Convert a PAL DVD to an NTSC DVD?

[Paulcat]

Okay, I have been searching the FAQ's, Guides and Threads for ages here without much luck.

How would I go about converting a PAL DVD to an NTSC DVD? I know the picture size and framerates are different, and I'm not really concerned if I lose the menus. I'm assuming I'd have to use DVD Decrypter/DVD Shrink to copy the contents to my HD. Since the PAL DVD is a TV show, I'd end up with 6 VOB's (one per episode).

How do I demux the VOB to be able to maintain the audio and convert the video to NTSC format? I have TMPGEnc XPress and TMPGEnc DVD Author installed, but what else do I need?

Or, miracle of miracles, is there a one stop piece of software that can do a conversion?

[NaN]

Sorry, I'm not aware of a 1-clicker, but I can give you some concept to do this.

You can demux with smartripper or DVDecrypter. Means for the latter to open the dvd in ifo-mode, select streams tab, there you go to select and demux the streams you want (video+audio).

So you end up with an .mpv for the video and usually a .ac3 or .mp2 for the audio.

Search for pulldown.exe, that tool should be able to do that.

For audio you can use besweet, however the ac3-audio is a problem, since ac3enc is experimental and delivers quite useless output sometimes. At least you can save the ac3 as wav and do the frame rate conversion in besweet. Afterwards you can alternativly encode the audio as mp2 (within besweet) or use some other ac3-encoder.

Remux within tmpeg-DVD-author.

Cheers and happy searching! NaN

[Paulcat]

Thanks for the info. I did read a post in another forum that said I could use IFO EDIT and simply change the data in the IFO files from PAL to NTSC without actually changing the VOBs. It went on to say that most players cannot play these new DVDs! Yeah, that's REALLY USEFUL!(heavy sarcasm)

The audio should not be a problem, I can just leave it in ac3 format (I have ac3 filter installed, and it works with my other software)

I was thinking to use TMPGEnc Plus to re-encode the video streams and then remux the audio stream from DVD Decrypter with TDA. The problem is that if I have a DVD with 5.1 audio, TDA will only allow me to master with Stereo, and will probably convert the audio since I don't have the ac3 plug-in. Is there something I can use that will allow me to re-master with 5.1? (This is almost a non-issue, since the PAL stuff I have are tv series' and stereo is generally good enough, but it would be nice to know)

[MvB]

There are some things to consider.

To convert PAL-DVD to NTSC-DVD (Film) you have to:

1) Change length and pitch of the audio. If you want to change 6-Channel ac3, i suggest you use besweet to create 6 32-Bit pcm-wav with the right length and speed (Preset: PAL (25.000)->NTSC(23.976) and encode them again to ac3,e.g. with soft encode.

2) Use avisynth to change the size of the video to 720x480 and change the framerate with assumefps to 23.976. Send it to your favourite mpeg2-encoder.

3) You can rip subtitles with subrip, output as bitmap and *.srt, change to I-Author-Colors. Use your favourite tool to change the framerate from 25.000 to 23.976 and use srt2sup to create the *.sup file. Don't forget to set the right colors!

4) Use Ifoedit to author and after that set the subtile colors to the ones set in srt2sup.

Hint: It's possible to automate the video stuff with dvd2svcd and d2sroba.

MvB

[MvB]

Thanks for the info. I did read a post in another forum that said I could use IFO EDIT and simply change the data in the IFO files from PAL to NTSC without actually changing the VOBs. It went on to say that most players cannot play these new DVDs! Yeah, that's REALLY USEFUL!(heavy sarcasm)

No, that won't work. NTSC-DVD-Film has a video resolution of 720x480 with a framerate of 29.97 FPS (23.976 + pulldown-bits). If you change a 720x576 stream in the header to NTSC the results are not predictable, but you can be sure they are not what you want.

[MarioGarcia]

can someone tell me how to do the other way round. from ntsc to pal.. I don't know how to do it.
I am willing to use dif4u or dvd-rb.. there's one point that I have to change the avs script but I have never made a script.
if I could get the menus and the extras that'll be wonderful.
thank you and good you made this thread

[NaN]

Sure you can add e.g. BilinearResize(720,576) (or maybe Lanczos4Resize) to Rebuilder's avisynth-script (it's automatically generated during prepare phase).

The menus don't get changed in any way, so if they include animated parts that could be a problem (since they're staying pal).

However you cannot use the rebuild phase afterwards, since the orginal audio would get remuxed then (being synched to ntsc, it would be 4% too short). So you've too convert the audio to .wav, use besweet with the ntsc->pal profile, and reencode the audio maybe to mp2 (do *not* use besweet for ac3 encoding! Its output is usually not what you want).

Remux with some authoring program (or ifoedit).

However, why do you do that? Doesn't support your tv ntsc? Or the dvd-player?

Cheers, NaN

[Paulcat]

I am going to try this:

(1) Put the files on the HD with DVD Decrypter
(2) Use VobEdit to demux the VOBs into Video and Audio
(3) Use TMPGEnc to re-encode the video and audio into an MPEG2 file.
(4) Use TMPGEnc DVD Author to make a new DVD

I will lose the menus but who cares really. If TMPGEnc does not read the video, I can use the Stream option on DVD Decrypter to make an m2v stream which TMPGEnc can read.

I don't understand the syncing issue with the audio. Both the video and the audio have the same running time, so there should be no reason why this cannot work.

[MarioGarcia]

well
when I watch it on my tv, all i get is black and white picture, i don't know if it's the tv or the dvd player, I don't have a very good dvd player that is, and a very cheap tv, so I am sure none of them support ntsc

[NaN]

@MarioGarcia: sure you're using composite signals (1 wire and mass). You get a b+w picture if s-video is selected in the video drivers settings. Change it to composite.

@Paulcat: try it as you described (although I don't know wether tmpeg is able to encode audio). Don't forget that pal is 4% accelerated when converted from ntsc (23.97->25fps, "Pal-speedup"), so the audio has to be too. You will see, finally the video will be 4% longer (as ntsc).

Cheers, NaN

[MarioGarcia]

I live in Europa, you connect your dvd player and other through scart; there's no composite or s video, or at least I don't have it... I know about composite when sometimes I use the tv out of my graphic card.. besides that the dvd player that I use is a playstation 2.. I think I should've said it earlier.

[Paulcat]

Results of first attempt to convert Pal to NTSC

I tried this on the weekend with Men Behaving Badly Series 2 (PAL)

(1) I used DVD Decrypter, in IFO Mode, and demuxed the video and audio streams to my HD, to make a total of three stereo .ac3 audio files and three .m2v video files.

(2) I used TMPGEnc Plus (2.52 I think, not the newest one) to re-encode the video only to NTSC (Using the DVD NTSC template). Note that TMPGEnc Xpress did not recognize the .m2v files as valid.

(3) Using the mpeg tools in TMPGEnc Plus, I had to correct an error caused by TMPGEnc not finding the end of the video file and continuing to write to the HD until the 4 GB file limit was reached. This was, needless to say, UNEXPECTED! I think I know a way around it by setting the start and end times to encode...

(4) I used TMPGEnc DVD Author to remaster the new video and old audio into files for burning onto a DVD.

I played the resulting DVD on the PC through Media Player Classic and it looked great, the audio remained in sync and played fine.
I did notice the video was very jittery on the DVD player (Sony), I don't know if changing the field order from Bottom First to Top First will change that at all, I couldn't be bothered to re-encode again.

[NaN]

@MarioGarcia: oh actually I thought you we're using the tv-out of your graphic card! Sorry. No idea, why it's b+w on your playstation.

@Paulcat:
I'm quite astonished that your procedure worked! But hey, if it works...

If you encoded at 23.97fps progressive, try pulldown:

www.doom9.org/mpg/pulldown.htm

Cheers, NaN

[Paulcat]

Pulldown is unnecessary since in the DVD Template in TMPGEnc Plus it sets the framerate at 29.976 FPS, whether that is a TRUE value or whether TMPGEnc does the pulldown for me, I don't know. But it worked fine.

I'd assume then to go from NTSC to PAL, you could do the exact same proceedure, assuming your ntsc video was 23.976 frames per second.
TMPGEnc has a template for PAL DVD as well...

[Paulcat]

Originally posted by NaN

@Paulcat:
I'm quite astonished that your procedure worked! But hey, if it works...

Cheers, NaN [/B]

Well, I did note that when I played the encoded video in Media Player Classic (which also picked up the audio, since it had the same filename but different extension) the entire thing was way out of sync. But after re-authoring these to DVD files, it played fine.

The authoring must simply match audio and video with the same running times and maintains their syncronicity...

[outsideAG]

This method is really just a function of my laziness, but I find that the easiest way to go from PAL->NTSC is to leave the ac3 track alone, and use ChangeFPS(29.97) to get the correct frame rate.

The interesting thing is that while ChangeFPS(23.976) results in horrible jerking, because you are chopping a frame, duplicating frames doesn't have any noticable impact on the smoothness of playback.

As I said, this method is pure laziness, because I don't want to deal with the hassle of stretching 6 seperate wav files, and then re encoding them, but it seems to work fine.

[Andykard]

A very easy, 1 step method I found for converting a PAL dvd to NTSC is using Nerovision Express 3. You import the PAL disk into express and have output set to NTSC and audio to auto. Nero then converts the PAL format to NTSC, the audio is in sync and is still 5.1 dolby ac3. The only thing you lose is the chapter points, it ends up being 1 long chapter. The size of the dvd increases, you have the choice of letting Nero resize it for you or letting it go onto a dual layer disk on the harddrive. I let it go to dual layer disk and then run it through recode as Nero's auto resize makes it very much smaller than 4.3GB