Mini DV to PC (US vs UK)

[Guest]

I've tried writing to the contributors of TH but thought people on this board may also have some input.

Here is the problem:
Equipment:
Sony TRV20 Mini DV
PC with Firewire and Studio DV

Problem: Need to take edited DV and burn to CD-R's in the highest quality possible but resulting CD's must be able to play on a United Kingdom PC.

My hunch: I could burn in MPEG2 but would then run into the old PAL/NTSC format crap that plagues most people in the US who want to sent video to the English relatives (True?).
Also, I'd only be able to write about 15 minutes of video (True?).

I could burn in AVI but would lose quality, it may still not play(?)

So repeat of problem:
Take mini DV from the US, and write to CD-R's in a format that will play nice quality video on an English PC.

Any ideas my friends?
Thanks,
APS

 

[Guest]

You are confusing TV formats with computer formats. A monitor connected to a PC operates in the same format wherever it is in the world. So your hunch is right - you can burn up a MPEG-2 and send it to the UK and they should be able to view on their PC (providing their machine is up to it and they have the appropriate video codec installed). Depending on how well the compression is done will determine how much you can fit onto a CD-R, but I would guess that you should get 20-30 minutes worth.

BTW there should be no loss in quality with AVI's as this is essentially the same raw uncompressed information which is stored in the camera.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply.
My concern over MPEG formats by country was mixed up by the fact that US DVD (MPEG2) often cannot play in UK DVD players, but thats probably some coding issue unique to movies.

The other confusing issue is that you can buy mini DV with NTSC and PAL on the side, which made me think when you put it in a computer you would be transfering unique standards. So then writing out to MPEG or AVI format would preserve the PAL or NTSC format.

I'd appreciate any further comments on this format issue.

Also, if a computer has a DVD player installed with software decoding (shame) would this imply that the PC would be able to play the MPEG2 file? It seems to imply that the PC is using some kind of codec to read DVD.

Has anyone else tried and succeeding with this particular transfer of video?

Thanks ,
APS