PAL DVD help.

[Jamie Tate]

One of my friends, through some nice detective work, found a copy of the Marx Brother's- A Night In Casablanca. It's one of my favorite Marx Bros flicks and has never been released on DVD in this country. This disc is either from England or Australia and is in the PAL format. The disc is an all regions disc. A friend of mine has a DVD player that will play PAL, SECAM and NTSC discs but it looks like hell... very pixalated and blocky. Out of curiosity I put it in my G4 and it played. It looked amazing actually, and computer monitors show flaws that normal TVs hide.

Is there a way to get the video on to my hard drive and import it to iMovie or Final Cut Pro so I can record it to my video camera through firewire or to my DVD recorder? How do you extract the video from a DVD? Is there an easy way to do it keeping in mind I'm dangerously close to being a computer imbecile.

[Pinknik]

If there's an EASY way, I don't know it. Well, and that means if you want to keep it digital, the only way I can go from one to the other is to play a disc on a multi-region machine and record the analog video off of it. A good place to check, though, would be the Apple support discussion groups, a lot like this forum, but more techy. SOMEBODY has always had an answer for a question.

[Pinknik]

P.S. Why is that the Marx Bros. seem to be getting the same respect the Beatles do in the CD world? Stuff missing, mediocre stuff available. Sad.

P.P.S. Among the only truly rare stuff I have in my possession is a short video transferred from 16mm film of Harpo and Benny Goodman clowning around on a home movie. Neat.

[Claviusb]

Jamie,

Feel free to ignore this advice, but you can buy an Apex DVD player for less than $60 from Walmart that will play any region's discs (even the pal ones) on your NTSC TV.

[BradOlson]

There are people who do modify their players to play all region's discs as well but this voids the warranty.

[proufo]

Check the archives or ask ar www.avsforum.com

[Holy Zoo]

OSex can pull DVDs onto your hard drive:

http://www.cs.buffalo.edu/%7eafaversa/test

I've used it, it's easy, it works.

[BradOlson]

DeCSS is the most popular program on the Windows PC to record DVDs to your hard drive. Do a Google, Yahoo, etc. search for this program if you desire, Holy Zoo is right that you have a Mac, so you can use the program Holy Zoo suggested.

[Pinknik]

I knew people somewhere would know, and HERE you don't have to go far.

[Jamie Tate]

Originally posted by Claviusb
Feel free to ignore this advice, but you can buy an Apex DVD player for less than $60 from Walmart that will play any region's discs (even the pal ones) on your NTSC TV.

That's the player my friend has.

You're right, it played the disc without any fuss but looks really bad. Blocky and pixalated.

[Jamie Tate]

Originally posted by Pinknik
I knew people somewhere would know, and HERE you don't have to go far.

No doubt. This place is a great resource. :)

[Jamie Tate]

Originally posted by Pinknik
P.S. Why is that the Marx Bros. seem to be getting the same respect the Beatles do in the CD world? Stuff missing, mediocre stuff available. Sad.

P.P.S. Among the only truly rare stuff I have in my possession is a short video transferred from 16mm film of Harpo and Benny Goodman clowning around on a home movie. Neat.

The DVDs Image put out looked great. I heard several stories on why they went out of print. Unfortunate. I see the video tapes are all out of print now too. Such a shame you can't find Night At The Opera, Monkey Business or any of the others anymore. Such brilliantly funny stuff.

Have you heard the audio clips of Harpo speaking? Not the voice I expected.

[SVL]

What you saw on the TV is probably a result of poor PAL to NTSC conversion by the DVD player chip. PC video cards/DVD player software do not have that problem.

As for recording, leaving other considerations aside, I do not see why this could not be done technically, except for the digital camera part/DVD recorder part, because that would depend on the equipment, connections and software involved.

Here is a good and simple step-by step guide. (http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdripping) It should have links to the necessary tools. You do not need the conversion part - just the steps that would result in having the MPEG2 content on your HD.

Most DVDs also have something called Macrovision that may get in the way of things, but something tells me that if your disc is multiregion, this may have already been taken care of;).

Anyway, once you have PAL MPEG2 digital video on your HD, you can either play it on the PC, or convert it to NTSC so it could be played on a regular (not multisystem) TV.

Generally, hardware PAL to NTSC conversion is expensive if you use professional quality equipment, or will give you poor quality if you use anything else. For digital video, however, you can use software tools that could match the quality of professional hardware.

Canopus DV Format Converter (http://www.canopus.com/US/products/DV_format_converter/pm_dv_format_converter.asp)

At $400, not exactly cheap either :( . There should be a demo version, but that would embed a visible watermark in the resulting video.

[romanotrax]

Another nice program fro pulling DVD to your hard drive is SmartRipper. I use it all the time and it works great.

Check out:
http://purpleman.cjb.net/

for all the details

[SVL]

All of these things are built around the old DeCSS, which that poor Norwegian kid was made a scapegoat for.

Of course, everybody is using them strictly for backup purposes;)