PAL to NTSC conversions yields .VOB with pauses
 

Hi, I followed the "How to Convert PAL DVDs to NTSC DVDs" guide and after a couple of attempts I finally got a .VOB file with my merged m2v and wav files from step #7 using VirtualDub and Goldmine. In step #8 I had to use TMPGenc DVD Author 3 since I couldn't find a copy of TDA.

After creating my new merged .VOB I played the file to see how everything looked and the video pauses for a split second every 2 seconds. If I check the .m2v file created in VirtualDub in step #7 it plays smoothly (no pausing).

I did see the note in the guide that said: "The only note to make here is that TDA3 and TAW4 mistakenly believe that the 23.976 file is a top-field interlaced 29.97 NTSC file, so do not attempt to change this setting. The video will be butchered if this setting is changed." But, does this mean to change the fps to 23.976 or leave it at 29.97? Regardless of the meaning, I tried it both ways (leaving it at 29.97 and changing it to 23.976) and still get the pausing every second or two.

Also, there's another post from July 27 that talks about their file size getting shrunk when converting from PAL to NTSC. Mine has shrunk too. When I first converted my video in step 5 using VirtualDub my file went from a 4GB+ file to 3.8GB. When I saved as an uncompressed avi the file was a 135GB avi after step 7 when I merged the video and audio I got a 1GB VOB with the remaining few minutes in a smaller 131MB VOB.

I'm not so much worried about the file size though. This is a movie I'm converting for my dad and he's not going to be too picky about the quality not being perfect.

The pausing though is not going to cut it.

Any ideas on how to fix this problem? If it matters, this is a PAL formatted DVD from the Netherlands. My dad has had it on VHS for years and it's about worn out.

Thanks

I really need to update that guide. There are some alternate (possibly better!) method now, too.

Something must have changed in the software, which has created a problem that used to not exist. Let me try the full method myself, and see what happens.

It'll be a few weeks, but I'll for sure see what's going on here.

I converted the original PAL movie to NTSC using ConvertXtoDVD. It's a pay program, but I've used it in the past and liked it so I upgraded and used it here and it worked perfectly.

The ConvertXToDVD method has lots of quality issues compared to better methods.

No doubt. I didn't even try to change anything although I would have liked to have resized the resolution and I didn't see a way to do that. This video is for my dad though and he's been watching it on crappy VHS for years so anything was an improvement. He's just happy to get it in a format where it doesn't take 5 minutes to rewind so he can watch it again.