question regarding PAL 2 NTSC converters for TVs

[AiShaolinQuan]

I have a region free dvd player, but have been told that it won't play region 2 dvds on my tv since my tv isn't PAL formatted.

So my question is about the pal converters I see online for sale.

The two I know of are either around 35$ or 200$. 1 seems to be this digital converter, namely the 200$ one.

The other one is a 35$ "Emerson Multisystem" converter, but only seems to convert ntsc to pal.

So I was wondering whether or not I need to get one of these converters to watch a region 2 dvd, and if so, are there any PAL 2 NTSC converters out there and any recommendations.

Thnx to any one who can help me out, much appreciated

[miamicanes]

Watching NTSC on European PAL TVs is generally easier to accomplish than watching PAL on NTSC American TVs. Basically, you have two problems:

* Different color encoding. This is trivially easy to fix via transcoding, and it's what cheap "converter" boxes do.

* Different fieldrates. PAL (as it exists in Region 2-land) has 50 interlaced fields per second. NTSC (as it exists in Region 1-land) has 60 interlaced fields per second. This IS a problem.

There's basically one cheap way to deal with scanrate conversion: don't. European TVs are usually engineered to be capable of working at BOTH 50Hz AND 60Hz. When a European watches an American videotape or DVD, he's really coaxing his TV into displaying a bastardized video feed that has a 60hz fieldrate, but PAL color encoding. Strangely enough, 60Hz PAL is actually the native TV standard in Brazil and probably a few other countries.

Few American TVs can handle both scanrates.

The only cheap way I know of to play PAL on American TVs is the technique used by Apex DVD players: they weave together two consecutive fields (one odd scanlines, one even scanlines) to create a 25 frame per second fake progressive-scan video feed, then treat it like 24fps film-sourced material and do 3:2 pulldown on it (showing field 1 3 times, field 2 twice, field 3 three times, field 4 twice, and so on) to produce a 62.5 field per second video feed -- NOT standard 59.94Hz NTSC, but close enough to work with most TVs since it's fairly close to 60Hz.

TRUE temporal rate conversion is hard and expensive to do well. It basically works by digitizing each field of video, de-interlacing it, then aggressively studying the whole movie, over and over, frame by frame, scene by scene, to identify morphing backgrounds and sprites, extract them from the page, choreograph their movement and morphing (filling in obscured/missing details from info gleaned from previous and subsequent frames), then rewrite the whole thing at the new cadence and rerender all the "backgrounds" and "sprites" to produce a new movie at the desired native framerate. If you think good MPEG-2 compression is slow, TRC will blow you away with its resource requirements. It's definitely NOT a realtime activity, by any stretch of the imagination.

It does, however exist. It's the reason why many new NTSC DVDs no longer have the "Film" look. But unfortunately, it's going to be a long time before products that do it, and do it well, show up at affordable prices at the local CompUSA or Best Buy -- let alone sourceforge or freeware/shareware sites.

The Moral: If you want to convert a couple of Pal videos to NTSC and don't need perfection, try Nero (which makes a stab at it) or TMPGenc. But beware -- video-sourced material (as opposed to film-sourced material) will probably look like shit when converted (however, using TMPGenc to intelligently deinterlace the video first might help). If you want to watch A LOT of PAL videos (because, say, you're into foreign films), your best bet would be to buy an Apex DVD player that supports playback of Region 2 discs on a Region 1 TV, or a TV intended for foreign markets that was manufactured to support both 50Hz and 60Hz (59.94Hz) video.

Actually, there's one other alternative... if you only care about watching the video using your computer monitor and have both a videocard capable of doing Pal captures, you can capture them, de-interlace them to 25fps, and watch them at just about any scanrate 50Hz or faster (possibly 100Hz... it depends. If the material has lots of onscreen action, the "real" FRAMERATE will still be 50Hz, even if you deinterlace it to 25, so refresh rates between 50 and 100 might appear to betray Nyquist (it's related to the same phenomenon that makes wheels appear to turn backwards in movies filmed at 24 frames per second).

more info: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/archive/TVBROADCAST/TempRate.asp[/url]

[AiShaolinQuan]

wow, ok, thnx for the info (tho I don't really understand most of it)

I actually have an apex 1500 region free player, so according to what you say, I should be able to watch it on my tv pretty much regardless?

(again, I don't really understand how it all works out, so if I'm totally off, lemme know