www.hoochvdr.info is an NTSC-only vdr site. I also would like this option in the future! You can see vdr's North American popularity from the activity at that site. I hope so! VDR is used by a great number of NTSC users (more so than I think Klaus and the others realize) and it seems weird to have to apply patches for something so common. I've wondered why this wasn't addressed in earlier versions but honestly never bothered to inquire. Maybe Klaus will see this and offer some insight. And hopefully answer your question with a yes! :)

On 3/13/07, André Weidemann Andre.Weidemann@web.de wrote:

I never had to patch my VDR to make it play NTSC properly. Have you ever tried the videosystem plugin? I have been using it for quite some time and it always worked flawlessly.

NTSC users shouldn't have to use a plugin to provide NTSC compatibility.

Stone wrote:

I never had to patch my VDR to make it play NTSC properly. Have you ever
tried the videosystem plugin? I have been using it for quite some time
and it always worked flawlessly. It can be found here:
http://www.vdr-portal.de/board/thread.php?threadid=43516

VDR will play video fine w/o patching the code. But, the improper framerate will calculate incorrect times on the video. Also, the OSD will be sized differently when 720x480 is used instead of the hardcoded value of 720x576.

The plugin will take care of the OSD resizing for sure. That was the main reason I installed it. Regarding the time display... I'm not quite sure if the plugin also takes care of the correct calculation of time for the progress bar and such things, but you can give a try and see how it turns out.

André

Stone wrote:

It seems this plugin assumes I am currently using PAL. The plugin takes the OSD-Settings from VDR as PAL-settings and calculates the corresponding NTSC-settings. But, my television does not do both PAL and NTSC, so if this plugin assumes that I currently have PAL setup properly, wouldnt it calculate improper values for NTSC? I dont understand how it can generate proper NTSC values from PAL settings that I am not using.

My TV can handle both PAL and NTSC. Nevertheless, the OSD is resized and everything is displayed correctly when playing NTSC content.

I might be way off here..., but I assume that since all TV-standard values in VDR are hardcoded to PAL, it is safe to use those values to calculate the correct OSD size for NTSC material.

Have you already given the plugin a try?

André

Stone wrote:

It just seems like I would have to translate my NTSC values into PAL, and then put those PAL values into VDR so that the plugin will read them as PAL and translate them back again to NTSC. Right now they are PAL settings with NTSC values.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Why don't you simply grab a plain VDR 1.4.6 without any patches and try the plugin out? It only takes 3-4 minutes to set it up and you'll see whether or not it will work correctly.

Using the plugin was only a suggestion for the time being. I thought you might want to use it until things might be changed in some future version of VDR. I thought of it as an easy to use option instead of patching the VDR every time a new version comes out. That's it...

André

I do appreciate the suggestion and I will take a better look at it. I was just trying to conceptually understand whats going on. All I was trying to say is that I dont think the plugin can generate valid NTSC values from invalid PAL settings. I'll post my results.

Best Regards.

Ok, I have looked at the code and here is what I had to do to make it work. The OSDHeight value that I need to have for NTSC is 425 (what I am currently using). Therefore, I had to reverse the calulation in the videosystem plugin to make that equivalent to the PAL value.

Pal.height = (425 * 576) / 480 = 510

So, after reversing the my current NTSC patch (except for the FRAMESPERSEC part), and putting 510 into VDR's OSDHeight, the videosystem plugin now reads the value of 510 (that is PAL) and converts it to 425 (which is the correct value I need for NTSC). That is what I meant when I said I would have to convert my NTSC settings to PAL so the plugin could read them and convert it back to NTSC (since the plugin assumes that PAL is the default).

Best Regards.

I think I'll stick to what I said earlier in that support for NTSC should really be a core feature of VDR. I have no interest in running a plugin like this and would rather just stick to patching VDR if Klaus doesn't intend to address this issue. :\

Hi,

Stone wrote:

That plugin is only beneficial if you have a dual PAL/NTSC environment. It does not help with the frames per second calculatons at all.

You may want to try the attached patch. It determines FramesPerSec by having a look at the first picture of the recording and falls back to the FRAMESPERSEC macro otherwise.

The current implementation requires that the recording was taken with cVideoRepacker enabled. Furthermore it must be MPEG2.

The file marks.vdr still uses FRAMEPERSEC for compatibility. Plugins like dvd, burn, mp3, mplayer, etc. still use FRAMESPERSEC.

Although this patch is against VDR-1.4.6, it applies with some offset also against VDR-1.5.1.

Bye.