Which video format is in Eastern Europe?

[walter4h]

Does anybody know which format is currently in Eastern Europe? In the old days it was SECAM (French). The reason for its selection was to prevent the people in the communist-occupied Germany to watch West German TV. And so Russia, including the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Eastern Germany - were all on SECAM. However, I heard that many people there nowadays own PAL equipment and use it for home viewing/recording, even though the broadcasting is in SECAM.
The reason for that massive usage of PAL equipment, if that is indeed the case, is probably the same why you can see lots of German cars in US or Canada, but I have never seen a French one.
I need to know it because one guy asked me to make a DVD for him, which he wants to send to Poland. He said it should be in PAL, but I felt I better doublecheck.
Thx: walter

[BJ_M]

send PAL , good luck trying to make a SECAM dvd

[lenti_75]

it's pal.....secam is old stuff

[cosmin]

Short answer: no reason to worry, go ahead with PAL.

Long answer:
Most East-European countries have converted their national standard to PAL, and some of them (e.g. Romania) have always used PAL. This is not relevant, however, to DVD, because PAL-DVD and SECAM-DVD are exactly the same thing (or, other people like to put it as "there is no SECAM-DVD, there is only PAL-DVD, which also works in SECAM").

The reason for this is that, in spite of the transmission/encoding differences, both PAL and SECAM use 625/50, and this is all that matters to a digital video recording. So, if you put a 25fps, 576line video on a DVD, you have already created a PAL/SECAM DVD!

Best regards,