I guess I will try the PAL-discs now, since they have a professionally done 25 FPS, which is present uniform and throughout. Perhaps that will work.
I did this earlier this year with the PAL DVD releases of Stargate SG-1 seasons 1-7 and Dark Angel seasons 1 and 2 (the NTSC Dark Angel discs are 4:3, only PAL got a widescreen release). I wanted to have higher resolution copies of both, but I couldn’t put up with PAL speedup. It took a few months of poking and prodding at it before I settled down into a workflow and I got it all done early in the pandemic, as it proved to be a good quarantine project. This is what I did:
- Ripped disc with MakeMKV
- Disassembled MKVs into components with MKVCleaver and MKVToolNix. The latter program is used to take apart the audio and chapter files, and can export the video file itself at 24000/1001p. MKVCleaver is for the subtitles, as it can export them as idx/subs.
- Using MKVToolNix, took the chapter files and convert timing by applying a conversion factor to the start and end times. This is also when I go in and add the chapter titles if available.
- Loaded each file in Audacity, changing the speed under effects -> change speed. I used a .959 value for it. You then save in the highest quality you want and take care to preserve the channels, since it won’t save 5.1 properly by default.
- Using VobSub Sub File Cutter, loaded the .sub subtitles and used it to modify the timing.
- Opened up MKVToolNix and used it to -re-assemble all of the components.
- Used Handbrake to reencode the whole thing into whatever format desired. I used x265 at high bitrate for the video and audio and got good results.
This worked for me. There are probably easier ways to do it, but I had decent success with the two programs. I still have all of the seasons I did at their step 6 pre-encoding stage (usually a couple gigs an episode), if someone wants to do something similar to this with them as I lack the processing power to upscale more than short clips.