[Stepan12]

I didn't know the european PAL system of video meant that for dvd, also.

I tried to burn a PAL dvc to dvd with poor results because of the difference in American and European systems.

[yazoo]

“I didn’t know the european PAL system of video meant that for dvd, also.”

It doesn’t. DVDs don’t use PAL or NTSC, but they do have regions built into a lot of DVD players to stop pirating. On the other hand, most DVD players these days are pretty much universal, at least from my experience overseas.

[Lucretia Borgia]

It's not PAL vs NTSC. DVDs have "region codes" that generally mean DVDs made the U.S. market can't be played on players made for the European market, DVDs made for the Asian market can't be played on players made for the U.S. market, and so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

[MarkL]

I didn't know the european PAL system of video meant that for dvd, also.

It's a different thing. The issues with video tape were more due to technological issues. With DVDs, it's more for copyright protection. DVDs are composed with "regional encoding" to ensure that a DVD created for region 1 won't play on a player set up for region 2. Most DVD players can be set for a specific region, however there's a limit to the number of times you can change that region setting. Once you've hit that maximum number, you can't change it again. This allows a manufacturer to make a single DVD player but sell it anywhere in the world.

But some DVDs are also "non-region" encoded, so they'll play on any DVD player, anywhere in the world.

Mark

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

It’s true that NTSC and PAL are incompatible systems of scanning and color encoding and that would make them incompatible as far as playing back disks on equipment designed for the other system; but I think Steyn is referring to geographical encoding, which DVD mfrs do as an anti-piracy measure. Same resulte either way, though, it was a pretty lameass gift.