I have been burning for some time and ran into a few problems with some non protected, DVD formatted movies that I just had given to me. I wanted to watch them on my DVD player (I have a Sony and Panasonic DVD player). It works in neither player, but plays fine on my computers and mini DVD player. It reports an "Area Limitation" as the cause for not playing on the Sony and the Panasonic will play the DVD, but it is horribly distorted and shaky. Normally, I would say this is a region or PAL issue, but those check out fine. I even tried to rip and rewrite the DVD with my tools (DVD Shrink, Decrypter and Slysoft), but could not get it to change the outcome. Any ideas?
"Normally, I would say this is a region or PAL issue, but those check out fine." Those would be the first two things to look at, for sure. You say they checked out fine, but just curious, how did you check them out? I'd open a .VOB file from the original DVD in Virtualdubmod, File, File Information. Make sure the framerate and resolution rule out a PAL/NTSC problem. Then I'd rip with Shrink. Under "Backup!", "DVD Region", make sure "Region Free" is selected. Then burn a new DVD. That should take care of the region issue. After that neither your Sony nor Panasonic DVD player can play the newly burned DVD?
I will look at it with the tool you mention. To date, I have confirmed that it is not PAL by using DVD Decrypter. What should the frame rate and resolution be? I have also already tried ripping it with Shrink to no avail. Thanks
Here is some of the data that I collected from Virtualdub on the video file. Frame size - 720 x 576 FPS, # frames - 47835 (31:53) Avg Bitrate - 4210 Kbps Does this help you?
You have a PAL video. 720 x 576 is PAL video resolution. Virtualdub should show you the framerate (fps) explicitly, 25.000 (PAL) or 29.970 (NTSC). But anyways, doing the math on your 31:53 runtime and your 47835 frames comes out to 25 fps. So, no question, it's PAL.
Well, converting video from PAL to NSTC is really the last thing you'd want to do. That's just my opinion. It's always better to just use a DVD player that will play PAL. But, if you're stuck with an NTSC only DVD player and a PAL DVD, then you've got a couple of choices. The quick and dirty method is to "patch" the DVD to trick the DVD player into thinking the video is NTSC. This doesn't do a real conversion of the video. You can get watchable results with some DVD players, but not all. You might get video stutters and audio dropouts. I don't think it's a good idea to use this method, but it may work for your DVD player. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/534583 If you want to really convert the video from PAL to NTSC then you could do an easy conversion with software like NeroVision Express. It does an OK job of re-encoding the video and creating NTSC DVD files. A more detailed PAL/NTSC conversion: http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=56599 Best of all is a DVD player that plays NTSC and PAL.
