Wedding DVD Video Formats: NTSC vs. PAL
It’s not often that our clients require that our wedding/slideshow DVDs work exactly the same in other countries as they do in the United States, but the situation has presented itself before.
If you’re unfamiliar with how the rest of the world’s television/video formats work, here’s a quick refresher:
NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) is a format used on DVDs and video cassettes in the Americas, Japan, Canada and 30 other countries.
PAL (Phase Alternating Line) is used widely in Europe, Africa, Australia, the Middle East and China to name a few. Now these two facts shouldn’t be confused with the DVD region codes that are in place in all set top DVD players.
Region encoding is the mechanism that enables motion picture studios to control the worldwide release of their movies. It is required by the DVD Forum in all commercial hardware DVD players. Every DVD-Video disc contains one byte of data representing a region code, which limits where the disc can be played.
Region codes correspond to specific areas of the world:
1. Canada, United States, and U.S. territories
2. Japan, Middle East, South Africa, Western Europe
3. East Asia, Southeast Asia
4. Australia, Caribbean islands, Central America, Mexico, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, South America
5. Africa, Eastern Europe, India, Mongolia, North Korea
6. China
7. Reserved
8. Special international venues (airplanes, cruise ships, etc.)
DVD players are generally limited to playing discs of only one region, usually the region where the DVD player was purchased. For example, DVD players purchased in Canada usually only play Region 1 DVD-Video discs.
The problem with having our custom wedding DVDs (or anyone’s for that matter) playable on TV/DVDs outside of the United States comes down to a battle of video standards — NTSC vs. PAL. Here are some of the differences:
NTSC – 30 frames per second/575 scan lines; DV picture measures 720×480 pixels.
PAL – 25 frames per second (frame rate closer to that of Hollywood films, which are 24 fps) 625 scan lines; DV picture measures 720×576 pixels.
PAL is often heralded as the “better” of the two formats, but NTSC is arguably far more popular due to the populations of the countries who have adopted it. However, the problem boils down to this — the two formats are incompatible with each other.
So if we author a DVD for a bride/groom that primarily has family in the United States we’ll encode the DVD in the NTSC format. If the bride/groom has family outside of the United States (for example Germany) then we’ll need to make a separate “PAL” version of the DVD.
As you can imagine, this can quickly become a costly endeavor. There is good news though — if the people who will receive the DVD in Europe have a fairly new computer (and it has a DVD-ROM along with software capable of decoding DVD movies), they’ll likely be able to play a NTSC DVD without any problems. Again, so long as they don’t intend on watching it on their TV.
Therefore, it’s possible to bypass the whole compatibility problem if set top DVD players and TVs are not involved. Obviously this won’t work (or be ideal) in all situations, but it’s a fairly easy work-a-round that most people can live with. For those who can’t live with this, the only solution is to make two copies of the DVD — one in NTSC and the other in PAL.
0 Comment(s) — Spread the Gossip.
