PAL in South Africa

Humble1 · Post by **Humble1** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 2:12 am

I am going to generate some PAL DVDs to send to a friend in South Africa. I have some questions to that end.

1) When I put my UVS 8 Trial into PAL/SECAM mode a warning " ... some information may be lost." How likely is it that the"Information loss" will be a serious degradation of the video?

2)Does anyone know how South Africa shapes up with the DVD - and + R situation that was discussed in another thread? Right now a workable process is to generate a DVD-R in PAL mode.

Thank you.

Post by **lancecarr** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 2:35 am

I have an NTSC cam and live in an NTSC country but my parents live in a PAL country. I do what you are doing all the time.

VS8 gives that warning but I have never actually noticed any drop in quality. Just follow, as much as possible, the procedure outlined in the sticky at the top of the forum. Keep the same field order, bitrate etc., obviously there will be some paramaters you will have to change for the conversion.

As far as -R or +R goes the "-R" camp wins on compatabilty by only a few percentage points so I tend to go with -R.

Humble1 · Post by **Humble1** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 3:25 am

Thanks Lance ... next question

Is there some free ware that can be downloaded that will permit me to play PAL DVDs on my computer.

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 3:30 am

Computers aren't sensitive to the TV standard -- as long as you have a DVD decoder on your system, you can play both NTSC and PAL DVDs.

Humble1 · Post by **Humble1** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 3:50 am

Thanks THoff ... Windows Media Player played the PAL DVD just fine. They are on their way to South Africa as I type.