Converting NTSC WMV to PAL VOB

To be brief, I have some old video clips I edited back when I was living in America using Windows Movie Maker, and now I’m looking to burn them onto a DVD that will actually play on any standard player.

A friend of mine offered to help out since he has a DVD burner, but we hit a major snag: the video keeps stuttering constantly. He eventually gave up because he thinks there's a mismatch between the NTSC and PAL frame rates, and apparently, his DVD authoring software just can't handle the conversion properly.

I tried to fix it myself at home by converting the .wmv files into PAL .avi format using Adobe Premiere, but the results were still terrible. I even installed Adobe Premiere, but it won't even open the .wmv files.

Does anyone have any suggestions or, better yet, some actual experience with this? I should probably mention that I'm a total amateur when it comes to this stuff, so please, keep your advice simple enough for a layman like me to follow...

And why wouldn't you just leave it in NTSC?

Maybe give Nero Vision a shot and see if that works...
It really ought to do the trick.

dustycanyon6 said:Why wouldn't you just leave it in NTSC?

Do you really think that would work? Logically speaking, since I'm over here in the States, it feels like it would be better to have a PAL version. Does every single player actually support NTSC? What if someone is still using an older television set? I wouldn't want anyone to end up with a black and white picture or some other glitch because of NTSC compatibility issues.
Please correct me if I'm wrong...

Jeremy Gray69 said:You think that’s doable? It just seems logical to me that if I'm living here in the States, I really should have a PAL version. Does every single player actually support NTSC? What if someone is still rocking an old TV? I wouldn't want anyone ending up with a black and white picture or some other mess because of NTSC issues.
Correct me if I'm wrong...

More or less, pretty much any DVD player can handle both PAL and NTSC discs and adjust the output accordingly—so, if they're playing a PAL DVD, they can output either PAL or NTSC depending on what kind of TV you've got hooked up. Plus, since all the newer TVs can take both signals, I don't think it's worth stressing over too much.

By the way, if you were looking to convert PAL to NTSC, you'd typically use an "inverse telecine" process—or something along those lines. For instance, there's a plugin for VirtualDubMod that handles it. Honestly though, I don't think it's worth the headache...

dustycanyon6 said:Pretty much any DVD player on the market can handle both PAL and NTSC discs and adjust its output accordingly—meaning if you're playing a PAL DVD, you can set the output to either PAL or NTSC depending on what kind of TV you have hooked up. Plus, almost all modern TVs can pick up both signals without an issue, so I don't think it's worth stressing over too much.

Alright, I'll give it a shot and just burn the DVD as-is to see how it turns out. To be honest, I hadn't realized quite how much of a headache this was going to be, which is why I had to reach out for some advice.

One more thing, if you happen to know. I actually put together subtitles for that WMV file in .srt format. I didn't use any specific software or anything; I just took an existing subtitle file from another movie on my hard drive and manually edited the text. It looks pretty decent now. My question is, how complicated is it to actually embed that subtitle file onto a DVD?

Jeremy Gray69 said:The big question is... how much of a headache is it going to be to add this subtitle file to a DVD?

Look, if you just want to hardcode them directly onto the video—that’s actually pretty straightforward. But if you're trying to add them as actual DVD subtitles? Man, that's a whole different beast. It gets messy fast. You'd first need some kind of tool like SRT2SUP to convert those subtitles into a SUP format, but then you run into another wall. You'll need something to fix the color palette in the specific VOB file because SRT2SUP tends to mess everything up... leaving you with a result that looks pretty terrible. Honestly, it's much easier to just burn them right into the image using something like VirtualDubMod or AVISynth... saves you all that trouble...

No way! DVD Architect 2 handles subtitles just fine—honestly, why would you even want to hardcode them into the video? 😕Btw, Adobe Premiere Pro converts NTSC to NTSC without any issues. I have no clue why you were having such a headache with version 4.