Converting DVD

Marlin said:

Anyone know if a PAL DVD can be converted to an NTSC version

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Assuming you are doing this legally...

The program called hawkeye will do this easily. That's one of its main features. ( it's as simple as rightclicking on the menu with the asset list and clicking convert to NTSC , if I read correctly )
Here's the company website

Also Toast will do this I believe.

A free solution will be pretty convoluted if you want it to go back onto a DVD.
Mac the Ripper, MpegStreamclip, or handbrake to get the video off for you. You'll need to reauthor the DVD with iDVD or Toast or something.

It's kind of alot of effort.

Agreed...it's much cheaper and easier to buy multi region DVD players (you will always loose some quality in the conversion)

Marlin said:

Thanks. The disk we have was sent by Porsche in Germany, footage of the car that won the Florio Targa race and is the car named for the Targa model. My cousin owns the car so they sent him the disk not thinking to send the NTSC format. The disk played on his Computer but not the set top, so thanks for the site. I didn't know you could do that, good to know thanks so much.

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People in PAL land also are used to having players that automatically decode (long story short - most DVD players would do it if not for a chip or bit of code that prevents them from doing it). Computers will do it with out problems (usually) but the difficulty is in region encoding.

It really would be a lot easier to buy a region free DVD player as they only cost $50-60. Converting from PAL to NTSC involves changing the frame rate and the size of the image, so you lose detail and oftentimes sync (if it's a very short video, go for the conversion. But if we're talking an hour or more...)