How to use Atlantis to make a high-quality NTSC DVD from a PAL DVD, or vice versa

It can be done with Atlantis, a DVD burner, and some software for copying DVD's
and DVD authoring. You will need a large amount of hard drive
space (40GB for 100 minutes) and 2 pieces of free software in addition to Atlantis.

Atlantis 2.1 for Windows will now read VOB files.

This should probably not be attempted unless you already have experience with
copying and authoring DVD's. You'll need:

  1. A DVD copy program like DVD Decrypter or SmartRIpper. Please note:
    it is illegal to copy, or defeat the copy protection, on copyrighted DVD's. See
    www.doom9.org for more information.
  2. A DVD authoring package, or a combination of MPEG2 encoding plus authoring
    programs like Tmpgenc and Tmpgenc DVD (1 month free license).

The steps you must take are:

  1. Decrypt the DVD to a VOB file on your hard drive if necessary.
  2. Start Atlantis and drag the VOB file into Atlantis. Press Start.
  3. Once Atlantis is finished, rename the ouput file to a unique name for your movie.
  4. Encode the new movie into MPEG-2 format with Tmpgenc or other DVD encoding program.
  5. Create the DVD menus and write the disk with Tmpgenc DVD
    or other DVD authoring program.

Other than Atlantis, these other software programs are not supported by DVFilm. Each has their own
help system and support.

For Macintosh, you will also need a program to convert decrypted VOB files to Quicktime,
since the Atlantis program for Mac quires a quicktime file. One recommended program is
MPEG Streamclip available at squared5.

Note that the 5.1 Surround encoding, the Menu and Chapter information will be lost. The 5.1 Surround
is downconverted to regular analog stereo with surround. Extra tracks of audio like second language
tracks and commentary tracks are written by Atlantis into separate WAV files if you need them.

The default output compression for Atlantis is DV. If you need higher quality intermediate format,
but not necessarily real-time playback (since in the final step you will be encoding to MPEG-2 anyway),
consider these two, free, high-quality codecs

HuffYUV: http://dvfilm.com/maker/huffyuv-2.1.1.zip

Matrox DVCPRO50: http://www.matrox.com/video/en/support/digisuite/downloads/softwares/codec/

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