Last week while visiting my mother in North America, I was asked by a friend of my mothers (a German lady in her mid-80’s) if I could change a DVD she had received from relatives in Germany, such that it could play on her North American DVD player. My laptop is a European laptop, so it can play European region DVDs with out a problem. The movie was in PAL format, and after determining she only cared about the “title” track, I agreed to convert her DVD movie to NTSC format that would play in a North American DVD player
The applications I used were all packaged by Packman packagers and available for all supported openSUSE versions:
- k9copy,
- tovid (and also idvid which comes with tovid),
- avidemux,
- dvdauthor
- vlc,
- k3b
I initially inserted the PAL DVD in my laptop, and with k9copy ripped the title track (being careful in k9copy to select title track and the German language track) to my laptop’s hard drive (with k9copy - took about 40 minutes ) to an avi format (I called the file “rippedvideo.avi”). This was about a 4 GB file.
I then, from a konosle with tovid, converted the avi title track to NTSC mpeg (with tovid - took a few hours ) with a resulting 3 GB file called “friendsdvd”. The command line I used was:
tovid -dvd -ntsc -normalize -in rippedvideo.avi -out friendsdvd
That created a video called friendsdvd.mpg
The audio had desync’d by 750 miliseconds from the video, so I loaded the friendsdvd.mpg video into avidemux, and then used avidemux to resync the audio and video (took 30 minutes of trial and error to get the sync right - I had to make a 750 msec change), being careful to save in mpeg format. To determine audio video sync, I used a scene where a door was slammed, and also used a scene where a lot of people were talking, with their mouths clearly visible in mouthing the words at the same time as the audio to ensure I had the sync correct.
Once complete, and having saved the resynchronized audio/video, I used “idvid” from the tovid package, to confirm my avidemux operation did not impact the dvd compliant mpeg formt.
I then created a simple custom xml file (called ‘customfile.xml’) to use with the program dvdauthor. Since I was only backing-up/converting the title track for my mother’s friend, this is what the xml file looked like:
<dvdauthor dest="/home/oldcpu/data/dvd">
<vmgm />
<titleset>
<menus />
<titles>
<pgc>
<vob file="/home/oldcpu/data/dvd2/friendsdvd.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
I then ran dvdauthor to convert the mpeg to a video_ts directory in dvd compliant format:
dvdauthor -x customfile.xml
and that created a video_ts directory under /home/oldcpu/data/dvd
I then ran vlc, and opened the “video_ts” directory under vlc. vlc played it properly, giving me confidence that it was safe to proceed to burn.
I then ran k3b, selected a video dvd project, and I simply dragged the contents of the /home/oldcpu/data/dvd/video_ts directory into the corresponding video_ts area under the k3b video dvd project. I then selected a slow dvd speed and burned the DVD.
I then tested the new DVD on my mother’s standalone DVD player (which is an old player). The video played, but the widescreen did not work in my mother’s older dvd player. Clearly vlc run on my laptop, could not pickup the limitation in my mothers stand alone dvd player (as they are different machines). Now DVD -R’s are inexpensive, hence just to be complete, I modified the xml file to force a widescreen by adding the line
<video aspect="16:9" widescreen="nopanscan" />
such that the new xml file looked like:
<dvdauthor dest="/home/oldcpu/data/dvd">
<vmgm />
<titleset>
<menus />
<titles>
<video aspect="16:9" widescreen="nopanscan" />
<pgc>
<vob file="/home/oldcpu/data/dvd2/friendsdvd.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
Again, I ran dvdauthor:
dvdauthor -x customfile.xml
and that created a video_ts directory under /home/oldcpu/data/dvd, it tested ok under vlc, and then I used k3b to create a second dvd. I tested this in my mother’s DVD player and it worked in widescreen.
I then gave my mother’s friend back her original DVD, the two new “backup” DVDs in NTSC format. We played both on her DVD player and both worked in widescreen. Her player is newer than my mother’s so it appears my 2nd DVD was not needed for my mother’s friend … Still, one never knows. This backup/converted DVD that I created for her did not have the many menu’s selections, … but rather it was a simple backup of the main title with one language.
Note this is ONLY recommended for videos that you own. Also note that inserting a video DVD from a different region into your computer’s DVD player may not work, if your DVD player is set to a specific region. I had purchased my laptop in Europe, so the German DVD was not a problem for my laptop’s DVD player region coding.