I'm sorry as I think this has been asked and answered before. I searched
Google and couldn't narrow down the results enough to make it less than
a monumental search.

Seems I recall someone posting a switch on either mplayer, transcode or
ffmpeg that dumps all the info including whether it's PAL or NTSC.

Now QDVDAuthor will tell ya but with that's after you've wasted an hour
encoding it with avidemux into a DVD-Video compliant container.

tcprobe tell me everything but whether it's PAL or NTSC. usually PAL
uses 25 FPS and NTSC 29 but I've seen it otherwise also.

I tried tcscan and a few others and so far no joy :(

--
Email - rsgibson@verizon.borg
Replace borg with net
"Ubuntu" - an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".

Ron Gibson wrote:
> I'm sorry as I think this has been asked and answered before. I searched
> Google and couldn't narrow down the results enough to make it less than
> a monumental search.
>
> Seems I recall someone posting a switch on either mplayer, transcode or
> ffmpeg that dumps all the info including whether it's PAL or NTSC.
>
> Now QDVDAuthor will tell ya but with that's after you've wasted an hour
> encoding it with avidemux into a DVD-Video compliant container.
>
> tcprobe tell me everything but whether it's PAL or NTSC. usually PAL
> uses 25 FPS and NTSC 29 but I've seen it otherwise also.
>
> I tried tcscan and a few others and so far no joy :(

Just run it with mplayer:

> mplayer file.mpg
....
Playing file.mpg.
MPEG-PS file format detected.
VIDEO: MPEG1 352x272 (aspect 12) 29.970 fps 1000.0 kbps (125.0
kbyte/s)
....

So this would be NTSC.

The -identify flag gives more verbose information, and there's an
midentify script in the TOOLS directory of the mplayer sources. It
simply runs
mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify file.mpg
through a sed script to strip out the garbage.

- Daniel

On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:50:56 -0400, D Herring wrote:

>> tcprobe tell me everything but whether it's PAL or NTSC. usually PAL
>> uses 25 FPS and NTSC 29 but I've seen it otherwise also.

> Just run it with mplayer:

> > mplayer file.mpg
....
> Playing file.mpg.
> MPEG-PS file format detected.
> VIDEO: MPEG1 352x272 (aspect 12) 29.970 fps 1000.0 kbps (125.0
> kbyte/s)

> So this would be NTSC.

Like I said you can not go necessarily by the frame rate. On top of
that often different applications report different frame rates!

See I could encode something as PAL but use 29 fps. I know that is the
incorrect way to do it if you want to adhere to standards but people do
it nonetheless. The source files are torrents and while there are some
excellent videos sometimes the only one available is PAL. Now they are
supposed to tell you (In the torrent locating software's description
section) but it's not done many many times. See a lot of people don;t
know what they are doing but I have enough software that I can usually
recover a poorly ripped or encoded video. However I hate wasting time
only to find out that I had a PAL avi after I change it into a
DVD-Video (mpeg2) compliant format - That usually takes 1-1/2 hours for
a 1:45 minute video.

If I know it's a PAL I use...

ffmpeg -i <Source file> -target ntsc-dvd <Target file>

Which does the DVD-Video compliant conversion straight away and ten
minutes later after using QDVDAuthor I have a DVD that will play in any
player - PC or Home Theater.

Lordy someone help me :( The only way can predetermine this now is
boot winders and plug it into Nero Vision. I can't believe with all
the video software I have both for winders and Linux the only damn
program that will tell me this is NVision.

There's got to be a better way.

> midentify script in the TOOLS directory of the mplayer sources. It

I had an old build of mplayer laying around I compiled myself and found
that. Thanks. For what I'm using now I used a Slackbuild and it didn't
create that script.

Since it's just a script there are no dependency issues so I copied it
over and am gonna investigate what else I might could use from that old
build.

So we did find some easter Eggs afterall, just not the right one :-)

--
Email - rsgibson@verizon.borg
Replace borg with net
"Ubuntu" - an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".

Ron Gibson wrote:

> Seems I recall someone posting a switch on either mplayer, transcode or
> ffmpeg that dumps all the info including whether it's PAL or NTSC.

There is no such thing as PAL or NTSC when looking at digital video.

PAL & NTSC are both methods for encoding analogue video signals.

On Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:14:21 +1000, Wild Wizard wrote:

>> Seems I recall someone posting a switch on either mplayer, transcode or
>> ffmpeg that dumps all the info including whether it's PAL or NTSC.

> There is no such thing as PAL or NTSC when looking at digital video.

> PAL & NTSC are both methods for encoding analogue video signals.

LOL! Thanx for sharing that. I'm interested in making DVD's for a home
DVD player, not playing files on a PC.

The TV happens to be <Drum Roll> NTSC! And it will remain so for a long
time yet. I do not even have cable. All my television viewing except
over the air broadcasts come from DVD - South Park, Enterprise,
Voyager, Seven Days, and many many movies. Cable or FIOS is a waste of
money for my viewing habits.

I also have House, NCIS, Nova and other series on DVD.

--
Email - rsgibson@verizon.borg
Replace borg with net
"Ubuntu" - an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".

Take a look at this site:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Create_a_DVD:Encode

- Daniel

On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:14:56 -0400, D Herring wrote:

> Take a look at this site:
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Create_a_DVD:Encode

Oh yeah, Gentoo docs are usually great. I'm trying something different now.

--
Email - rsgibson@verizon.borg
Replace borg with net
"Ubuntu" - an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".