Posted by Gene E. Bloch on 10/09/06 17:32

On 10/07/2006, Edward posted this:
> I had realitives come over France (I'm in the US) and something
> unexpected happened: They have three home movie DVD-RWs they wanted to
> play on my TV of their daughter's wedding. I don't speak French so I
> couldn't very well convey the differences in NTSC and PAL. My father
> tried, but he doesn't really understand it either, so it was hard for homt
> o tell him in French without knowing the words to certain things.
> Anyway, I managed to make copies of the DVD no problem and make second
> copies in NTSC format by importing the VOB files into Nero and buring them
> to DVD. It worked out pretty well - obviously some quality loss but not
> much.
> SO here I am.
> I was thinking abotu getting a region free DVD player so when they happens
> again in a year I'll be ready.
> Are there any disadvantages to getting a region free DVD player? WIll
> certain DVDs simply not play?

First you need to know that Regions and NTSC vs PAL are two unrelated
things.

Commercial DVDs are marked with a code specifying that they "belong" to
a specific geographic region of the planet. For instance, the US is in
region 1 and France is in region 2. A player is supposed to note the
region code on a DVD and not play it if the DVD's region is not the
same as the payer's region. Region-free players disobey this command.

On the other hand, there are three different schemes (with variations
on top of that) for actually encoding the video, including differences
in frame rate, number of lines per frame of video, and the way color
is represented. A player could very well accept a DVD as being in the
right region, but be unable to play it because it is not equipped to
decode its videor representation.

Here are two analogies, not worth much :-) Let's say x goes to book
store to buy a pornographic book, but she is only 17 years old. The
bookseller says "Sorry". That's like region codes. So she borrows her
older sister's drivers license and goes back to the store (she waits
until the first clerk is off duty, of course). She buys the book, gets
it home, and discovers that it's in Urdu and she can't read it. That's
like NTSC vs PAL.


--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")

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