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My father is a big fan of British TV series. I have wanted to get him a boxed set of DVDs for Christmas, but they only come in Region 2 PAL format. I'm pretty sure his Samsung DVD player does not play PAL. Do any American player work with the PAL format? If not, is there a simple way to convert them?
Man I love your long hair and mustache. I am a bit jealous. I only hope that there is hope for me.
Mike
William,
I too think your long hair and moustache is hot, but I suggest that you go on line for Public Television. They have many of the Brit. serioes on DVD for American format.
Wow. I'm stunned! Thank you for that most unexpected compliment!
As for the source for the specific videos, I could not find any source in the US, including the pbs.org store. That is why I had turned to sources in the UK.
William
P.S. - the 'stache is longer now and groomed into handlebars.
As a general rule, all players sold OUTSIDE of North America play both PAL and NTSC discs, and all late model televisions are capable of displaying both standards also, but very few DVD players or televisions sold IN North America can play PAL.
Do you know if his television is capable of displaying PAL video? If in the remote chance it is, it's likely you'd need to hunt around to find a DVD player that works with both NTSC and PAL, as well as being multizone for that matter.
As for converting, some players have built-in PAL to NTSC converters but their performance is pretty average. For the best picture quality it's best to keep anything originally shot on video tape (i.e. most British TV series) in the standard it was shot in. Conversion is complex and only reduces picture quality. But this also depends on how fussy you are (and I am very fussy).
Hope this helps.
LukeB (in Australia, PAL Region 4)
You can use a ripper to disable the region thing and burn it onto another DVD, but i dont know about the PAL to NTSC thing, perhaps there are programs out there that converts it.
No Need to rip any thing its time consuming and classed as copy right theft !!
Axel
Theft is in the eye of the beholder; for most of us, it is viewed as fair use.
I dont know whats the whole legal stuff is, but I do know that if you make a backup copy of an origional disk you own, then it's fair use... I think thats why many DVD ripper programs still exist because they could say people just use it to make backup copies.
A DVD is not 'NTSC' or 'PAL', that is decided by the DVD player and the TV, not the software medium. You just need to worry about the region encoding.
I should also note that the reason they say 'PAL' on the DVD is just because they are region 2, where PAL is the standard, not because the video is PAL encoded (which makes no sense). I get tons of DVDs from other countries that use PAL and run them fine on my (region unlocked) american DVD player on NTSC, or on my computer.
As Tai Fu stated, ripping them to a computer would remove the region coding, though this process would take considerable effort. Otherwise you'd need to find a region-unlocked DVD player somewhere (easier to get outside of the US). Better yet, the free software program, VLC (google for it), will ignore the region encoding on DVDs, thus these region 2 DVDs will play without a problem on any computer.
Make sure the DVD drive on that computer is region unlocked as well... alot of DVD drive have RPC-2 which allows you to change regions 5 times, then it locks to that region. This is a hardware thing so no software will do, unless you can find a firmware that can disable it. Lite-on drives are good because they have programs that disables all region locks on any lite-on (and Gigabyte because its a Lite-on OEM client) drives.
Actually, VLC will completely bypass the drive's region checking mechanism, so there's no need to do any fancy firmware hacks or anything. In the end, it's a software thing, not a hardware thing.
In all my years of interest in all things technical, that's the strangest thing I've ever heard. I don't know how you have come to this conclusion.
The video contained within the disc IS encoded to a particular standard, ie. PAL or NTSC. Whichever it is, when it comes out of the player and into the television, the television detects what standard is to be used and adjusts accordingly.
Region encoding aside for the moment (for that can be circumvented), I fail to see how one in North America who owns a TV and DVD only capable of displaying NTSC (29.97 frames/sec) can possibly watch a disc that was encoded in PAL (25 frames/sec), unless their player is capable of doing a quick and nasty conversion.
Whichever standard is used, there is a definite number of frames per second that have to be delivered to the television and I don't believe it's ONLY a simple matter of the DVD player saying to the television, "ok, we're going to use this standard now". To achieve the full quality intended, something recorded on, say, video tape using PAL standard must be coupled with a display that can operate to the PAL standards, ie. 625 lines at 25 frames (50 fields) per second, and usually interlaced.
So I don't think it's quite as simple as you're suggesting.
LukeB
Hah, hah, looks like you're right and I didn't read fully my quick google search. Nevertheless, my solution of using VLC will still work, for it can play any region-coded DVD, PAL or NTSC, on a computer regardless of drive settings.
There is program called anydvd that allows you to rip copy protected DVDs to the computers hard drive and from there you can use any burning program to copy it to another DVD.
The program allows you to remove region coding and other info from the DVD the program is available from the following website it is not free but for a small fee it can be unlocked.
A friend of mine and I have used the program and found it worked.
get it here
www.slysoft.com
As others have pointed out, DVDs are neither PAL nor NTSC, but are region encoded. This is done to prevent people buying discs for a lower priced market, but has stupid consequences. Generally, the discs for the lowest priced regions (read third world) are lower definition anyway, so if you hack them some way or other you get a poorer quality copy anyway.
Most of the hacking is done to view region 1 (US) discs is region 2 (Europe), saving 1/3 to 1/2 off the price. This is legal, AFAIK. No European country is likely to pass a law against it anytime soon, as the encoding benefits mainly US filn studios. However, the players continue to support encoding due to patent licensing terms. Region free players exist, but generally cost more, so instructions on how to hack a region 2 player to play region 1 continue to be legally posted on the web (provided they are not hosted on a US server).
Sadly, if you are in the US there is a law against circumventing the region encoding. AFAIK, the US is the only country with such a law, and it's likely to remain that way. This is intensely dumb, as it is mostly done to view discs that aren't available in region 1 encoding, not to save money, as region 2 discs cost more and discs for Asia, etc. have lower definition to fit the data on discs with fewer layers, or so I'm told.
All the same, there are lots of ways to illegally view region 2 discs in the US, and unfortunately only one legal one, which is to buy a player that is either region 2 or region free. Far be it from me to encourage breaking the law, but obviously it's a lot cheaper to buy your dad discs than a DVD player, so you can draw your own conclusions.
My own experience on Amazon UK has been that many old British films are available both in region 2 versions and in region free versions that play perfectly well on cheap 'region 1 only' players. Unfortunately, the series that are shown in the US only seem to be available there in region 2 versions. This is probably the BBC trying to control distribution, i.e. some part of the deal between the BBC and the PBS stations in some way.
It is very annoying, as for example the 2nd new series of Dr Who is being released piecemeal on region 2 discs, but I have to wait for the region 1 version, which will only be released as a boxed set at a much later date. A friend of mine who is single (not a longhair, BTW, he's bald and his remaining hair is collar length!) has a region free DVD player and gets everything as soon as it is out for region 2, but with a family to support I can't justify buying such a device and have to wait for the region 1 releases.
I'm a video engineer, and my company installs high end video systems and occasionally this problem comes up. We've spec'd the player from the company in the link below in a lot of systems and it works as advertised.
Plays any region coded DVD in NTSC, whether originally coded in NTSC, PAL, or SECAM (yes, disks are coded not only in region coding, but also in NTSC, PAL, or SECAM). The quality is just fine.
Most of the major manufacturers design their players to be capable of playing in multiple regions and video formats, and just set up a chip at the end of the assembly line depending on what country they're going to be shipped to. Guys like the one in the link below have figured out how to reprogram the player so that it will play back anything. Pioneer (for example) won't sell you one of these in the US because they'll get in trouble with the MPAA but there are a lot of people out there doing what these guys are doing.
So don't bother converting the disks, just buy a player like this one and play the originals.
RD
One of many region-free DVD player sources
Hi
William
Ive had the same problem as yourself but it was solved by openning my own dvd player to play ALL REGIONS yes ALL REGIONS
Just Visit this site you may have to sign up for it http://www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk/info/multiregion/
On this site you will find codeds to open your Dvd Player to make it Multi Region or you can download software to disk and burn it to disk to actually put in your Dvd player to make it multi region ive done this myself as I buy Dvds from America which are Region 1 as now my own plays All Regions !
You have No need to rewrite the Dvds or have Chips inserted just look for the make & model number of the actual player itself for the codeds or software !
I hope this helps you
Axel