Pal and NTSC

[Catman209]

Ive joined a guitar lesson site and they are letting me pick 6 dvd's of my choice. The only problem is that they are in PAL format. Will they play on either my desktop or laptop? If they wont play, is there a way I can convert them to NTSC? Thanks.

[jman98]

PAL is no problem at all on computers. However it is possible that the DVDs are region coded, which could be a problem for your computer if the region on the DVDs is different from the country where you live. I'd suggest installing the free VLC media player to play them. VLC does not check region codes.

You can convert them to NTSC, but my constant suggestion to those who ask is that if you have to do this more twice it's too much. Conversion will break the menus so please be aware of that. Since PCs don't care about PAL and you can use VLC to ignore the region codes you should be fine to watch on that platform without conversion.

Note too that conversion will require some special extra work to preserve pitch between the formats. In fact if the PAL DVDs were not carefully made to begin with they may actually be pitched slightly too high.

[Catman209]

Thank you very much, that is great advice and what I was hoping to hear. This site always amazes me. I have not been here for a few years but when I do ask a question, I get good advice. Thanks man!