Will my DVD play on a American DVD player

trazix

I am putting a DVD together of some old family videos and am sending it to relations in america.
What i need to know is will it play on an american dvd player or will it have to be formated to play on there NTSC tv system. Is whats on the disc just an mpeg and the dvd player does the formating into PAL or NTSC or have i to change the mpegs before i record the disc.

optiplexgx270

depends on the DVD player TBH.

mikeanywhere

I thought when using editing software that you have the option to save it a region if need be.

trillianv

You may be able to save it for Region 1 to play in American DVD players. I know that most of the players are solely for Region 1 and don't have the option to play multiple regions. When I go home (America) I cannot play any Region 2 DVDs on my player. I had to have my wedding DVD converted by someone to Region 1 for them. You will have to ask your relatives if they have the option to switch between regions (my DVD player does but only because I searched everywhere for a multi region player).

extopia

Most NTSC (US) DVD players can not play back PAL (Europe) DVDs, although PAL players can indeed play back NTSC DVDs.

Region encoding is a seperate issue. If you're creating a DVD, just set it to Region 0 (no restriction) - but you will still have to convert to NTSC if you want it to be playable in the US.

You can do the conversion either in a video production facility (best) or with software. Most editing software does a bad job of converrting so stick with something like After Effects if you have access to it.

Let me know more and I may be able to advise you, especially if you use a Mac. Don't know much about PC applications I'm afraid.

CraggyIslander

As far as I'm aware, most US dvd players will play european (PAL) discs, it's the TV sets that can not handle the PAL signal because of the different size and framerate.

Although not cheap one of the best pc programs available to convert .avi, .mpg, etc to other formats is Canopus Procoder. It handles framerate conversion and resizing to PAL or NTSC dvd format perfectly. You'd then import the resulting VOB files into your DVD creator program (DVDLabs Pro comes highly recommended).

As mentioned before, set the region to 0 and the regionlocking problem is averted.

extopia

Another thing - even if the TV or DVD player can't play your PAL disc, your relatives can always watch it on a computer.

trillianv

extopia wrote:

Another thing - even if the TV or DVD player can't play your PAL disc, your relatives can always watch it on a computer.

You only have a limited amount of times that you can change the region code on most media players on the computer. Found that one out through experience.

abetarrush

Regions are fxckin stupid! Theres no such thing as a DVD player that can only play one region. They all start off multiregion, then they're modified to lock to one region, so, with a Mutiregion player, yer actually payin more for less!

So, if ur famila in the USA have a mutiregion, the Picture might be black and white or green cos they're NTSC and we're PAL

As for the PC, get DVD Region Free

Its great! Also removes user blocks, like not lettin u skip the Copyright crap at the start, and the FBI stuff etc


Gl!

derekconlon

how you doin pal
all you have to do is buy a dvd player that is divx format i work in the field it will play all even hd dvd

abetarrush

****** EDIT***** Be sensible.... *****EDIT*****

tred

trazix wrote:

I am putting a DVD together of some old family videos and am sending it to relations in america.
What i need to know is will it play on an american dvd player or will it have to be formated to play on there NTSC tv system. Is whats on the disc just an mpeg and the dvd player does the formating into PAL or NTSC or have i to change the mpegs before i record the disc.

Are you just copying them from a video recorder to DVD burner wiht out editing?. I know the software I have for converting MINDV to DVD allows me to choose the region.

rogue-entity

NTSC and PAL just represent the video system that the DVD has been optimised for, nothing more. DVDs dont actualy contain NTSC or PAL formatted video, only that the video on the DVD is encoded at the resolutions (and possibly framerates) used by those standards

A US DVD player may be able to playback a "pal" disc with no problems asside from quality loss caused by the downscaling of the higher resolution video and the different frame rates. European DVD players when playing american DVDs generally output a pseudo-PAL signal. That is, NTSC video but with the colour signal transmitted on the same frequency as used by PAL. Most TVs will handle this with no issues. This is my experience of it anyway when playing back R1 and R3 NTSC discs.

Ruu_Old

I have a US DVD player (Daewoo DVG 9200N, $72 I think from Amazon), its region free and NTSC and PAL compatible - plays NTSC discs on a PAL TV & plays PAL discs on a NTSC TV. Works great!