Pioneer A04 NTSC and PAL

[Navillus]

I live in Europe and as I'm in the USA next week I was thinking of buying a Pioneer A04 DVD recorder for my PC. I've been checking for the cheepest web site. This was fine until I came across www.sharbor.com where they say that the don't sell a PAL version of this drive - restrictions by Pioneer on selling outside the usa/Canada etc.

This was the first time I have read anything about PAL and NTSC versions of DVD-R drives and it does not make any sense to me that there is any difference. I would assume that this will depend on if the external source material is PAL or NTSC. In my case I want to make DVD's of PAL Digital Video (DV) and not for copying DVD's For that matter I can already play region one (NTSC) DVD's on my DVD Player.

Can anyone confirm if there is or is no different version of this drive for NTSC & PAL?

[3dcandy]

I'm sure that the Pioneer drives are the same for PAL and NTSC, BUT they are region locked. Obviously this isn't a problem unless the region lock in firmware causes differences, which I'm not so sure about.
So, what I'm trying to say is that the drives are likely to be identical, but the firmware will be different depending where the drive is (was) bought.

[Navillus]

3dcandy thank you for your response.

I always thought that with a DVD players in a PC that the region coding is sofware driven and not hardware driven. Certainly this is the case with the DVD drive I have now.

My intended use is to be able to write my camcorder videos to DVD so I don't see that region coding will make any difference to me.

By the lack of response I wonder if posting this in the Newbie section was the right thing to do. If it's only read by newbie's will I get any more answers?

[bugster]

This forum is not read only by Newbies, though the question has to be asked, how much do you need to know before you stop being a newbie?

Anyway, I agree with 3dcandy, PAL/NTSC should not be an issue, only region coding will be a problem. If you buy it in the US it will be set to region 1, so only the playing of commercial DVD's (and maybe ripping) would be an issue.

[3dcandy]

nearly every dvd drive has hardware region protection these days, BUT most software is easily hacked/tweaked to be region free. If you ever want to find out if your drive is region protected, there are sites and/or programs that will tell you. The Pioneer drives ARE protected in hardware, but there are firmware's around that will bypass them, but that is another story!!!!

[mbellot]

Also, if it helps...

I just bought a Pioneer 104 (OEM A04, rebadged as a "Cendyne") that had no region selected in the firmware yet (at least according to Win2K). Windows wanted me to select a region for the drive before it would play a commercial DVD.

So if region selection is of concern, it looks like they ship without a region.

[3dcandy]

that's standard the first time you try and play a dvd...
Windows will ask you to set the region, and then you can change it another 4 times (5 times in total), and then usually the region sticks at whatever you set it to last time....

[Navillus]

In the meantime I did some more 'digging' and checked the Pioneer site and found their leaflet and the Operating Instructions for the A04. (Isn’t the internet wonderful?)

Nowhere in either of these documents can I find any reference to PAL and/or NTSC. The Operating Instructions do point out, as does 3dcandy, that the Region settings of the drive can only changed a maximum of 5 times. (I’d like to know how to hack this though!)

Getting back to my original question …is there different versions of this drive for NTSC & PAL? My conclusion is that there is NOT.

Unless anyone knows differently!

It makes me suspect the knowledge of the sharbor.com site and I’ll go elsewhere.

[pacoreguenga]

DVD-R drives are identical for any region.
They just get locked after 5 region changes.
You have to select region for the first time to play a commercial dvd.
You won't go into region trouble if you wan to make your own dvd's, as long as your dvd authoring software / video gear / capture card support the format you need. (pal or ntsc, I think you will use pal)
I have a 103 and it works very good with any standard and region. As I do commercial DVD authoring right at home for a living, I can tell you. In fact, I just happened to convert a few PAL DVD's from some Finnish Artists for an exhibition here at the Rufino Tamayo Museum (in Mexico). It was really easy, as they were originated on iDVD on a Mac, so they had no region protection. I just had to reencode the video signal to meet NTSC standards. I also regionalized the NTSC dvd's to R4 because no-region DVD-R discs sometimes don't run on any given dvd device.
Besides, I upgraded my DVD-R firmware to get rid of the region code constraint.
There's a version for the 104 and A04, too.
And they can be found on the 'net.
Greetings!