NTSC DVD to PAL SVCD - Argh !!!!

[Scumbag]

Anyone had any success with this ?

We have PAL TV here in OZ.

I get excellent results when converting PAL DVDs to SVCDs. My DVD player also does a decent job of outputing a PAL signal from an NTSC DVD, but I just can't get a decent picture out of an SVCD I create from an NTSC source.

The MPEG plays OK (but not as good as a PAL DVD rip & convert) via my software player (WinDVD) but looks shitty on the TV. It's hard to describe, but it looks like every tenth horozontal line or so is distorted. Sort of like the effect of running your fingertips across a picture drawn on a blackboard.

Anyone ?

jr

[tacosalad]

NTSC has 525 lines per frame, whereas PAL has 625 lines. Strange things can happen when the player converts from one format to the other because lines from each field can get swapped into the other frame.

It's possible your player can't do any better with SVCDs. As an experiment, you could run the NTSC video through a deinterlacing filter and uncheck the "interlaced" box in TMPeg. This produces a progressive-scan SVCD, which is probably similar to the DVDs you tried.

If it was me, though, I would just convert the video to PAL before I record it. The player is just going to convert it anyway, so why not do it more carefully? Just a thought.

[Scumbag]

Yep - tried unchecking and checking various "interlaced" and "non" boxes et al... Nothing seemed to help.

Tried getting TMPGEnc to convert the ripped NTSC 29.97 fps VOBS to PAL 25 fps when encoding, but that produced a fairly ugly result.

The concept of converting the video to PAL is what I had in mind but how ? It's a dvd rip.

jr

[alexb]

It is really strange. I rip some NTSC movies OK! but others are pain in the but! The only way I manage to convert was to use TMPGenc VCD Film template at 23.976 fps and it worked fine. Just give it a go mate!

[aldus4]

Just out of curiosity....why not leave them as they are and make NTSC SVCD's? If your DVD Player will play NTSC DVD's, won't it play NTSC SVCD's?

[Scumbag]

That's the annoying thing. It will play NTSC DVDs fine. I have it set to auto convert to PAL80 (or something like that) format so my PAL TV displays them properly.

But the NTSC format SVCD doesn't seem to be output as PAL80 - or maybe it is, and it still looks shitty

Ah well - such is life. I'll muck about with a few more TMPGEnc settings but won't hold my breath...

jr

[VidGuy]

I've done this going the other way. If the DVD is FILM (you can get it to 23.976 fps either by FORCE FILM with DVD2AVI or with Inverse Telecine), you can extract the audio and use something like CoolEdit to speed the audio up by 25/23.976. Then either get the utility AVIFRATE to patch the frame rate of the avi file to 25 or use VirtualDub's ability to modify the frame rate.

This should create a marvelous PAL SVCD (this is the method that they normally use to create PAL from film in the first place).