Pal Dvd -> Ntsc Dvd*r

[Xesdeeni]

I have a PAL video DVD9 (1 season of a British sitcom). I have created a conversion that gives me an excellent NTSC version of the video, and re-encoded it for the lower bitrate as well. Since it's not film, I don't have to alter the speed of the movie, so I can use the extracted audio as-is. The DVD in question has a very simple menu organization, so I authored the NTSC version as closely as I could using SpruceUp. It was tedious to extract, scale, and link up the 25 menus (with an average of 5 buttons each), and I lost the audio for the menus as well as some playback options (play all the episodes vs. play just one). But it looks very good (3 hours on one DVD isn't fabulous, but this is just a sitcom, so there isn't much "action" to make it look too bad).

But I would rather duplicate the functionality exactly. I also have a much more complicated PAL DVD on deck for my next conversion, that includes motion menus and menu transitions.

So the question is, what process do I use to duplicate this DVD as an NTSC one?

I've played around with IFOEdit (it scares the heck out of me, it's so complicated) to see if I could link the original IFO files to the new VOBs. I can change some stuff from PAL to NTSC, but some stuff refuses to be changed from 25fps to 30fps. And even then, I'm sure I screwed up lots of stuff because even Nero won't just burn the files for a test.

How do I convert the menus so that they have the NTSC size, but look like the original version (complete with audio)? The VOBs don't seem to work the same was as the video VOBs. DVD2AVI doesn't even give me all the menu frames.

Also, what about the buttons? How can I scale these from PAL to NTSC as well?

Xesdeeni

[Xesdeeni]

I'm still looking for help on this. I basically want a duplicate of an original PAL DVD9 on an NTSC DVD*R, complete with motion menus, audio during menus, subtitles, extras, etc., without having to completely re-author. These are video DVDs, not film, and I have a very nice conversion for the video (the audio can be left as-is).

But I can't figure out how to:
- convert the IFOs to 30fps (you can modify the basic info in IFOEdit, but individual chapters still say 25fps)
- modify the chapter list to match the new encode
- re-encode the menu VOBs for frame rate and resolution (they don't seem to work like the video VOBs)
- modify the menu buttons (where are the buttons?...they need to be scaled down vertically as well)
- modify any subtitles (they would also need to be scaled down)

Xesdeeni