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Riftwing
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 Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:25 am Post subject: PAL -> NTSC DVD |
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I have a 16:9 PAL dvd that I want to convert to 16:9 NTSC to work on a standalone dvd player. I backed up the dvd to the hard drive but I'm unsure as to how to achieve this. I'm guessing you need to use transcode to change the framerate and resolution but I'm not sure the exact method to doing this. I'm also wondering if there is anyway to retain the dvd menus seeing that it seems to be required to change the dvd to mpeg first. Can anyone help me out?
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hds
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| Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 9:33 am Post subject: |
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just a quick question 1st: are you sure your standalone is unable to play PAL? i have not seesn any standalone dvd player yet, unable to play both - pal AND ntsc. hmm..
btw: its OK if your TV does NTSC ONLY. usually the dvdplayer will take care about the conversion by itself.. at least my (very old!) yamakawa does this. |
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mnxAlpha
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| Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 1:15 pm Post subject: |
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| hds wrote: | | i have not seesn any standalone dvd player yet, unable to play both - pal AND ntsc. |
You wouldn't. Almost all PAL DVD players will play PAL and NTSC. They will output NTSC DVDs in either NTSC or PAL60 mode (often selectable). Virtually all PAL TVs can deal with PAL, PAL60 and NTSC. I have one TV that can't do NTSC (but it can do PAL 60), and I've never seen a DVD player that can't do NTSC/PAL60. Everything I've seen for sale both here (Australia) and in Europe is pretty much universal.
That's not so in the US. Most NTSC DVD players will only read NTSC DVDs, and most NTSC TVs will only accept 60Hz NTSC. I don't really know why, but I've never seen any US hardware that can deal with PAL.
Riftwing - Converting PAL to NTSC without loosing too much quality would be difficult. The best way depends on the kind of material you have. If the material originally came from film (24FPS), the PAL version is the same film but sped up by 4% (to 25FPS), so the best way is to resize to NTSC frame size (480 lines instead of 576), drop the framerate down to 24FPS, and then perform a telecine to get it up to 60FPS interlaced for NTSC DVD. The quality (on a CRT TV anyway) should be almost identical to the original, except for the slightly lower resolution (unavoidable, I'm afraid) and extra compression artefacts (again, unavoidable).
For stuff that's real PAL (25FPS progressive or 50FPS interlaced) it's a lot more difficult. You either need to slow it down by 4%, speed it up by 20% (bad idea), or start dropping / repeating frames to get the right framerate, and then resize to NTSC resolution. It usually looks like an ugly mess, and quality is going to suffer quite a lot. Transcode (or mencoder, or whatever) should be able to do it, but as I've never needed to (PAL equipment), I can't vouch for it. |
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Riftwing
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| Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 4:56 am Post subject: |
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Alright, thanks. I was able to convert it to NTSC with transcode but lost the menus (oh well). Not too difficult but time consuming. Although, I'm curious. What would be the advantage to going to NTSC (29.97 fps) interlaced instead of Film NTSC (23.976 fps) progressive? Why not just leave it at 24 fps progressive?
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hds
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| Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 10:35 am Post subject: |
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| Riftwing wrote: | | Why not just leave it at 24 fps progressive? |
i fear the audio would not be in sync then. |
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Riftwing
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| Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 4:10 pm Post subject: |
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Hmm, it was still in sync when I had it at 24 fps.
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dontremember
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| Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 8:35 am Post subject: |
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| mnxAlpha wrote: | | You wouldn't. Almost all PAL DVD players will play PAL and NTSC. They will output NTSC DVDs in either NTSC or PAL60 mode (often selectable). Virtually all PAL TVs can deal with PAL, PAL60 and NTSC. I have one TV that can't do NTSC (but it can do PAL 60), and I've never seen a DVD player that can't do NTSC/PAL60. Everything I've seen for sale both here (Australia) and in Europe is pretty much universal. |
I have a NTSC DVD made by the video guy at a local college here in Oklahoma. If I mail copies to my family in Europe, can I reasonably expect it to play back OK?? I was looking for a conversion method, but if the original stands a good chance of working, I can just mail it as-is. It's not region-locked, as far as I know. |
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hds
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| Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 8:48 am Post subject: |
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| dontremember wrote: | | can I reasonably expect it to play back OK?? |
perhaps you ask them what brand/model the player is, and have a look here:
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers
it also lists "Multisystem PAL/NTSC Convert". OTOH you could also check on the homepage of the manufacturor..
btw.. you would also like to check if the player will play DVD-R/W DVD+R/W or whatever your media is.. this can be a real mess with some standalones  |
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