Copying a PAL DVD to a NTSC DVD
 

My friend bought an old DVD of Amazon Europe not realizing that the DVD he bought was PAL encoding and would not play on our NTSC DVD players here in the USA. He asked me to reburn the DVD so that he could play it on his tv. I ripped the DVD with dvdrip. It looks like it generated 4 vob files that are pretty lengthy (3 are 1 GB and 1 is 700 MB) and there are 4 titles on the DVD.

So, did I do this right? I was hoping to get 1 big iso file. How do I burn this or these files?

First of all, PAL and NTSC have very different properties. Just ripping the video off of the disk isn't going to make it playable. You have to make sure to transcode the video into NTSC format also. I'm not too familiar with dvdrip, but I seem to remember that it includes such conversion features. Am I right?

In any case, does your output contain an entire VIDEO_TS folder and associated files, or just the vobs? If the former, then you can simply burn it to a blank DVD with any burning software. Just be sure to use the DVD video mode. If it's just the vobs, then you need to do some kind of re-authoring to give them a DVD menu structure. I recommend dvdstyler, it's pretty good and easy to use.

FYI, the maximum file size for DVD video is 1GB, so videos are generally broken up into multiple 1GB vob files.

ok. I used DVDRipper and got the vobs and a bunch of other small files. I then put the vobs into ffmpeg and transcoded from PAL to NTSC. For mastering the DVD I was told about DVDStyler a while ago and tried that. It burned almost perfect and I was able to watch the movie on my tv. The annoying thing is that it does not play continuously between the transitional files....there are 3 times where the movie stops playing where DVDRipper started another vob file.

How can I get this movie to play continuously? Also, I'd like the movie to autostart when I put the DVD in the player and close the tray....how do I do that?

Hmm. It's hard for me to say without knowing exactly how things are arranged. I imagine the vob breaks aren't matching up with the title breaks though, right? My guess is you simply authored the disk with each vob as a separate title, which then return to the menu when they finish playing.

I can see two possible solutions. First, if you hold down the crtl button when dragging on a video in dvdstyler, it will append it to the previous video so that it all becomes a single title. You can then edit whatever menu buttons you have to point to certain chapter breaks instead of the beginning.

You can also link videos with the 'post' commands. Just point the post command of one title to the beginning of the next one and they should play straight through. They all have to be in the same titleset though.

Your other, more complicated option, but maybe cleaner in the long run, would be to use ffmpeg (or similar) to first concatenate all the vobs together , then use the -ss and -t commands of ffmpeg (or a similar range selection function) to extract the actual titles from the linked vob. That way you'll have 4 separate titles that are easier to work with.

Finally, I'm not 100% sure about autostarting (I hate that kind of thing myself), but I believe you can simply set the 'pre' command of the main menu to jump directly to the feature. That should play the video before bringing the menu up. You may want to look through the dvdstyler forum or do a web search first though, as I'm sure it's been answered before. There are a lot of neat things you can do with 'pre' and 'post' commands when you know how to use them.