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From: Martin Gregorie on 20 Nov 2009 18:27
On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:34:23 +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:

Thanks to all for your answers, which give a good idea of what's
involved.

I asked because I'm interested in getting a copy of "The Sunship Game" on
DVD when its released later this year. There is a crappy, YouTube quality
transcript circulating, but as it was originally a professionally made
film in 1970 and the DVD will only be available in NTSC, I was wondering
if I'd be wasting $30 + P&P if I ordered a copy.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |
From: Mark Hobley on 20 Nov 2009 21:08
Martin Gregorie <martin(a)address-in-sig.invalid> wrote:

> I asked because I'm interested in getting a copy of "The Sunship Game" on
> DVD when its released later this year. There is a crappy, YouTube quality
> transcript circulating, but as it was originally a professionally made
> film in 1970 and the DVD will only be available in NTSC, I was wondering
> if I'd be wasting $30 + P&P if I ordered a copy.

Is the DVD formatting for NTSC different then, or is it just the region
code that changes?

I purchased a region 1 DVD, and it played fine in my old DVD player.

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/

From: Geoff Clements on 21 Nov 2009 08:04
Tony Houghton wrote:

> In <he6qop$rk4$1(a)localhost.localdomain>,
> Martin Gregorie <martin(a)address-in-sig.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Is there any Linux application that can convert a US NTSC DVD to PAL or
>> MPEG4?
>>
>> Apologies if this is a dumb question: I really don't understand video DVD
>> formats.
>
> The usual conversion tools such as mencoder can do it, but as Paul
> Martin implied, are you sure you need to? DVD players and TVs that can't
> do both NTSC and PAL are quite rare. I think you'll need to increase
> your understanding of the formats before you can manage it, because I'm
> not aware of a simple "NTSC to PAL wizard", you need to build up your
> own filter chain.
>

There are quite a few tools out there to do this but they all require a
reasonable amount of knowledge to operate successfully. To the OP the
chances are that any equipment you use for viewing is likely to be just as
happy with NTSC as it is for PAL so I'd try playing it first to see if you
need to do any transcoding.

If you still want to transcode it check out:
mencoder
ffmpeg
transcode (I have a script available at the transcode wiki to do this job)
avidemux
QDVDAuthor to format a video DVD.

Transcoding to mpeg4 can be painless but there's a lot to catch out the
uninitiated like pixel aspect ratios, overscan compensation etc. Go to over
to http://www.transcoding.org/transcode and have a look at the examples and
tutorials. Unless you rally want to know about video and transcoding you'll
see that sticking with the NTSC video is probably the best option unless you
can't view it.

> The fundamental difference between NTSC and PAL DVD is that the former
> is 720x480 @ 30fps and the latter is 720x576 @ 50fps.

NTSC plays at 29.97 *frames* per second and PAL plays at 50 *fields* per
second which is 25 *frames* per second.

This means that to do a NTSC to PAL conversion with freely available
software you have to drop nearly 5 frames a second. This is pretty much
pathological for a good video but it can be done.

> Both are
> interlaced, but are usually mastered from 24fps progressive sources
> (film). A process called telecine or pull-down is used to convert film
> to NTSC (it's a bit too complicated to explain here, Wikipedia it). A
> player can detect this and reverse the process for a computer monitor or
> "24p" TV. For PAL the film is simply sped up slightly to play at 25fps
> instead of 24fps and both fields of each interlaced frame come from the
> same source frame. Clever audio processing can prevent the pitch from
> being altered when the sound is sped up.
>
> So to convert it you'd need to get mencoder or whatever to do inverse
> telecine (I think that's more or less automatic), scale up to 576 lines
> (not really necessary if you use MPEG4 as your output) without changing
> the aspect ratio and speed up to 25fps, resampling the sound.
>

Doing an inverse telecine will give you 24fps which is not what the OP
wants. In fact I'd stay away from doing _any_ telecine work with free
software.

--
Geoff
From: rich on 21 Nov 2009 08:31
On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:30:33 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:

> Is there any Linux application that can convert a US NTSC DVD to PAL or
> MPEG4?
>
> Apologies if this is a dumb question: I really don't understand video
> DVD formats.

It is usually a bit of a disaster because of the different frame rates
29.97 (NTSC) vs. 25 (PAL) which leads to audio sync problems on
conversion.

see a few screen clips here: http://www.imageno.com/t9l3bghs3jb2pic.html

Fortunately I only have one NTSC region one DVD and by far the easiest
way is to play it on a region free DVD player. If you don't have one of
these or can't find a hack to 'de-regionalise' your player then FWIW
(since for video work I still use windoze) my suggestions are.

1. Preserve your region setting on your computer dvd drive.
I usually rip to hdd for speed.
The drive region can usually be set 5 times then its fixed. I don't know
if any of the linux dvd ripping software such as dvd::rip bypass this but
windoze DVDdecrypter running under WINE will.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD_Decrypter

The purpose of this is to 'de-regionalise' the video so it will play on a
UK (region two) player. Then re-author with (maybe) DeVeDe.

Another windoze one to try using WINE is dvd shrink.- This might be the
best bet since commercial DVD's are generally double layer. It removes
the regionalisation, language and audio options and I think it does not
affect the drive setting.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD_Shrink.

Both the above will keep the format as NTSC and if you have WINE
installed use dvd shrink straight to .iso. You can check it out with VLC
and if ok burn it. I'm still using wine v1.0.1 purely on the basis that
it works.

2. Conversion to PAL or .mp4. Either from the DVD or files.
see:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/linux-video-tools

In theory WinFF (front end for ffmpeg) has the presets you want for PAL
DVD. I've just given it a try and it scrambles the audio but give it a
try.
Never used it but Handbrake (front end for mencoder) should do a .mp4
conversion, beware of audio sync.

For DVD specs see: http://www.videohelp.com/dvd



--
rich
From: Martin Gregorie on 21 Nov 2009 08:45
On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:04:06 +0000, Geoff Clements wrote:

Thanks for an excellent summary.



--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |
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