XBMC has the ability to slightly "slow down" the playback of PAL videos that run at 25fps to proper film speed of 23.976fps. You can enable this option if you go to:
System --> Settings --> Videos --> Player
There is an option there under "Framerate Conversion" that you can set to "Play PAL videos at NTSC rates".
This works quite well and eliminates the pitchy voices and slightly off-key music that results from film-sourced material being played too fast. Unfortunately, this excellent feature hasn't yet been implemented with the built-in DVD player. Here's a workaround I've come up with that I thought I'd share:
The first thing to try is putting the DVD directly in the drive. If it autoplays, hit stop. Navigate to your Videos/Movies and then to the DVD-ROM. It should show the DVD title. Enter the disc's folder and the first file there should be "VIDEO_TS.IFO". Highlight that file and bring up the Context Menu by pressing the White button on your controller or Title on the remote. Select "Play Using..." and then select "MPlayer". This may do the trick. But maybe not, as, in my experience, MPlayer seems to have problems playing DVDs that have menus, which is most of them.
If that doesn't work, you'll have to rip the DVD to your computer first. For this purpose, I like to use DVD Shrink. We're not going to do any re-encoding here, so this isn't an all night affair. Find and install DVD Shrink 3.2 (Google is your friend). Don't pay for it, it's free.
Put the DVD in your computer's DVD drive. Launch DVD Shrink. Click the "Open Disc" button. Select the drive letter of the drive you just put the disc into and hit the "OK" button. It'll do some "Analysing" that shouldn't take more than a minute. Uncheck the "Enable Video Preview" box and it'll go a bit faster.
Now the disc information is loaded into DVD Shrink. Click the "Re-author" button all the way to the right. On the left-hand side you'll see a "Re-authored DVD" column. On the right, you'll see the contents of your DVD, including Menu, Main Movie and Extras. If you just want to watch the movie, left-click "Title 1" under Main Movie (there's usually only one here) and, holding down the mouse button, drag-and-drop it to the left under the "Re-authored DVD" column. If you want to drag-and-drop some of the extras to play after the movie, you can. There's a nice playback preview window that shows you what each "Title" that you just dropped is. You can move the various files up or down the list by clicking on them, holding down the mouse button and then moving them up or down the list. The titles are in the order that they'll play back in on your new disc. Just above your list of "Title" files, indented to the left, you'll see a little disc icon next to the word "DVD". Highlight this and then click the "Compression Settings" tab on the right-hand side. Under Video, click the drop-down box and change the setting from "Automatic" to "No Compression".
This is important because we just want to rebuild the disc with no menu, not recompress the video (which takes forever). At this point, you might as well uncheck the boxes for any audio or subtitle languages you don't need.
Click the "Backup!" button. A window will pop up. The first tab is "Target Device". Under "Select Backup Target:" choose "Hard Disc Folder". Under "Select target folder for DVD output files:", browse to a location to put the newly ripped disc. Make sure you select a drive that has enough free space to hold the DVD! You can check this with "Space required" and "Space available in folder" that is there. It'll automatically create a folder name for you that is the same as the ISO name of the DVD you put in. Uncheck the "Create VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS subfolders" option. Hit the "OK" button.
A window that looks a lot like that "Analysing" window will pop up. Once again, uncheck the "Enable Video Preview" box to increase speed. DVD Shrink is now recreating your PAL DVD into a new movie-only DVD without a menu and putting it on to the hard drive of your PC. My computer has an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ processor with 1.2GB of memory. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's old. On my rig, this last step takes about 25 minutes with a full single layer DVD. Dual layer disc take longer.
Once it's finished, use whatever method you use to move the entire folder to the hard drive of your Xbox. If you haven't upgraded your Xbox's hard drive, then use Nero or some such program to burn this new folder to DVD.
Launch XBMC. If you're going to play the DVD from the hard drive of your Xbox, there is only one more setting you need to adjust. Go to:
System --> Settings --> System --> Cache
Increase "Video/Audio/DVD Cache - Harddisk" from "256 kb" to "512 kb". This is important. If you don't do this, MPlayer with play the DVD at the correct framerate, but it will stutter a lot. MPlayer just needs a little bit more memory to do DVD playback with framerate conversion smoothly. This one took me forever to figure out!
Just as you did when you tried playback with the PAL DVD directly in the Xbox drive, navigate to your movie folder, highlight that "VIDEO_TS" file, bring up the Context Menu (by pressing the White button on your controller or Title on the remote), select "Play Using..." and then select "MPlayer".
Your PAL DVD movie should now play at the correct 23.976 framerate.
Enjoy!
System --> Settings --> Videos --> Player
There is an option there under "Framerate Conversion" that you can set to "Play PAL videos at NTSC rates".
This works quite well and eliminates the pitchy voices and slightly off-key music that results from film-sourced material being played too fast. Unfortunately, this excellent feature hasn't yet been implemented with the built-in DVD player. Here's a workaround I've come up with that I thought I'd share:
The first thing to try is putting the DVD directly in the drive. If it autoplays, hit stop. Navigate to your Videos/Movies and then to the DVD-ROM. It should show the DVD title. Enter the disc's folder and the first file there should be "VIDEO_TS.IFO". Highlight that file and bring up the Context Menu by pressing the White button on your controller or Title on the remote. Select "Play Using..." and then select "MPlayer". This may do the trick. But maybe not, as, in my experience, MPlayer seems to have problems playing DVDs that have menus, which is most of them.
If that doesn't work, you'll have to rip the DVD to your computer first. For this purpose, I like to use DVD Shrink. We're not going to do any re-encoding here, so this isn't an all night affair. Find and install DVD Shrink 3.2 (Google is your friend). Don't pay for it, it's free.
Put the DVD in your computer's DVD drive. Launch DVD Shrink. Click the "Open Disc" button. Select the drive letter of the drive you just put the disc into and hit the "OK" button. It'll do some "Analysing" that shouldn't take more than a minute. Uncheck the "Enable Video Preview" box and it'll go a bit faster.
Now the disc information is loaded into DVD Shrink. Click the "Re-author" button all the way to the right. On the left-hand side you'll see a "Re-authored DVD" column. On the right, you'll see the contents of your DVD, including Menu, Main Movie and Extras. If you just want to watch the movie, left-click "Title 1" under Main Movie (there's usually only one here) and, holding down the mouse button, drag-and-drop it to the left under the "Re-authored DVD" column. If you want to drag-and-drop some of the extras to play after the movie, you can. There's a nice playback preview window that shows you what each "Title" that you just dropped is. You can move the various files up or down the list by clicking on them, holding down the mouse button and then moving them up or down the list. The titles are in the order that they'll play back in on your new disc. Just above your list of "Title" files, indented to the left, you'll see a little disc icon next to the word "DVD". Highlight this and then click the "Compression Settings" tab on the right-hand side. Under Video, click the drop-down box and change the setting from "Automatic" to "No Compression".
This is important because we just want to rebuild the disc with no menu, not recompress the video (which takes forever). At this point, you might as well uncheck the boxes for any audio or subtitle languages you don't need.
Click the "Backup!" button. A window will pop up. The first tab is "Target Device". Under "Select Backup Target:" choose "Hard Disc Folder". Under "Select target folder for DVD output files:", browse to a location to put the newly ripped disc. Make sure you select a drive that has enough free space to hold the DVD! You can check this with "Space required" and "Space available in folder" that is there. It'll automatically create a folder name for you that is the same as the ISO name of the DVD you put in. Uncheck the "Create VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS subfolders" option. Hit the "OK" button.
A window that looks a lot like that "Analysing" window will pop up. Once again, uncheck the "Enable Video Preview" box to increase speed. DVD Shrink is now recreating your PAL DVD into a new movie-only DVD without a menu and putting it on to the hard drive of your PC. My computer has an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ processor with 1.2GB of memory. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's old. On my rig, this last step takes about 25 minutes with a full single layer DVD. Dual layer disc take longer.
Once it's finished, use whatever method you use to move the entire folder to the hard drive of your Xbox. If you haven't upgraded your Xbox's hard drive, then use Nero or some such program to burn this new folder to DVD.
Launch XBMC. If you're going to play the DVD from the hard drive of your Xbox, there is only one more setting you need to adjust. Go to:
System --> Settings --> System --> Cache
Increase "Video/Audio/DVD Cache - Harddisk" from "256 kb" to "512 kb". This is important. If you don't do this, MPlayer with play the DVD at the correct framerate, but it will stutter a lot. MPlayer just needs a little bit more memory to do DVD playback with framerate conversion smoothly. This one took me forever to figure out!
Just as you did when you tried playback with the PAL DVD directly in the Xbox drive, navigate to your movie folder, highlight that "VIDEO_TS" file, bring up the Context Menu (by pressing the White button on your controller or Title on the remote), select "Play Using..." and then select "MPlayer".
Your PAL DVD movie should now play at the correct 23.976 framerate.
Enjoy!
