PAL to NTSC

So I bought some DVD's from England at the Fresh Expressions Conference. I get them home and discover that they won't play on my DVD player. Of course, I realized, they are in PAL format, not NTSC. The NTSC format is what we use for TV in North America and Japan. NTSC is what they use in the UK, Europe, and many other places. The difference, incidentally, came about back in the days with everything was analog and the power grid in North America cycled phases at 60Hz and the UK was on a 50Hz system. Back then it was easier to simply come up with a new format for a TV signal stream than make TV's smart enough to overcome the difference.

Anyway, it's not a big deal since you can buy PAL-compatible DVD players or simply play it on most computers. But I'm too much of a techie to let that go by. So I stopped by my local consumer video production outfit and they said they would be happy to do the conversion: for about $40-60/video! Yikes! So I decided to do it myself.

It turns out that doing the conversion yourself is not a straightforward process (unless you pay for software specifically designed to do it). So it took a few tries with various free video programmes until I finally cracked it and got a disc burned. Here's my path, for those of you interested such things.

1. Copy the video files (VOBs) onto your hard drive. Remove any copy protections in the process. (I used DVD Shrink.)
2. Transcode from 25fps to 30 fps. VSO DivxToDVD was supposed to work for this, but didn't. So I used the trial version of Blaze Media Pro instead.
3. Build a new DVD using the transcoded files. I used Nero Vision for this, which isn't free, but there are similar programmes that will do the same thing.

I feel like I accomplished something figuring this out. And now I can give my wardens and others a DVD that will play in their home players!

-t