International Compatibility

[rdangler]

New at DVD and confused. Can DVD players output to both NTSC (U.S.) and PAL (Europe and most of the world) TV format or is there system problems like video tapes?

I also understand that there is a Zone restriction -- an European DVD will not play on a U.S. TV system, is this correct? If so, is there anyway to overcome that problem.

[quickfamily]

Hi,

I'm no expert but I thought I'd add a few extra comments and see if we can get a discussion going.

First of all if you live in USA you can buy an APEX DVD player which can play PAL/NTSC disks in PAL or NTSC format. Sounds the perfect solution but......

1) APEX no longer support VCD format
2) APEX hardware is cheap; my player lasted less than a year.

It would be great if someone out there knows of a player with the same functionality but with VCD support and a decent quality hardware.

Here's my understanding of what happens when you put PAL/NTSC disks into DVD players.

Some players recognize the format and change the output of the player to match the disk. This is only OK if you have a TV that can switch between PAL and NTSC.

Some players don't know what type of disk it is and play everything as if it is the player standard. What I mean is an NTSC player will try to play a PAL disk as if it is NTSC. The problem is that NTSC is 29.9 frames per second and PAL is 25. If you put a PAL disk in an NTSC player the picture will skip as you are feeding 25 fps into the input and outputting at 29.9 fps.

I think what the APEX player does is output to the TV at the frame rate of the disk being played but leaves the other encoding at what you have set it to (ie PAL/NTSC). What this means is you can output in NTSC format at 25fps or in PAL format at 29.9 fps. The TV seems to pick the frame rate being fed to it so everything is perfect (or would be if the APEX DVD player was better quality)

As I said at the start I am not an expert so I might be completely wrong with all this but if so I hope someone will correct me.

You are correct that there are region locks on DVD players but there seem to be a lot of 'hackable' players to get rid of this part of the problem.

Andy

[snowmoon]

DVD's have the same problem that VHS does. Diffrent TV's require diffrent signals. As stated before SOME dvdplayers can auto-correct and output a valid stream for the system they are designed for. The same problem occurs with VCD, CVD, SVCD and other CD-R formats.

Region coding is not enabled by default when writing DVD-R's. They are completly inapplicable to the CD-R formats ( VCD, CVD, SVCD ). You CAN enable region coding when making a DVD-R, but who would really want to. All programs that I know of default to region 0 ( all regions ).

[yg1968]

See this website for more info on inexpensive Region Free DVD Video players:

www.nerd-out.com

Many DVD-ROM player can be made to be region free with hacked region free firmware and a freeware program called DVD region killer. See this website:

http://www.firmware.fr.st/

There is a risk of destroying your drive when changing firmware. However, the risk is minimal if you know what you are doing.

You can also remove the region protection of a DVD using DVD decrypter or smartripper.