Self burned DVD movies PAL/NTSC

Hello,

Does any body has experience with a camcoder movie, made with a European (DVD) camcorder (PAL), burn the movie files to a DVDR and play it back in the US on a local DVD homeplayer and (NTSC) television?
I would like to burn a copy of my movies on a DVD+R and send it to my family in the US. Some people tell me that I have to convert this movie first to NTSC. But on the other hand I can easily playback and watch movies bought in the US (NTSC, regcode 1) here in the Netherlands on my (region free) home DVD player and PAL television..

That's most probably because a large number of tvs and dvd players in EU are now multi format, and generally the factory setting is default to auto select. My TV is 3 or more years old and my DVD player is 2 years and are dual format. From what I understand chatting to people in the US this sort of thing isn't as prevelant over there yet.

Why don't you send one over as a test and if it doesn't work you will know that you will need to make them NTSC.

If you are a beginer, and do not know how to use AviSynth+CCE then I would say DVDSanta ($30) will do it best for you, first copy the VIDEO_TS folder from the PAL DVD to the hard drive, then in DVDSanta select "video files" as the input, and then add "VIDEO_TS.IFO" to the list of files to be encoded, then at the bottom set it to encode NTSC, either widescreen (16:9) or fullscreen (4:3).

Idealy if you still have the film in the orignal format from the camcorder, and have the right codecs to decode from then select these files to encode from.

DVDSanta is not the best quality alternative, and the playback may be very slightly jerky, but the only other option is AVISynth+CCE, and this would take time to learn how to use properly.

Ben

G'day.
I'm sorry I couldn't help jumping in but I have a question. Does Nero NTSC option do a good job converting from/to Pal NTSC?
Does it do it at all?
John