Saturday, March 12, 2005
For "techies" only! - converting PAL to NTSC
Anyone with a serious interest in movies who collects films on DVD soon becomes aware that many important and/or interesting films (US and foreign) that are not currently available in the US have been released in other countries. A quick search on ebay or on the foreign Amazon websites will amaze you with the riches available.
Unfortunately, due to TV format differences (the US uses NTSC, much of the world uses PAL) and the industry's Region Code system most of these foreign DVDs are not playable in standard US DVD players. There are all-region DVD players which can handle the job. Or, if you have a DVD burner and are computer savvy you can try converting a foreign DVD to be US compatible.
Converting a DVD from PAL to NTSC format is not a simple task and the image quality often suffers. But recently there has been a lot of activity at the Doom9 and VideoHelp forums that, just maybe, a "Holy Grail" software has been created that can make the conversion process from Pal to NTSC much easier and produce quality results. If this topic interests you I urge you to check out this forum topic using the link below - be sure to read the whole thing, it's several pages long - and test the software program.
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=261056
Unfortunately, due to TV format differences (the US uses NTSC, much of the world uses PAL) and the industry's Region Code system most of these foreign DVDs are not playable in standard US DVD players. There are all-region DVD players which can handle the job. Or, if you have a DVD burner and are computer savvy you can try converting a foreign DVD to be US compatible.
Converting a DVD from PAL to NTSC format is not a simple task and the image quality often suffers. But recently there has been a lot of activity at the Doom9 and VideoHelp forums that, just maybe, a "Holy Grail" software has been created that can make the conversion process from Pal to NTSC much easier and produce quality results. If this topic interests you I urge you to check out this forum topic using the link below - be sure to read the whole thing, it's several pages long - and test the software program.
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=261056
