Compensate for PAL Speedup in Digital Video

If you are not familiar with PAL Speedup then you should read about it to understand the problem and implications of how it adversely impacts digital video.

It is best to encode in the correct framerate. 25 FPS Telecine video mastered from film or NTSC source is bad. Delete it when you come across it. If the video you are looking for is remastered with 25 FPS Telecine, suffering from PAL Speedup, and no other video source is available, you can use one of various methods to compensate for the distortion during playback.

Play PAL movies at correct speed in VLC

This guide comes from Mac OS Hints on the Macworld web site and applies to VideoLAN Player on Windows, MAC, and Linux. The article in the Macworld forum is Play PAL movies at correct speed in VLC.

In Video LAN Player / VLC Player do the following:

1. Go to the 'VLC' menu and select 'Preferences…'
2. In the radio buttons in the lower-left corner of the window, change 'Basic' to 'All'.
3. Click on 'Input / Codecs' in the left-hand side list.
4. In the right-hand side frame look for 'Playback speed' and change it to 0.96.
5. Click on 'Audio' in the left-hand side list.
6. In the right-hand side frame disable 'Enable time stretching audio'.
7. Click the 'Save' button on the lower-right corner of the window.
8. Restart VLC.

• Make sure to set the Playback speed to 1.00 when watching NTSC encoded movies!