PAL vs NTSC

[Feanor1]

I wanted to field for reasons I should choose one over the other. I see lots of people saying they are encoding mpeg2's in PAL, but I dont know if that is a regional reason or a quality one. I"m trying to capture SVCD's at as good quality as I can.. My DVD player can handle either format. Is there an advantage to converting it to PAL instead of keeping it at NTSC? (I am working exclusively with captured from Cable TV shows).

An upside I thought about was less frames per second so higher bitrate per frame, but this might be false reasoning. I'd appriciate any advice you could give me. I'm having a hard time getting a good quality Captured 45 minute show onto a sVCD..

[SLK001]

It's regional. PAL is common in Europe, Australia and parts of Asia, NTSC is common to the United States, Canada and Japan. Another format is SECAM, which is similar to PAL and is common to France and Russia. This board has participants from all over the world.

[t0nito]

Well actually if you encode in PAL or NTSC the resulting size is exactly the same, because PAL vertical resolution is 1.2 x higher than NTSC (***x480)x 1.2 = (***x576) BUT, NTSC's frame rate is exactly 1.2 x higher than PAL 25 x 1.2 = 30. So as you can see file size is the same, but quality of PAL is better because resolution is higher even though frame rate is slower. But if you are from an american country. I would advise you to encode in NTSC, your TV may not be compatible with PAL.