DVDs from another country

[tobinf]

Hello all,

I recently was on holidays in Germany, and I bought a few DVDs while I was there. I'd like to work on my German, so the idea was to watch the movies in German with English subtitles, or watch them in English with German subtitles. There are two problems, of course. The first is that they have a region code, and therefore won't play on North American DVD players. The second problem is that they are PAL, not NTSC.

I am able to play the DVDs on my computer with no problem. The PAL issue doesn't seem to be an issue on my computer, and I bypassed the region code problem with a beautiful little program called DVDXGhost.

What I would like, however, is to be able to play these DVDs on my home DVD player. I have a DVD+R burner, and I have had success backing up my North American-coded DVDs using DVD Shrink, but when I try that with my European discs the result hardly works at all. When I try to play these discs, it stutters when it plays, and the colour is all wonky.

Is there a way for me to back these discs up but somehow convert them from PAL to NTSC?

Thank you very much,
Tobin Frank

[Neo Neko]

Yes but it is not as simple as DVD shrink AFAIK. The way I would go about doing it involves re-encoding. Which can varry greatly depending on the tools avalible.

[tobinf]

Thanks for the info Neo!

[Pato]

The same happened to me, but the other way around. I was trying to read NTSC on my PAL TV. I found that my DVD Pioneer Player had an option to create PAL output from NTSC source (the factory default wasn´t doing that), so I switched it on and now I´m able to see both Systems.

Note that I had to make a copy without region codes, since my player is R2.

[Neo Neko]

Yes that can work. But you need a player that supports it. And I can say that here in NTSC land that is unfortunatly not super common. :( I have several Apex DVD players that will do it. But I also have several other systems that are major name brands that will not. I have an older samsung that I picked up for $179 more than 4 years ago that would not even play the Matrix on DVD let alone foriegn PAL stuff. We have a Panasonic that we picked up about 2 years ago for $179 that will play the Matrix but has visual and audio skips at odd points on basically all DVD old or brand new. And no. No PAL conversion support. Then there is my newer samsung Which will play any NTCS DVD including those on DVD±R/RW, VCD and S-VCD, but not X-VCD or K-VCD. :p And ofcourse no PAL conversion support. But there are those 3 Apex players we got for $29 each. DVD, DVD±R/RW, VCD, *-VCD, AND PAL DVD!

So I guess if you have the dough and can find an Apex cheap enough it could be the solution to your problems. Outside of something like that all you can do is convert the frame and sample rate and re-encode.

[Matthew]

Here's the way I'd do it (although I never have) to produce a movie-only backup - probably is an easier way though:

Save a dvd2avi(dg) project file and loading the avs in CCE and encoding as 23.976. Off the top of my head something like:

LoadPlugin("D:\MPEG2Dec3dg.dll")
MPEG2source("D:\movie.d2v")
BicubicResize(720,480,0.0,0.6)
AssumeFPS(23.976)
ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=false)

Then use pulldown:
pulldown.exe input.mpv output.mpv -drop_frame true

For the audio you can use besweetgui's 25000->23.976 frame rate conversion to get 6 waves (one for each channel). Then re-encode with softencode.

The subs can be quite tricky, but it is possible to convert maestro/scenarist bmps and the associated son/sst from NTSC<->PAL. The resizing can reduce the quality a bit, but they should be very readable. Alternative is OCR (urrrg).