PAL vs NTSC (Which is better for producing an XVCD?)

[Trenton_Net]

Hi,

I was wondering if someone could tell me which is better when producting a XVCD? I know that the diffrences is only slight with regard to screen size, and frame rate. But I was wondering since NTSC has a lower resolution, does that mean more bits can be alocated to make the existing picture more sharp?

Thanks, I really appreciate it.

[Vejita-sama]

It depends on where you live. NTSC is for the US, Canada and Japan. PAL is used in Europe. You CAN NOT play a PAL source on your NTSC TV (and vice versa).

You correct thou that at for a given (low) bitrate, the higher the resolution the the worst the picture will become.

Click to the left and read the "What is..." sections.

[flaninacupboard]

hmm. not quite true. lots of TV's (in the last 5 - 10 years. my 20 year old front projection TV included!) play NTSC and PAL. and in fact some DVD players will output the system you want. so if you need NTSC output, itll convert from PAL to NTSC and output NTSC.
In order to answer XVCD question, it depends on what form of XVCD. if youre going for a super low bitrate movie, then NTSC 23.976FPS is your best bet. if you're going for higher bitrates you may want up the res as well. 352X432 may be right, or 480X576 if your bitrate is high. then of course, you may want to consider system your source is in.......

[Vejita-sama]

Yeah, I was discussing this in anothe tread. I think most of the TVs sold in Europe will support NTSC or PAL. But most of the TVs (I've seen in my own personal non-random sampling) sold in the US are NTSC only.

For DVD players it seems to vary by brand.

[VideoBoy]

A PAL VCD will anytime be better than NTSC for following reasons

1) Higher Vertical Resolution. PAL has 48 more vertical lines than its NTSC counterpart

2) Frame Rate. PAL framerate is 25 against 29.97 of NTSC. which means for same amount of video, PAL has less frames than NTSC and hence it has more bits allocated per frame than that of NTSC for same given bitrate. This may be little hard to understand. But let explain with actual numbers. Lets say you want to make XVCS at 2000 kb/sec

In NTSC, 2000 kb/per sec = 66.73 kb data per frame (29.97 fps)

In PAL, 2000 kb/per sec = 80 kb data per frame (25 fps)

Don't take my word for it. Try yourself. Almost all NTSC DVD players and NTSC TVs in US (including mine) play PAL VCDs.

[barnsey]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>You CAN NOT play a PAL source on your NTSC TV (and vice versa). </BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

My dvd player outputs a 25fps/29.97fps/23.97fps source to my pal TV and they all play beautifully. I would agree with the above post for the reason (this may be all wrong) that NTSC Film is used for big budget movies and therefore they want the quality to be good so i would say that PAL being closer to the 23.97 standard would be better quality, though if you use good motion quality settings and a high bitrate its hard to tell the difference

Im not expert so its probably best you dont believe a word i say

[vitualis]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-09-26 17:00:54, VideoBoy wrote:
A PAL VCD will anytime be better than NTSC for following reasons</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Actually, this is not necessarily true...

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>1) Higher Vertical Resolution. PAL has 48 more vertical lines than its NTSC counterpart</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

This may be true, but this doesn't necessarily mean that PAL will look better than NTSC -- especially at VCD bitrates. For PAL, it means that the same number of bits have to be spread over more lines of resolution. In any case, bits per pixel is actually almost the same between PAL and NTSC (explained below).

Furthermore, the PAL vs. NTSC question is beyond just the resolution. I'm not a TV engineer so I can't (and won't try) to explain it, but from what I've read there is little difference in quality between PAL and NTSC. Perhaps someone else with knowledge in this field can post here about this?

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>2) Frame Rate. PAL framerate is 25 against 29.97 of NTSC. which means for same amount of video, PAL has less frames than NTSC and hence it has more bits allocated per frame than that of NTSC for same given bitrate. This may be little hard to understand. But let explain with actual numbers. Lets say you want to make XVCS at 2000 kb/sec

In NTSC, 2000 kb/per sec = 66.73 kb data per frame (29.97 fps)

In PAL, 2000 kb/per sec = 80 kb data per frame (25 fps)</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Actually, this is somewhat misleading. Although you have less bits per frame for NTSC, each frame also holds less data (240 lines versus 28. NTSC may have a framerate that is 20% higher, but each frame also holds 20% less data -- so it equals out. If you do the calculation, NTSC actually has minutely MORE bits per pixel than PAL (as 29.97fps rather than 30). In essence though, the bits per pixel for NTSC vs. PAL is almost exactly the same.

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>Don't take my word for it. Try yourself. Almost all NTSC DVD players and NTSC TVs in US (including mine) play PAL VCDs.</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

I've tested both NTSC and PAL from the same source. In my opinion, NTSC and PAL look almost exactly the same with NTSC (to my horror -- I live in a PAL area) beating PAL slightly (with the Panasonic MPEG encoder).

NTSC-FILM looks enormously better than both the above (it has about 25% greater bitrate per pixel than both NTSC and PAL for VCD).

Regards.