Capturing NTSC in VHS country?

[zeerust2000]

Hi there. I'm new to this forum and hope someone can shed some light on this for me. I have been transfering my own copies of old commercial VHS tapes to DVD using a Dazzle device marketed by Pinnacle. All my tapes so far execpt one have been captured with no problems. I have one tape that I obtained from South America that plays perfectly well on my TV through my VCR. I am in Australia so our standard is PAL, of course. When I try to capture the video on the PAL setting the first frame comes up and then freezes. If I try the NTSC setting the video is captured but in black and white and poorer quality. I'd like to know if I am experiencing a problem due to copy protection of some sort or (as seems more likely if my other tapes are indeed copy protected also) some issue involving PAL vs NTSC. All my tapes expect the south american one are at least ten years old, I think. Thanks in advance!

[edDV]

Which country in South America. Brazil uses 525/60 PAL-M. Argentina and Paraguay use 625/50 PAL N. Some former French colonies use SECAM.

[zeerust2000]

Thanks for your question, the video is a kind of travelogue dealing with places in Peru, so it's likely that it was produced there, but there is no other information so it could originate from anywhere really. It was produced by Panamericana Television. I guess one approach would be to try different settings or hardware and see what works, but I'm new to this and so am unsure of the options.

[edDV]

Panamericana Television is in Peru and Peru uses the NTSC standard. Have you captured from NTSC in the past? It could be your capture hardware works only for PAL.

[danno78]

You need a capture card with Pal60 suport in driver. PAL-60 is NTSC with the chroma part converted to PAL (both encoding and subcarrier frequency, 4.43 MHz). Your vcr feed TV with Pal60 signal.

Some PAL-60 capable cards up untill now:

- BT878 with BTWincap, but this needs additional tweaking with BTtweak because of a timing error;
- all SAA713x based cards (works very well) (7130, 7131, 7133, 7134, 7135)
- ATI AIW and VIVO models (chipset Rage Theatre and Theatre 200), exception tv tuner cards with Theatre 550/650

I used Radeon 9200 (9250) VIVO and TV Tuner KWORLD V-Stream Studio TV Terminator (based on Philips SAA7131).

"PAL-60:

Modern European equipment can handle both 625/50 and 525/60 timings. It cannot handle NTSC color encoding. So if you use European 'NTSC playback' capable equipment to play back an American NTSC tape or DVD, they will produce a signal that retains the NTSC timing, but has both the color encoding and the color carrier frequency converted to PAL. Modern European TV’s understand this hybrid signal and show the video. Some game consoles also produce a PAL-60 signal instead of true PAL.
To capture this, you need a device that understands PAL-60. Almost all devices do. Unfortunately, many drivers won’t give you this option. If your device/driver has the option, set the Video decoder to the PAL_60 video standard, and you can follow the NTSC guides for the rest."
From http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/analogue_video.html

[edDV]

You need a capture card with Pal60 suport in driver. PAL-60 is NTSC with the chroma part converted to PAL (both encoding and subcarrier frequency, 4.43 MHz). Your vcr feed TV with Pal60 signal.

Some PAL-60 capable cards up untill now:
...

- ATI AIW and VIVO models (chipset Rage Theatre and Theatre 200), exception tv tuner cards with Theatre 550/650

...
I used Radeon 9200 (9250) VIVO and TV Tuner KWORLD V-Stream Studio TV Terminator (based on Philips SAA7131).

One warning. In the "Americas" ATI sells a different model of the "All-in-wonder" than the one available in Europe. From what I have read, the western hemisphere model does not tune European PAL. It only works with 3.58MHz subcarrier as found in NTSC, PAL-M 525/60 3.58MHz (Brazil) and PAL-N 625/50 3.58MHz (Argentina). It won't work for European 625/50 PAL 4.43MHz.

At least that applied up until the AIW-9800. Others may have more detail.

[danno78]

Yes, tuner part is different for particular country, but composite and S-video part is the same for all models (same chipset in all models). In this case (tranfering NTSC tape play on Pal VCR via composite or s-video input) it doesn't matter.

[edDV]

Yes, tuner part is different for particular country, but composite and S-video part is the same for all models (same chipset in all models). In this case (tranfering NTSC tape play on Pal VCR via composite or s-video input) it doesn't matter.

Yes, I had forgotten zeerust2000 was in Australia. I was thinking Argentina (PAL-N 3.58MHz) for some reason. So if zeerust2000 has a PAL VCR and a PAL model AIW card it would be as you describe.