I saw a great foreign film at the Film Festival titled Kontroll. The movei was so great that I found a website in Hungary (the movie is Hungarian) and I bought the movie and soundtrack.
Apparently the parcel posts don’t work that well and I just got the movie today…I ordered it in January. I was aware of regional encoding and how to get around it but this particular movie is in PAL format. PAL 0, to be exact.
Neither my Samsung DVD player or my girlfirend’s DVD player will play PAL. After some googling, I think I have two options:
Convert PAL to NTSC using various freeware programs that talk about framerates, bitrates, and take many hours to finish.
Buy a regions free DVD player that can play PAL & NTSC.
I’m leaning towards solution #2. Can anyone recommend a good DVD player that will play both types of DVD’s?
Solution 1 is probably going to be easier, because in addition to the DVD player that will play both NTSC and PAL, you will need a television that is multi-system, and will display PAL. NTSC uses a 29.97fps frame rate, while PAL is 25 fps. There are other signal differences that I don’t entirely know about, I think. So…PAL DVD player with NTSC TV will get you junk. One other way is to just use the DVD drive in your computer, and either make the drive region free or get a second for region 2.
Living in Europe, but being American, I have a multi-system TV, but only an NTSC DVD player.
My $70 Norcent DP300 will play both NTSC and PAL (as well as discs from other regions, DVD+/-R and RWs, DVDs full of MP3s, compliant and noncompliant VCD/SVCDs, CD-Rs full of MPEG files, bagels, hubcaps, etc.). I think it’s been discontinued, but here’s one on eBay.
It doesn’t pay to buy a whole player if all you want to do is play one tape.
There are places that will transfer from one medium & format to any other for a small price. A friend of mine recently came back from eastern Europe with a VHS tape that he thought was blank when played on his NTSC player. But he sent it to a conversion shop and had a DVD made for about $20.
Unfortunately I can’t find the name of the outfit that did it, but try googling for “PAL SECAM NTSC conversion” (without the quotes) and you’ll see several places.
Not true. As Mr 2001 correctly points out, if you buy the right DVD player, the type of TV doesn’t matter. Friends of mine here in the US wanted to play their PAL DVDs from Australia. They spent about $80 on a PAL/NTSC DVD player, and it works great with their rather old, NTSC television.
For the OP:
The whole DVD conversion thing is a pretty tricky process, involving the extraction of the vob files from the DVD, converting them to avi files, running them through an mpeg2 encoder like TMpegEnc to convert them to PAL, and then reauthoring the DVD in the new format. I’ve contemplated giving it a try myself, but i’ve never gotten around to it.
There is, apparently, another method called the “patch method,” which involves editing only the .ifo files of your DVD and essentially “fooling” the DVD player into thinking that it’s playing an NTSC DVD when it’s really playing PAL. The method is explained here, although if the comments in the forum are any indication, it only works for some people and with some DVD players.
You shouldn’t have to convert them to AVI first… recompressing them twice instead of only once leads to quality loss. If your MPEG encoder won’t accept VOBs as input, you can use AviSynth to decode them on the fly.
The actual frame rate conversion should be easy enough to do, either with the MPEG encoder or with an intermediate tool like AviSynth, since it’s a film source. Film is shot at 24 fps, and for PAL, it’s usually played back at 25 fps, causing it to run a little faster instead of doing any complicated conversions. To convert a PAL film DVD to NTSC, you can just slow it back down to 23.976 fps, crop or resize the frame to 720x480 (PAL is 720x576), and let your DVD player convert that to the proper TV frame rate like it does with every NTSC film.
Converting a PAL video source to NTSC is more complicated, because you have to duplicate fields to get up to the proper frame rate. American TV shows that aren’t shot on film (and thus have to have fields removed) must look terrible on European TV!
The whole DVD conversion thing is a pretty tricky process, involving the extraction of the vob files from the DVD, converting them to avi files, running them through an mpeg2 encoder like TMpegEnc to convert them to PAL, and then reauthoring the DVD in the new format. I’ve contemplated giving it a try myself, but i’ve never gotten around to it.
No wonder you’ve never tried it if that’s what you think you have to do. I’ve converted tons of PAL DVDs to NTSC and burned them to DVD-R and it’s a piece of cake. Any decent DVD authoring app can do the conversion and reauthor in one go. Even if it doesn’t, you can, in most cases, simply rename the movie vob files (they’re the big ones) to mpg files and then run them through any editor or authoring software. I use Nero Vision Express, part of the Nero Ultra Edition, and I recommend to anyone that is getting into burning DVDs that they seriously consider investing in some software that makes it as easy as possible. The easier it is, the more likely you are to do it and justify the cost of all this fancy computer gear
As for rendering times, it definitely depends on your system. Older, RAM deficient computers are going to take serious time. My 3 GHz/1 GB RAM system can usually render a two hour DVD in about 3 hrs. I do them at night while I am sleeping.
Jman, made a great point about the TV system that I wasn’t aware of. Damn these formats.
OK, I tried again and when I insert the DVD into the TV I get a screen that says check TV system. When I do so in my gf’s DVD player I see ascreen that says incorrect disk.
Does this mean that my DVD player can play PAL but my TV is holding up the process?
Seems I may have to find one of those services Musicat referred to in order to save some cash.
