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St00pid DVD question.

F

FrustratedUser

Lifer
Are DVDs encoded different for NTSC, PAL and SECAM? I mean, can I buy a DVD in Europe (PAL) and play it here in the US?

Edit:
Assuming it is region free or have been 'backed-up' to be region free.
 
I know the framerate is different but does the DVD player compensate for this.
The reason I'm asking is that many hack their DVD player to be region free but what is the point of that if you cant play the DVDs because of the different TV systems.
😕
 
I had a Pal Dreamcast game and tried it out in my NTSC machine and it would just show a scrolling image. I applied this PAL-> NTSC patch to it and allowed me to change the refresh rate. Might want to check DVDRHelp.com see if they have any mods
 
no, dvds are progressive mpeg 2@24fps. the player generally outputs whatever u want though. only region codes are different, and to play foreign dvds u need one thats region free, or frmo there.
 
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
no, dvds are progressive mpeg 2@24fps. the player generally outputs whatever u want though. only region codes are different, and to play foreign dvds u need one thats region free, or frmo there.
Click to expand...
I am quite sure framerates are different, 30Hz for NTSC vs 25Hz for PAL, as are resolutions, 720x480 for NTSC vs. 768x512 for PAL or some wacky number like that. Having a region-free DVD-player is most definitely not enough. This can be very easily demonstrated, since Europe and Japan are in the same region (2), however Europe uses PAL and Japan uses NTSC. I know for a fact that European DVD's cannot be played on standard Japanese set-top boxes from Sony, Panasonic etc.

I presume the reason why higher-end players do not accommodate both standards is that their analog circuitry is made specifically to produce optimal quality images on signals using local frequencies. Lesser brands skimp on quality circuitry and make up for it with versatility.

When wanting to use both PAL and NTSC DVD's, a PC with an ATi video card (great TV-out) and a region-freed DVD-ROM plus DVD-Genie is your best bet. This is what I use. The PC nicely compensates for the sampling rate & res. differences by up-sampling and then down-sampling to the output res. & frequency.
 
no, ntsc is 60hz, 60 fields interlaced, and pal is 50hz.......

dvd players convert 24fps film into tv signal the same way film has always been converted to tv signal, breaking it up into fields, repeating frames 2 to 3 times over and over... its a funky pattern. i believe its called telecine. resolution doesn't matter, its converted to be viewed on a tv set anyways, with a chunk of the resolution thrown away if the tv is not capable of animorphic squeeze, or isnt' a wide screen tv.
 
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
no, ntsc is 60hz, 60 fields interlaced, and pal is 50hz.......

dvd players convert 24fps film into tv signal the same way film has always been converted to tv signal, breaking it up into fields, repeating frames 2 to 3 times over and over... its a funky pattern. i believe its called telecine. resolution doesn't matter, its converted to be viewed on a tv set anyways, with a chunk of the resolution thrown away if the tv is not capable of animorphic squeeze, or isnt' a wide screen tv.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I meant the framerate of DVD video, which is half of the refresh rate of TV standards because of interlacing. Anyway, are you sure you're not confusing the conversion from DVD to TV with conversion process from film to DVD? Look at any DVD authoring application, when you transcode video to PAL MPEG-2, the specified framerate is 25 fps, and when you choose NTSC the framerate is 30 fps (29.97 to be exact).
 
Pal is 25fps, NTSC film is 29.9 and NTSC video is 23.9.
I was looking for a cheap PAL player last night because every so often I get a PAL DVD. I don't think either of my players will convert PAL.
 
Originally posted by: MustISO
Pal is 25fps, NTSC film is 29.9 and NTSC video is 23.9.
I was looking for a cheap PAL player last night because every so often I get a PAL DVD. I don't think either of my players will convert PAL.
Click to expand...

You have your framerates backwards. NTSC video is 29.97.

Progressive mpeg2, though, is 23.976. As for what 0roo0roo is saying, the mpeg2 of a DVD shot on film will probably be in 23.976 and then the DVD player will convert it to what it needs. This is the same for both PAL and NTSC dvds. PAL, however, is a different(higher) resolution than NTSC and so it will squeeze the video to fit the screen. Or at least my Philips DVD player does this.

And it's not really called telecine, although that is the equipment used to achieve the upconvert from 24fps to 29.97, the actual name for it is 3:2 pulldown.
 
There's a very good, popular, website out there that has a lot of info on this stuff, but I can't remember the URL.
Anyway, Text this has a little bit.
 
Ahh, I finally found a page that seems to have some reliable information. Here. So it seems that PAL DVD's are indeed recorded at 25 fps, while NTSC can be either 24 or 30 fps, but 30 fps is redundant since the 24 to 30 conversion is easily done by the player. It also says that most NTSC players only play NTSC, while even if your PAL player can play NTSC, it requires a dual-standard TV that can receive NTSC as well as PAL.
 
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