_,,,^..^,,,_, no apologies necessary, though thanks for the explanation!

Is this the PAL disc you have? It's well regarded in picture terms but I should imagine it's comparable to the 1990 NTSC disc (it's certainly the same - altered - mix). Still, if you'd like to do a capture we could exchange and compare (though I've never dabbled with PAL > film rate conversion so the syncing would be over to you!)

On the VC-1 vs. AVC argument, I really hate to re-encode but VC-1 is just such a dog to work with (sync being one of its many potential problems). For what it's worth, even if people do choose to convert the video our audio should remain perfectly compatible (provided frame count/rate are preserved).