By the way, I now have a decent 1080P copy. Topaz can go straight to mp4 or produce a sequence of image files to run through your video software of choice to make a video file. I went down the image file route, which has some advantages, and almost blew my drive with just under a terabyte of images. 

Whelp, the two leads also appear in this, also directed by Sautet prior to Max & the Junkmen:



I'll be looking for it! Yes! It's on our free streaming service Kanopy  :-O~~~

I can get the full blu ray rip, but that's a 26GB download so I'd rather not. Aww fuck it - I'll grab it.

That's a PITA. Only German subtitles and it appears to have been totally re-jigged for bluray and doesn't match any of the subtitle files I can find. Doesn't come close to sync even after effing about with resync tools. Syncs fine for a bit then it's way off a few minutes later.

Oh well.
 

Nothing to see here if you have no interest in video editing.

At least it gave me a fun morning & afternoon. After puzzling over the way the subtitles got further and further out of sync, I realised that all the available subtitle files were ripped from DVDs. I also spotted that the bluray version (which I have) is 24FPS whereas the DVD is 25FPS. There was no transcoding done, just a straightforward framerate change on the basis that nobody would notice which means that the DVD version is about 4 minutes shorter. I scratched my head about whether I should edit hundreds and hundreds of text entries in the subtitle file, but wrote that off as a month's work. In the end I used FFMPEG to change the bluray framerate to 25 and pushed the audio through an FFMPEG filter to match. There was a bit more faff because they added some extra titles in at the beginning, but basically I now have a full copy of the film with video, audio, and subtitles all in sync. Hooray for me. 
 

Great work! Now you can post the TWR.

Just replying to say I like these sorts of posts because it's the sort of thing I'd do.
Had to reencode some audio on some TV downloads recently because the cheapy Roku thing I've got didn't like the codec.

It's all part of the game once you decide to keep a video as a file instead of just watching what's available live or on a streaming service. 

But then I got a firestick and Kodi handles whatever.
Was still nice to learn. Gave the task to a Pi4 and ffmpeg.

Think it was a case of doing some sort of change/conversion from one version AC3 to another.

Just checked the ffmpeg command I used. Looks like I initially did an AAC reencode (slower) then found out about mapping the AC3 or something so ended up with this which if I remember rightly wasn't a reencode, more a remux or something...

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0 -c:v copy -c:a ac3 -c:s copy output.mkv

Looks to me as though you're doing a frame by frame copy of the video, a copy of the subtitles (if any) and a re-encode of the audio to AC3. Which, I imagine, is what you wanted.

For my little puzzle, I first extracted the video stream.
ffmpeg -i "E:\MakeMKV\source.mkv" -c copy -f h264 "E:\MakeMKV\video.mp4"

then converted the video from 24FPS to 25FPS
ffmpeg -r 25 -i "E:\MakeMKV\video.mp4" -c copy "E:\MakeMKV\destination.mp4"

then extracted the audio from the original source, stretched it with a factor of 25/24 (near enough) and remuxed it with the "destination" video from earlier

ffmpeg -i "E:\MakeMKV\source.mkv" -r 24 -i "E:\MakeMKV\destination.mp4" -filter_complex "[0:a]atempo=1.0416666[out]" -map 1:v -map "[out]" -c:a aac -c:v copy "E:\MakeMKV\out.mp4"

 

ffmpeg is awesome!

How does it handle adding the additional video frames -- are there little 'blips' in the footage, or is it perfectly smooth?

Some people say it's not great as a muxer/demuxer (and it's certainly slower that, say, mkvtoolnix) but I've never had any problems.

For a stand alone program, it has an astonishing number of keys, flags, commands and variations on input syntax. Which is why it can be a bugger to use. But it is awesome.

It doesn't add any. The video simply runs at a different speed. That why I had a problem with subtitles from a DVD version of the film (25FPS) and a blu ray video version at 24FPS. The subtitles slowly got ahead of the video until at the end they were a full 4 minutes out.

So it's running slightly faster, not enough to notice?

Exactly. The only way you'd notice would be to run my copy and the original (unaltered) version side by side. I haven't tried it, but i reckon you'd see them going out of sync with each other quite quickly, say after 30 seconds. But if you watched one after the other they'd appear identical. Imagine a fairly substantial piece of action, say, somebody enters a bar, buys a drink and sits at a table. The scene takes half a minute. You're never going to notice a 1 second(ish) difference spread over that entire scene.

It only happened because the original movie Les choses de la vie was shot on film at 24FPS and the PAL DVD was encoded at 25FPS (which, incidentally is because the PAL TV standard was developed to match the 50Hz power supply common in Europe. In the US it was 30FPS to match 60Hz power, but colour TV meant they ended up with 29.97FPS, which is a long story). In the US and other places that use NTSC, the difference between film at 24FPS and NTSC at 29.97 is too great to simply speed up the playback, so they do have to add in images, but these images (fields as opposed to frames, because the video is interlaced) are added to slow the FPS down to 23.976 (don't ask).