Thanx to all the helpful advice on these forums I finally completed my third DVD authoring adventure (I had some old TV shows, etc that I wanted to put on DVD).
My girlfriend also wants me to make some copies for her mother who lives in germany. I’m guessing that they use the PAL system in germany.
So my question is:
The DVD’s were made by me (so the DVD’s are region free), and the video format I used was NTSC, will the DVD play in a german DVD player?
If not, will it still play on a computer with a DVD player?
What is the minimum and maximum bit rate a movie can be compressed to in order to remain DVD player compatible?
I’ve been using ~ 3500 for my tv shows (~4500 for movies), but can I go lower and still remain compatible with my dvd players? (I’m getting good results on as low as 3000 kbps).
My girlfriend was asking me to decrypt her german DVD’s. She says that they won’t play on her stand alone DVD player since they have the regional code for germany.
So I’m getting ready to do this when I think back to this thread. And I think to myself, “self, if an NTSC format DVD won’t play on a stand alone DVD player in germany, why would a PAL formatted DVD play on a USA stand alone DVD player regional code or not?”.
So I tell my girlfriend that it likely will not work because the format of the DVD video file is different. And then she pulls out another german DVD, which she claims works just fine on the stand alone player because it lacks the regional code.
So I take a look, and sure enough it does play fine. I look on the back of the DVD case and guess what it says? “PAL format”.
What the?? Am I missing somehting? Why does the PAL DVD play on the this USA DVD player? I checked the manual for the DVD player (It’s a KLH Digital DVD8350), and it mentiones NOTHING about it being able to play PAL format DVD’s.
So I’m confused, can someone explain this to me?
And also, if I re-author her other german DVD’s (taking out the regional code, but NOT changing the video format) will they play normally?
A lot of (lower-end) DVD players are designed for a worldwide market using off-the-shelf parts, so they can read many different types of discs and output different video signals. My Norcent DP-300 can do the same thing.
Incidentally, the KLH DVD-8350 is quite similar to the Mintek 1600, which can be made region-free with a firmware upgrade. If you’re feeling lucky, search Google for “mintek 1600” region free and you may not even need to re-author the disc. (Or your DVD player may blow up.)
It is not complicated but it will take more than a few minutes and you’ll be bored to death.
PAL and NTSC are color coding schemes for analog TV and have nothing to do, as most people wrongly assume, with frame rate and/or lines per frame. You can have PAL at 30fps-525 lpf and you can have NTSC at 25 fps - 625 lpf but the fact that PAL is used in Europe and NTSC in the USA has meant that "PAL"has become shorthand for “25 fps - 625 lpf” and NTSC has become shorthand for “30 fps - 525 lpf”.
DVDs have nothing to do with PAL or NTSC. Nothing. Now, there are three standard encoding frequencies for DVDs: 25 fps (“PAL”), 30 fps (“NTSC”) and 24 fps (movie). A player with NTSC output will certainly play DVDs recorded at 30 FPS (and it has to correct the height to width aspect ratio by widening the picture because it is compressed horizontally, the pixels are not square). It will also play movie by duplicating one frame in six. And it probably plays “PAL” by duplicating one frame in five (and compressing the picture horizontally). Similarly, a “PAL” player can play other resolutions by dropping the appropriate number of frames. All these things are fairly easy to do and most players can do them and will do them.
Then you come to region code which is an entirely different thing. It is just that the player voluntarily refuses to play a DVD encoded with another region code. As has been said, some players ignore this and will play any region DVDs and you can get others to do it. But this is an entirely different issue.
I have simplified a lot. The above is very simplified and can be further expanded a lot.
(I had some old TV shows, etc that I wanted to put on DVD).