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Yes but all US equipment is NTSC and PAL compatible now, or the vast majority of it anyway. Remember they are WAY ahead of us in this sort of thing

NeilUK

"multi region and NTSC v PAL are two different things"

Jay, you took the words out of my mouth.

Regarding whether most American consumers will have equipment able to cope with multi-system playback, I'm not so sure. America is so big that maybe there's a prevailing feeling (amongst consumers, retailers and electronics manufactures) that there is really no need for multi-system playback, as everything that a consumer could wish for is available in the States, and hence no need to worry about obscure video formats from far off lands of which they know little. What I do know is that my porno pal Remington Steel rang me up a while back to see if I could shed light on why is was that folks in the US who had ordered his DVD's were now complaining that the discs would not play on their systems! Maybe Bimmercat could enlighten us?


Officer Dibble

NeilUK wrote:

> Yes but all US equipment is NTSC and PAL compatible now, or the
> vast majority of it anyway. Remember they are WAY ahead of us
> in this sort of thing
>

In this instance, not true. That is it may be true of new equipment, but is not true of the equipment in use in people's homes.

I've had DVD players for several years and have experience of several models of varying ages and all played NTSC disks, converting them to at least pseudo PAL. Ditto even older VCRs and TVs. But if you visit US websites that sell cult DVDs, many of which are European and PAL, you see warnings that customers should ensure their DVD players can cope with these disks. All of which suggests that many Americans do not own DVD players that can cope with PAL disks.

And re region coding, I'm sick of posting that region coding and NTSC/PAL are two different issues, not to mention the ignorance about Region 0, and the ungrounded fears of porn watchers that porn DVDs from the USA (99.999% of which are Region 0, i.e. no region code) will not play on their systems..

Mick


Talk to Lewis a call at Lipstickprodcutions....and give me a shout when you get 5!

Chuck Starr

alec wrote:

"All of which suggests that many Americans do not own DVD players that can cope with PAL disks."

Spot on, sadly.

The few DVDs that I shipped over here from England do NOT work on an American DVD player.

Most US players can't handle PAL as most US consumers have no need to buy PAL DVDs. This will start to change now that many Hollywood movies are being released on DVD in the UK a month or two before they are out in the US (the reverse of the previous arrangement). People wanting to see the latest films first was a driving force in European consumers wanting the NTSC playback capability on their DVD players. I think the next twelve months will see a big reversal in the tide with US consumers buying European DVDs (most American TV shows, also, are out on DVD a year earlier over here than in the US itself, due to syndication rights etc) which will make PAL playback a standard feature on US DVD machines. Sadly it isn't yet.