PAL and NTSC are analog standards, so I would think that with digital media such as DVDs, and digital TV sets, those standards are not applicable. But I noticed two odd things.
I have a couple of DVD movies that include “NTSC” in the list of logos on the back. I figured that the DVD itself was agnostic about analog format and the DVD player would take care of providing analog output using the correct standard. Am I mistaken? Otherwise why would the DVD specify NTSC?
Secondly, I have a DVD that I bought in Italy . It won’t play in my DVD player, but it will play on my computer. The case says “PAL widescreen 16:9”. Same question–why does it specify PAL if this is digital media? And why can my PC understand it (Pioneer Blu-Ray player bought 2.5 years ago) but my DVD player can’t? Is this a PAL/NTSC issue, or a region issue? BTW the case also says, “All regions.”
Does the same thing apply to video game consoles? If I buy a Wii game in Europe, do I have to worry about whether a PAL game will play on my NTSC machine at home?
Which is why all this came up. We’re leaving for Cairo in a week and my wife’s cousin is asking us to bring a few Wii games for her, and asked about whether they’re NTSC. My first reaction was that it doesn’t matter what the game media is, just the console for converting to the correct analog output. The Wii games we have here don’t indicate PAL or NTSC. But maybe I’m wrong.
PAL and NTSC are not only analog standards, they are also trademarks for the organizations that developed them. Odds are, the only reason they are there is due to some contractural or copyright type legal reason. It’s also possible that the disks/game carts that include it have some digital coding on them that will only let the player output in that format to an analog TV. That’s just my quick guess, though, so you will have to wait for someone who knows more about the digital machines and their analog outputs to answer for sure.
I can express both English and Japanese writings in any number of digital formats. The fact that I have converted them to little 1’s and 0’s (as the hated expression goes) does not mean they are now mutually intelligble. I can’t read Japanese - no matter how it’s stored.
Your DVD player is expecting (color) to be expressed according to the NTSC convention.
Your computer software knows both systems and can do the translation.
(for what it’s worth - I have a “digital” video converter box - the fact that it internally digitizes the signal is of absolutely no importance - I flip the switch to NTSC, and out comes a signal my ancient (it doesn’t have a chance of ever even hearing the word “digital”) video monitor. can use
PAL and NTSC used to involve frame rate differences, as well as interlacing line differences.
Most new digital media is now not interlaced but progressive. However the frame rate standards still remain - NTSC countries use 29.97 frames per second, and PAL countries use 25fps.
And on top of/related to the frequency difference, PAL has a slightly higher resolution than NTSC (originally, 720 x 576 and 720 x 480, respectively for 4x3 ratio televisions).
Game consoles also use the terms for region coding, not just different broadcast standards. Typically you’ve got NTSC-U (North America), NTSC-J (Japan), and PAL (Europe, Australia, etc). Even though there’s no (significant) difference between NTSC-U and NTSC-J signals, games for one typically won’t work on a system sold to play the other, at least not without some sort of modification (there are exceptions, though).
PAL and NTSC are different standards, so they differ over a wide range of issues and techniques. Digital TV receivers/decoders have to translate an analog beam into pixels and that will differ, so presumably with an external PAL receiver you could watch both PAL and NTSC on the one TV. Actually, of course you can, by using connecting your computer to your the TV and having dual receivers in it. Sorry, I am way out of date, is digital TV terrestially broadcast in the US or do you get your HDTV solely from satellites and cable?
It seems your Wii games won’t work in Egypt. You can maybemake them work, but I’ve never done that so I can’t recommend it.
The language analogy is best here. While the formats can be stored digitally, in the end they need to be decoded/output etc and regardless of the storage format if you start with a page of French that is what you will come out with at the end so you need someone who can read it, unless the digitizing process translated the French into another language first. You still need to be able to read French though - whether you do the translation before it is stored digitally or after.
The difference between NTSC and PAL is pretty fundamental, as others have mentioned. NTSC is 29.97 frames per second, and PAL is 25. Their resolutions are different too - NTSC is 480i, 720i or p, and so on. PAL starts at 768 x 576. If your reader isn’t configured for one of the formats, you can see how that could cause some serious issues.
Since DVD video is compressed digital data, it needs to be unpacked into a frame buffer in the player and (if using analog outputs) converted to analog and sent out to the TV / monitor.
The reason that commodity players don’t convert is that there’s no economic incentive for the manufacturers to do so. The manufacturers want to make a player they can sell all over the world, and the DVD CCA (that licenses the DVD format) has a vested interest in having “Region Coding” work, to prevent people in country X from purchasing discs intended for Country Y. A manufacturer that doesn’t go along risks having their key(s) revoked, meaning that new discs will no longer play on their players.
So the manufacturers build players that output NTSC from NTSC DVDs and PAL from PAL ones, but don’t convert (since that would be evidence of supporting out-of-region discs). This holds true even for region 0 discs (allowed anywhere in the world).
Since a PC monitor is neither NTSC nor PAL, the player software needs to convert the video for the monitor, so a R0 disc will play there.
There are some standalone players that are advertised as being “multi-region”. Some of them are from manufacturers that aren’t DVD CCA licensees - they’re using some other manufacturer’s key(s), and if the DVD CCA revokes those keys, the legitimate owners of that other manufacturer’s players would not be able to play new discs. Other multi-region players are standard players with hardware or software modifications.
This is still true for some material on Blu-ray discs as well - as an example, the UK version of “Escape From New York” (which is not region-locked) will play the main movie just fine on a US BD player (since it was upconverted to 1080P), but the extra features won’t play, since they’re in standard-definition PAL. Again, a software player app on a PC will play them just fine.
Strictly speaking, PAL is just an analogue colour-encoding mechanism, and does not imply 25 fps or 625 lines (576 usable). For example, analogue TV in Brazil is PAL-M, which is PAL colour but with 525 lines and 29.97fps, just like NTSC.
So the OP is right to wonder how an analogue colour system can have any bearing on digitally-encoded video. But informally, the terms PAL and NTSC are used in both analogue and digital media to mean the common frame rate/resolution combinations that we are familiar with.