How many people in the US buy PAL DVDs?

[mikk]

one thing i've always wondered about is how difficult it is to get PAL dvds in the US. NTSC dvds are reasonably easy to find here in Australia.

in fact, warner brothers is being cheap by testing out the market with a few NTSC dvds to see if anyone will buy them. i hope everyone in australia stays well clear of these abominations!

i read magazines like widescreen review and PAL is treated as an inferior system to NTSC by writers who are supposedly experts... by using such idiotic arguments like "NTSC is 30fps, PAL is only 25fps."-Film is 24fps, which kills that argument, leaving the fact that PAL dvds have 20% more resolution. So with disinformation like this being pushed by people who are being irrationally patriotic, i wonder:

How many people in the US buy Australian/European PAL DVDs?
Where do they get them from?

[offline]

Amercians are starting to buy more PAL product as they upgrade
to HDTV. AFAIK they are mainly buying from o/s. I can email
a couple of links for you.

NTSC is of shocking quality (in my opinion) compared to PAL but there
are those, like u said, that for patriotic reasons, turn a blind eye as it were The thing is that some titles (VHS,DVD) are not available
in PAL so I have to put up with 4.97 extra cloned frames per second and terrible colour/resolution.

As for your point about Warner Bros - > they produce some of the
worst PAL product and, perhaps because they lost a big lawsuit of late,
seem out to punish Aussies by introducing P&S on some new
releases.

[oldfart13]

Well, I'm tempted to buy PAL DVDs, especially Pacific Home Entertainment ones but they come out over here anyway within 6 months of their OZ release so why bother. The real challenge will not be NTSC or PAL or SECAM but High Definition whose bitrates are beyond what our plain jane DVD burners and capture devices can normally handle. Are there any Hi Def DVDs out there? Just want to test one.

[energy80s]

Don't know about HDTV as Europe doesn't support it! But there are new Superbit DVD's that use higher bitrates and drop a lot of the "extras" from DVD's.

I think the main reason why America has went for HDTV is because standard TV is so shite, what with the lower defination (only four fifths of PAL) and the dodgy colour response where colours change with varying mains voltage! That's why it is nicknamed Never The Same Colour!

[CryptKeeper]

LOL @ the NTSC definition

[RWANDREWS]

I buy DVDs from Aus and the UK because there are various titles not available in the US, or the price is much cheaper, esp. in Aus. There seems to be a wide discrepancy as to what is available in regions 1, 2 & 4, with even rather mainstream titles not available in one or the other regions. An example would be the XENA series, NOT avail in regions 1, some avail in Region 4(where it comes from!) and most of it avail in the UK, reg 2.

Aus DVDs are rather cheap for me because of exchange rates, but the selection seems to be poor. I am rather ignorant of the definition pluses of PAL, so that was never a consideration for me.

I use an APEX AD 3201 DVD player to handle the conversion.