Do American DVD players play PAL?

[Postmaster]

As some of you know, I´m helping Faith Granger (Deuce of Spades) with her project.
Now we run into a problem that I never head before.

She want´s to make DVDs for America (NTSC) and Europe (PAL).

The differences in format, especially timecode make thing complicated with subtitle scripts.

Now I was thinking, if it is even necessary to convert her 24p film to NTSC. Would be easier to convert it to PAL (25 p or i) only.

I know European PAL DVD players can play NTSC, but is it the same the other way? Do American (NTSC) DVD players play PAL?

Thanks, Frank

 

[JeganRX]

This is seldom (if ever, sadly) used, but there actually is a method of pulldown that enables you to encode a PAL DVD in 23.976fps, with a pulldown to 50i. This eliminate soundtrack issues and subtitle timecode issues (Though technically in NTSC DVD, timecode ALWAYS follows 29.97fps, even if it's a progressive disc, so the same probably applies here, except to a 25fps timebase)

Aegisub may be able to help. As for that pulldown?

"
Although the 4% speed increase has been standard since the early days of PAL and SECAM television, recently a new technique has gained popularity,[citation needed] and the resulting speed and pitch of the telecined presentation are identical to that of the original film.
This pulldown method[4] is sometimes used in order to convert 24 frames/s material to 25 frames/s. Usually, this involves a film to PAL transfer without the aforementioned 4% speedup. For film at 24 frames/s, there are 24 frames of film for every 25 frames of PAL video. In order to accommodate this mismatch in frame rate, 24 frames of film have to be distributed over 50 PAL fields. This can be accomplished by inserting a pulldown field every 12 frames, thus effectively spreading 12 frames of film over 25 fields (or “12.5 frames”) of PAL video. The method used is 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 (Euro) pulldown (see below).
This method was born out of a frustration with the faster, higher pitched soundtracks that traditionally accompanied films transferred for PAL and SECAM audiences. A few motion pictures are beginning to be telecined this way[citation needed]. It is particularly suited for films where the soundtrack is of special importance."


DGPulldown (google it) can perform this on MPEG2 files.