help and info on formats pal and nstc

[nyna]

When friends sent me tapes  I could not play them in Australia,  here we are on the Pal system, I bought a newer vcr and a newer dvd recorder player now I can see anything.
Now I have sent a friend in Canada a dvd she says she cant see it, a while back I sent a friend in Los Angeles a vhs tape and she couldnt see it, after asking around I've been told that the newer ones play everything,  if  that  is so for the people in the US,  I'd like to know.  So I suggested to my friend to look up her instruction book and see if the other format can be played and if all else fails to go visit a friend or relative who has a newer player, any other suggestions?

[philo]

Hi Nyna,

This sort of thing is never easy to explain over text like this.

What I can say is that we in the UK have had machines that play multi system for a great many years. The USA is still not really embracing it as far as VCR's go. DVD players and recorders are hackable.

The best way to proceed is to post here what equipment you and friends have and we can search and see just what spec it has. At least then we will know what it can or can't do.

There is also the fault of software to consider especially with home burnt DVD's.

I will be happy to help if I can.

Philo . 

[KC]

Thanks, Philo. I was trying to come up with something that's both clear and non-technical, but it's hard. Here's the best I could do:

You're dealing with two different problems here: 1) the color encoding system used to create a video (NTSC in the U.S. and Canada, and PAL in the U.K., Australia and much of the rest of the world), and 2) regional coding on DVDs (region 1 in the U.S. and Canada, region 2 in the U.K. and region 4 in Australia).

NTSC vs. PAL is a technical issue with all analogue video. Most of the "PAL" world can now play NTSC videos without problems, but not the other way around.

The "region codes" are peculiar to DVDs. They were supposed to be a safeguard against piracy. In most cases, you need a "region free" DVD player to be able to play DVDs from another region than yours.

Here are a couple of Wikipedia articles that might help.

PAL and NTSC

DVD region code

Anyway, as Philo says, it's probably best to just tell us what equipment you and your friends have and then maybe we can help!

[Conan]

  Basically, if you have a PAL/NTSC problem there is nothing you can do to modify the player and/or display as far as I know.  If it is a region coding problem, sometimes you can find "hacked" firmware that you can burn on the DVD player (assuming you know what your doing), in other cases keying in a bunch of kooky codes works, and in some instances a hardware mod could be required.

[nyna]

Thank you guys.
Anyway after all that, I just got an email my friend in Canada,  says she was able to play my dvd onto her old dvd player and not on the new Recorder player with a hard drive, I would think she could have seen in on the newer one its the same one I have Panasonic with  146 hrs of recording on the hard drive.  So its problem fixed, thank you  guys.

[Agent]

FYI - Many DVD players can be converted to Region 0 (all-region) and be made both PAL/NTSC compatible simply by punching in certain keys on the remote. I've been successful in doing this on at least two different players I've owned in the past. There are some sites that assist in this. I do not know if this will void the warranty, but if you have a cheaper model, you don't have much to lose.

[nyna]

That must be what  my expert  friend did to mine without even knowing how he did it.
He went into connections clicked on the formats , now I can see both without adjusting anything.
The thing is now he says I wish I know what I did so I could  do it to mine, because he has to change back and forth on his.

[Lin Sunderland]

I just bought a new VCR recorder with a DVD player attached from Amazon.   When I bought it I found a website put out by Amazon showing various player recorders of the type I bought with instructions on how to make them into a multi region DVD player.  So at last I can watch my Region 1 and 4 DVD's on the TV instead of having to view them on the PC.  I have a NTSC TV by the way.    It was so easy to follow the instructions and I was able to change to multi region the first time I tried it.  It took me a couple of hours to work out how to set up a timed recording on the VCR