Zone-1 PAL DVDs available?

While reading the manual of my NTSC DVD player, I was surprised to see that out-of-the-box it will play back PAL-encoded DVDs… as long as they have been set to play in Zone 1 (Canada/USA). Are such DVDs available? Do European (or whatever) producers, who are not planning separate NTSC releases in the Zone-1 market, routinely allow Zone-1 playback of their discs?

Incidentally, I have a DVD that has NO markings whatsoever to indicate what zone it’s set for. It plays in my Zone-1 player, so obviously it is at least Zone 1. Is there any way to find out what other zones it may play in, given that I don’t have a computer DVD drive?

I believe in reality PAL and NTSC when applied to DVDs are misnomers and what they really mean is 25 frames / 625 lines and 30 frames / 525 lines in the MPEG encoding. Strictly speaking PAL and NTSC are schemes for encoding color which are used on broadcast TV but not on DVDs.

At any rate, if you play a “PAL” DVD you would just get a different frame rate and line count and you would need an appropriate TV set to see it.

To address your question; I do not think zone 1 DVDs “PAL” DVDs are available, just because I cannot see why anyone would make them.

Regarding technical encoding standards I found a couple of pages:
http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/dvdvideo/dvdvid_videnc.htm
http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/video/video_mpeg.htm

sailor, given the lack of emplasis promoting this particular feature (it’s not in the listed features), I suspect that the player, a [url="http://www.jvc.ca/en/consumer/product-detail.asp?model=XV-S502SL"JVC XV-S502SL, does not have particularly accurate conversion hardware. I don’t remeber seeing anything in the manual about needing a PAL TV for display, but I could be wrong.

The manual mentions that the player will play back DVDs with a region code marking of “ALL”. I see no reason why some content producers couldn’t make their discs for simultaneous worldwide release. And goven that only Zone 1 is exclusively NTSC (I think), might not it be easier for them to release their PAL discs with the ALL marking?

My DVD player will play PAL on NTSC Tv’s and vice versa. The main reason it has a PAL<>NTSC converter is for playing PAL VCDs in the US. (Says so in the manual)

Also, there are region-free DVD disks, possibly some of those are PAL? I have a set of region free DVDs from Japan, they are NTSC, so I don’t know if region-free PAL disks exist or not, but it seems likley that they do.

Oh Bog. Could someone fix my URL? I left out the first ].

Interesting. This never occurred to me. But then I’m still learning about VCDs. I wish there was a book called ‘VCD Demystified’ that had the same level of detail and explanation as Jim Taylor’s DVD Demystified.

What is the output form of your machines? Composite Video over a carrier? Baseband Composite video? RGB?

http://www.zonefreedvd.com/
http://www.codefreedvd.com/dvd_codefree611.htm
http://www.planet3000.com/Prod_MSDVD.shtml

Right now, I’m using baseband composite into an old Amiga monitor, but the player also provides S-video and component (YP[sub]b[/sub]P[sub]r[/sub]. There is also one analogue audio out (L/R) and two digital audio out (Toslink and ?coax?)