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NTSC widely viewable across UK, AU, europe?
I’ve read that most UK dvd players, something like 70% and up, will play NTSC dvd’s. Does this go for all the other countries that use the PAL format – such as Australia and others?
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21 Replies
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Yes…I would even dare to say it would be upwards of 98% of PAL players worldwide play NTSC discs.
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Would you say that goes for the televisions as well?
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No..thats where the problems might come up.
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I have never come across a DVD player in Europe that can’t play an NTSC disc (although they may exist). Even the oldest players I’ve seen have special modes to accomodate transcoding the NTSC colour signal for playback on select older PAL TVs.
As Eric said, getting an image to display on a TV will be a bigger issue than getting the player to play the disc. Even then, most TVs manufactured in the last 12-13 years should not have an issue displaying the 60hz scan rate. In fact, in the UK at least, it’s not too uncommon to find music video DVDs in their original NTSC format.
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Yeah…IMO your wasting money and time if you plan to release both a PAL and NTSC disc worldwide.
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“it’s not too uncommon to find music video DVDs in their original NTSC format.”
David, do you mean to say, the companies that produce these music video dvd’s decided to sell only an NTSC version in the UK stores?
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Yes, in fact, the official release was just a US import, as far as I can tell.
Oddly, Warner Vision International released “Sex and the City” (The TV series) on DVD in the UK, in its original NTSC format:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sex-City-Region-NTSC-Format/dp/B00005IBA0
I’m not sure why this was the case (perhaps to save on authoring/replication fees or to meet a deadline?), but I’m sure if there was a huge compatibility issue, they wouldn’t have gone ahead.
Someone once said to me something which I believe to be true: “So long as the TV’s chassis isn’t made of wood, it should be OK with 60hz video”.
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And for those tv’s and dvd players that will play ntsc in the uk, is the quality degraded somewhat you think? I noticed a person who reviewed the sex and the city dvd said it did not look good on their tv.
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It depends how the TV is connected. Broadly speaking: no, the quality will not be degraded if a European user plays an NTSC disc.
In Europe, most DVD players are connected with the ubiquitous SCART connector. The default setting on just about every DVD player is to send Analog RGB video through the SCART terminal. The closest thing to this in America is the analogue Component Video RCA connectors, to give you an idea of what the picture quality is like (very good). Using this common method, there will be nothing wrong with the quality.
But, some users will have their player connected with a lesser quality method (Composite or S-Video). Or, they’ll have it connected with SCART, but hooked up to an input on the TV which doesn’t support RGB video, meaning that the TV will instead fall back to the Composite signal also sent through the SCART cable (for our purposes, this is identical to the user connecting the player with a Composite video cable).
If it’s connected with Composite or S-Video, three things can happen. One, the player can output NTSC video as NTSC. On most TVs, this will give a decent quality picture. But, some old TVs will show this in black and white. And some really, really old ones will not be able to lock onto the 60hz scan-rate at all, and will display a distorted, fast scrolling picture.
Two, and this is the most common: the player will output the NTSC disc as PAL-60 (60hz video with PAL colour information). This setting is often made in the player’s menus. This removes the “showing in black and white” problem, but the video is still 60hz, so again, on really old TVs, people will get the distorted, fast scrolling picture. Only now, it’ll be a distorted, fast scrolling picture with bits of colour in it 🙂
Three, the player attempts to transcode the NTSC disc contents to real 50hz PAL, which will show on *any* TV in Europe. This only happens on a handful of newer players, and harms the quality (as such it can always be turned off). It will result in a juddery, sometimes poorly scaled (pixellated) image.
Whew – got all that? Most NTSC content is standards converted to 50hz timing for release in Europe, to avoid any hassle. Speaking from my videophile standpoint, this conversion does degrade the quality of the picture for all users, but not as badly as the player attempting to convert itself upon playback (what I described in the above paragraph).
For what it’s worth, a lot of my non AV-geek friends have some Region 0 NTSC discs and have no problem playing them. The equipment that can’t deal with them has probably been relegated to the attic by now. The decision to release NTSC content in Europe is ultimately up to the hassle involved of creating a second PAL converted disc, getting it tested replicated separately, etc…
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Interesting stuff – thanks.
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