DVD Regions and TV Formats

["Paul Feagan" <paul@xxxx>]

Okay so the boring techie stuff starts here for those of you who may be
interested...
I'm only writing this from memory so don't give me a hard time if I make a
small mistake.

In England we have a TV system called PAL. The main feature of PAL is that
there are 625 lines of dots on the TV screen. The line scan part of the TV
lights these dots from the top of the screen to the bottom, left to right,
about 50 times a second. It actually lights lines 1, 3, 5 etc then 2, 4, 6
and relies on persistence of (human) vision to make a picture. Around the
world there are different versions of PAL but I think these are mostly the
frequency between the video and audio. So you could have a PALA video on a
PALB video and see the picture but not get the sound.

In the US they have a system called NTSC. This uses 525 lines. As a result
US TV is a lower definition to ours. The other problem is that NTSC, played
on a PAL TV, means that the line scan gets to 525 lines and starts again. So
the picture would start to re-paint near the bottom on line 527 and then
roll. In fact I think it wouldn't play at all.

France has a system called SECAM. However, with the free availability of
spicy movies on UK TV and Satellite there is no longer a need to watch
French videos for 2 hours just in the hope that the girl takes her clothes
off!

Luckily most modern UK TVs and videos can handle NTSC signals. In the US it
is less likely that they can play PAL videos as they need 100 extra lines,
whereas we throw 100 away. We were just at the point where we could finally
buy US videos, earlier and cheaper and play them here. Then came DVD.

There is no technical reason why any UK DVD player can't play any DVD to a
modern UK TV. Most DVD players are PAL/NTSC compatible. However, the movie
studios don't like people buying movies at the wrong time from the wrong
country. So they developed a region coding system to stop that happening.
This started as a simple bit of code that stopped a UK (Region 2) DVD player
playing a US (Region 1) DVD. Most players can be set to multi-region using a
not-so-secret programmers hack entered via the handset. You can get more
hacks and info from http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdplayershack.php. Some players
need a chip changing.

Now the movie studios know that everyone is doing this, they brought out
something called Region Coding Enhancement (RCE) which confuses some players
and stops them playing the other region.

So the result of all this is that the Aussie DVD BTTF Trilogy is in PAL
which is the same as the UK, but still has Region 4 coding. That means that
only multi-region players, or players that can be set to a region manually
can play it. It may be that it has RCE which means some multi-region players
that automatically change region for you won't play it. Don't know yet as
I'm waiting for mine to arrive.

For people in the US, I'm not sure if they can play it or not. Has anyone in
the US got the Aussie DVD?

Whatever you do, don't include this text in any reply to the list as I think
once was more than enough!

Paul