Hopefully this will be an easy question to answer. I know that DVD players have different “regions”, so an American DVD Player probably couldn’t play a DVD made for China, but what about VCRs?
Specifically, I would like to give someone living in France an American VHS tape (its a commercial film, not a homemade movie). Would this play correctly on their VCRs (they have a VHS VCR), or is their some sort of encryption on VHS tapes?
Thanks for any help.
The French television standard used to be SECAM, while the US standard is NTSC. I suspect that modern French VCRs have NTSC playback capability, just as our PAL VCRs here do.
Thanks, reprise. Do you know what would happen if you played an NTSC tape on a SECAM (or PAL) vcr? Would it be srambled, or just not play at all?
PAL, SECAM, and NTSC are all different television signal standards. They are all three mutually incompatible. In Europe and South America, where PAL prevails, some consumer VCRs incorporate the ability to also play back NTSC tapes, but they generally cannot record NTSC, only PAL. This is because the USA (which uses NTSC) is the worlds largest producer of prerecorded VHS tapes.
OTOH, NTSC VCRs with PAL playback ability are virtually nonexistent. Why would we Americans want to watch European crap? 
Trying to play a tape encoded in one format on a VCR trying to play back in a different format just doesn’t work. I’ve never tried any SECAM<>PAL experiments, but PAL and NTSC are incompatible in the most important feature of video encoding: the number of fields per second (PAL is 50 and NTSC is 60). There are other differnces as well, but this one makes the rest moot.
DVDs are different. It is not an encoding difference, since all DVDs are encoded in the same manner. Region codes prevent the player form even trying to play the disc. No such mechanism exists for VHS. Stick the tape in the machine and press PLAY. It will play but you might as well be watching a blank tape.
An American (NTSC) tape is not going to play in Europe (unless they have a multisystem syetem which would be very rare).
American and European TV signals are very different in many ways. The (VHS) cassette is similar but the information recorded on the tape is quite different. Frames/second, lines/frame, color encoding etc are different.
A lot of the information posted here so far is accurate but irrelevant.
If you French friend’s VCR has the facility to playback NTSC tapes, then he will be able to play your tape, and otherwise he won’t.
Here in the UK, all VCRs are PAL machines, but most of those sold over the past couple have the extra facility to recognise and playback NTSC tapes. In France, they will all be SECAM machines, but whether manufacturers there have bothered to add the NTSC facility is something I guess only French people would know. My WAG would be NO. The French are very protective of their identity, and rail against anything which could be seen as compromising or diluting it. They are the second most arrogant race in Europe.
Second only to us Brits.
The previous post is not inaccurate but is incomplete.
A European multisystem VCR can be of two types: It may (I) merely play the NTSC tape and out put an NTSC signal to the TV, in which case you also need a multisystem TV (and I doubt many people would have a multisystem TV and VCR) OR (II) it may translate the NTSC signal to PAL so it can be displayed on a PAL TV. This results in a noticeable loss of image quality. I have one of these and I’ll say it may do for purely acqwuisition of information but I would not recommend this for the pleasure of watching a movie.
At any rate, my guess is most people in France do not have NTSC multisystem VCRs or TVs.