And maybe a final comment which may be of use to someone.

Just got back from another trip. This time I took 2 discs - one PAL (native to the original camera) and an identical content one converted into NTSC using Nero.

Played both in the U.S. player but to my surprise the PAL one played smoothly while the NTSC had the slight jerkiness that I'd seen before.

So, I reckon the answer is that dvd is dvd and it's the player/tv match that does the clever bit. No need to do more than create the dvd in the native format - after all, that takes long enough.

Nick