A carnival of technology

Man, video processing in Linux sure is a half-assed mess.

I’m trying to convert a DVD from PAL to NTSC. I may have mentioned here before that I enjoy Sergio Leone’s movies, so I thought that I would try to collect all six. The three with Clint Eastwood were easy enough to find, and Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America were also readily available, though somewhat more pricey since they were recently given Special Edition reissues, but the fifth film in this progression, A Fistful of Dynamite, is a bit more difficult to track down. The reason for this is that, though there was a US special edition DVD release planned for this movie, Sony has been buying up MGM Home Entertainment, and it appears that this release was lost in the merger. Faced with this indefiniteness, I made a somewhat rash decision: I imported the DVD from the U.K. So I’m now faced with the problem of how to burn a new DVD that I can play on an American television set.

I’ve been documenting my progress at dcantrell’s new wiki, http://wiki.burdell.org/wiki/PAL_to_NTSC. Transcode seems to be the best choice for doing video stuff in Linux, but as I learn more and more about it, I become angrier and angrier. It would seem, unsurprisingly—but disappointingly—that transcode, like other video tools for Linux, is designed to take a DVD down to a 0-day videoz file; the other filters and options are provided primarily for a veneer of legitimacy. My current hare-brained plan for creating this NTSC DVD is to try to slow the audio and video from its current 25fps to 23.976fps and then perform a 3:2 pulldown, since this is effectively what would have been done for an NTSC release of the DVD, but so far audio has presented the biggest obstacle. Transcode basically can’t do anything with sound. It can’t slow it down, since it has no useful audio filters, and it can’t even decode it to a useful format, since it turns out that the internal PCM format doesn’t support more than two channels. I suppose at this point that I could just live with that—even though I do plan to eventually get a decent sound system with more than two speakers, the original film was recorded in 1972, so at least 3 of those 5.1 channels are made up—but it’s become a matter of principal. I have six channels of audio coming in, and I want six channels of audio going out. If I have to write my own frontend for decoding AC3 audio, so be it. I’m not going to let this stupid do-nothing program win.