL<->NTSC conversions.

[Alex_ander]

In case you decide to re-encode PAL VCD to NTSC, you could encode to elementary MPEG2 352x480, then apply DGPulldown with 25->29.97 setting. This prevents frame blending at encoding. As in all other cases, audio should be resampled to 48 kHz.

[Mickey79]

I'm most likely going to be following the method you've written about.
I already extracted MPEG-1 Video from my VCD's using VCDGear. I'm going to use Canopus ProCoder for converting this MPEG-1 PAL Video into NTSC Video, but I had a couple of questions.

Firstly, since I have to author the result video into DVD, what output format should I choose for this MPEG-1 Video in Procoder? Secondly, I had quite a few choices in ProCoder and I got confused. There's a Program Stream & there's an Elementary Stream. What's the difference? Which one should I choose?

I guess my main questions are, should I choose Program or Elementary Stream? Should I output as MPEG-1 or MPEG-2? And lastly, the source MPEG-1 is 352 X 288 (VCD Standard). I know that an NTSC DVD will accept 720 X 480 or 352 X 240 (I think). Should I encode @ 352 X 240 or should I just encode at 720 X 480?

Appreciate any input.

Thanks!

VCD has nothing to do with AVI. VCDGear can extract the MPEG-1 video from VCD for you. Look at the MPEGAV directory at the *.DAT file(s) for your video. VCD video is valid as is for DVD, but you must convert the audio from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz. There's no real good way to do this and many DVD authoring programs won't accept MPEG-1 video for DVD, even though they should as the standard for DVD allows it. You could maybe extract the video, convert the audio, and look at one of our guides on doing header patching to convert PAL video to NTSC or vice-versa. That doesn't always work, but it doesn't require you to re-encode the video. The next choice would be to convert the video from PAL to NTSC by re-encoding it. If I had to do this, I guess I would consider using Procoder as I've seen posts in the past where people swore that it was as good as it got for PAL<->NTSC conversions.