How To Get DVD Player To Show Drop Frame Time

alfred-w wrote on 3/15/2007, 10:01 AM

In my experience the elapsed time display on NTSC DVD players always seems to indicate time in non-drop frame format (which is 3.6 seconds per hour less than real time). This is true even if the mpeg2 file has been encoded with drop frame (real time) timecode. Is there any way to author a DVD so that the player will be fooled into displaying real (drop frame) time? Thanks in advance.

Comments

MPM wrote on 3/15/2007, 12:17 PM

A pure guess, I think I'd try modifying the flags in the mpg2 (maybe even fudging the start time?) using DGPulldown, DVDPatcher, Restream or similar software. Often the player will follow whatever instructions/flags from the mpg2, but I'm not at all sure that's the case with elapsed time -- it would be easy to try using a short test title & RW blank.

alfred-w wrote on 3/15/2007, 5:03 PM

Thanks very much for your response, and for calling my attention to these potentially very useful programs. However, I looked into all of them and I don't think they will help with this issue. I am already encoding the mpeg2's with drop frame timecode, and I have verified that my authored vob files contain drop frame timecode. It seems that the players' ignore this and calculate elapsed time on the basis of 30 fps instead of 29.97 fps. So some sort of trick appears to be needed.

Thanks again.
-- Al