No handholding, just a clue. I'm in Canada, a region1 area. I have purchased, from the UK, a TV series on DVD. So these are region2, PAL format. I ripped them to a computer and re-authored the individual episodes to region1 PAL. And then I burned the episodes to DVDs with imgburn. My Toshiba DVD recorder will play them fine. I want to also play them on some Sony machines I own, ie. DVP-NS55p, DVP-NS575P and RDR-GX300 but each of these complains that the disks are the wrong region. I know they're region1, so I think they are actually complaining about the PAL encoding.
I thought that Handbrake would convert the video_ts files from PAL to NTSC. I tried several combinations of outputting different frame rates but I couldn't get anywhere. Any suggestions?
It's hard to be a newbie - PAL to NTSC
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Re: It's hard to be a newbie - PAL to NTSC
Seems like a lot of trouble to go through...
When you use handbrake to process the file, you end up with either an MP4 or MKV file that has no region and isn't "PAL" or "NTSC".
When you copy it back to a DVD, the authoring software will make what changes it thinks are necessary to convert the video within the handbrake-generated file to a VOB file for the DVD. It is at THAT point that the region and/or PAL/NTSC designation is being put BACK into the result.
When you use handbrake to process the file, you end up with either an MP4 or MKV file that has no region and isn't "PAL" or "NTSC".
When you copy it back to a DVD, the authoring software will make what changes it thinks are necessary to convert the video within the handbrake-generated file to a VOB file for the DVD. It is at THAT point that the region and/or PAL/NTSC designation is being put BACK into the result.
Re: It's hard to be a newbie - PAL to NTSC
I will try again, thanks. I'm using imgburn to author disks and I wonder what region it will write, and what encoding it will use. Everything I read says it has no controls for either of those things.
Re: It's hard to be a newbie - PAL to NTSC
Thanks for the help, but I'm going to give up. You're right, it's just too many steps. I like to take DVD disks to my cottage and watch british television series there. I'm set up with a DVD player and projector there, so physical DVDs are convenient. imgburn won't take as input MP4 files, so that idea was a real short trip. DVDshrink will change the region, and write the individual episodes, and AVStoDVD will rewrite the video_ts files to ntsc, so I don't need anything as powerful as handbrake. You have a nice system, keep up the effort.
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moneymatt4life
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Re: It's hard to be a newbie - PAL to NTSC
... a properly decrypted iso/folder should be region free... shouldn't have to reauthor for a different region 
Re: It's hard to be a newbie - PAL to NTSC
It's not about region locking, it's about formatting. In my experience Sony players in North America have always been very picky about only playing NTSC content even if the disc itself is actually marked region-free, making the ham-fisted assumption that anything PAL would not have come from a legitimate North American source and thus has no business being played on a North American player. Feed it something PAL and it just chokes or throws an error, exactly like Truenorth is experiencing.
Truenorth, as long as the output is NTSC you should be good with the hardware you have. If I'm reading this correctly then DVDShrink is letting you pull out the individual episodes from your source video_ts folder, which you then process through AVStoDVD to convert and author a new NTSC video_ts folder, which you then burn with imgburn. None of those tools change the 'region' of your video as any region-lock would have only ever existed on the original disc and would have been stripped away when you ripped that disc to your hard drive in the first place. Your issue is strictly a matter of PAL vs NTSC formatting just as you surmised, but you seem to keep bringing up 'region' as if its a thing you need to deal with when it's not.
Truenorth, as long as the output is NTSC you should be good with the hardware you have. If I'm reading this correctly then DVDShrink is letting you pull out the individual episodes from your source video_ts folder, which you then process through AVStoDVD to convert and author a new NTSC video_ts folder, which you then burn with imgburn. None of those tools change the 'region' of your video as any region-lock would have only ever existed on the original disc and would have been stripped away when you ripped that disc to your hard drive in the first place. Your issue is strictly a matter of PAL vs NTSC formatting just as you surmised, but you seem to keep bringing up 'region' as if its a thing you need to deal with when it's not.
Re: It's hard to be a newbie - PAL to NTSC
Suggest you update from the DVD player to a media player that can use flash or other USB media. There are a LOT of examples under USD50 out there, and more under USD100. Some can have internal hard drives installed, so you only haul one thing back and forth, if you don't want to leave it at the cabin. And you can fit a lot of content onto a flash drive - the entire series of Blakes 7 is only 41GB, for example, or a little less than 1GB per hour.