Background
Having kids I’m always dealing with DVDs, either backing them up or repairing them. Recently we received a bunch of DVDs from a friend of various kid movies. Some of them just refused to play in our DVD player and being a geek who’s curious I wanted to better understand why. Turns out the DVDs were in PAL format, here’s how I figured this out, using the little known tool, tcprobe.
Solution
tcprobe is part of the package transcode, available in the rpmfusion repo. I was able to install it via yum on my Fedora 14 laptop like so:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | % sudo yum install transcode ... ... ==================================================================================================================================== Package Arch Version Repository Size ==================================================================================================================================== Installing: transcode x86_64 1.1.5-5.fc14 rpmfusion-free 1.4 M ... ... |
With it installed, you can run the following command to pull some useful info off of a video DVD:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 | % tcprobe -i /dev/dvd -T 1 -H 10 libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.10 for DVD access libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.10 for DVD access [dvd_reader.c] mpeg2 pal 4:3 U0 720x576 video [dvd_reader.c] ac3 en drc 48kHz 6Ch [dvd_reader.c] ac3 fr drc 48kHz 6Ch [dvd_reader.c] ac3 nl drc 48kHz 6Ch [dvd_reader.c] ac3 pl drc 48kHz 2Ch [dvd_reader.c] ac3 hu drc 48kHz 2Ch [dvd_reader.c] ac3 ar drc 48kHz 2Ch [dvd_reader.c] DVD title 1/26: 21 chapter(s), 1 angle(s), title set 1 [dvd_reader.c] title playback time: 01:15:38.05 4539 sec [tcprobe] DVD image/device [tcprobe] summary for /dev/dvd, (*) = not default, 0 = not detected import frame size: -g 720x576 [720x576] aspect ratio: 4:3 (*) frame rate: -f 25.000 [25.000] frc=3 audio track: -a 0 [0] -e 48000,16,2 [48000,16,2] -n 0x2000 [0x2000] audio track: -a 1 [0] -e 48000,16,2 [48000,16,2] -n 0x2000 [0x2000] audio track: -a 2 [0] -e 48000,16,2 [48000,16,2] -n 0x2000 [0x2000] audio track: -a 3 [0] -e 48000,16,2 [48000,16,2] -n 0x2000 [0x2000] audio track: -a 4 [0] -e 48000,16,2 [48000,16,2] -n 0x2000 [0x2000] audio track: -a 5 [0] -e 48000,16,2 [48000,16,2] -n 0x2000 [0x2000] V: 113475 frames, 4539 sec @ 25.000 fps A: 69.26 MB @ 128 kbps USER CDSIZE: 650 MB | V: -69.3 MB @ -15999.9 kbps USER CDSIZE: 700 MB | V: -69.3 MB @ -15999.8 kbps USER CDSIZE: 1300 MB | V: -69.3 MB @ -15999.7 kbps USER CDSIZE: 1400 MB | V: -69.3 MB @ -15999.7 kbps |
NOTE: The key line in the tcprobe output being this: [dvd_reader.c] mpeg2 pal 4:3 U0 720×576 video. This line tells us that the DVD is in the PAL format and its size is 720×576. A standard DVD for the US market is in a format called NTSC. The difference being basically the size of the video & the frames per second, aka. frame rate.
- NTSC - 720×480 @ 29.97 fps
- PAL - 720×576 @ 25 fps
Further details can be found here
The Arguments
- -T 1 | Probe for DVD title #1
- -H 10 | Scan 10MB worth of VOB’s input data
References
links
local copies
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January 4th, 2012, @ 5:17 pm |
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