Thanks and immense kudos to Bob Mellish. Due to his kindly lending me a tape of some Series 3 episodes recorded in the US[1], I've now seen TALD and am looking forward to seeing a couple more. I'm rationing myself to one new episode a night though!
I'm thinking of starting a fund to put up a goalpost in Bob's honour.
Tony Walton said:
*message snipped*
I want one of those VCRs, although in reverse, since I'm the US. Can you record in either format? You are so fortunate to have found it. There are so many tapes available only in Britain that I want (usually rock music video). I guess I need to buy a DVD, since it's internationally sound.
Robyn Lesley
"And when she shines she really shows you all she can." --Duran Duran, Rio
"Well, then, you're already going to hell, so you might as well get the lenses; you'll see the brimstone better." --Amy Barksdale, Daria
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They only do NTSC playback, not recording. I don't have one, but my understanding is that they don't actually convert the NTSC to PAL, rather they output some sort of hybrid signal that most modern TVs are able to cope with. I would guess they convert the colour/luminence coding but leave the picture at 60Hz, 525 lines (or whatever NTSC is, I forget) in the hope that the tv can sync to it.
I wouldn't bank on it, DVD drives were intentionally crippled at the insistence of the movie industry. The world was divided into 5 zones and DVD players for one zone won't play videos produced by another. I believe the zoning can be circumvented though if you know which wires to snip or something, also there are some non-zoned players, I think they sell them in Japan or somewhere. Mind you I might be out of date on this: I know a lot of people were saying they wouldn't buy one unless zoning was abandoned, so the situation may have changed in recent months.
-Shez.
Shez writes:
*snipped my question & Shez's response*
I thought the manufacturers made CDs and laser discs so the problem with videotapes wouldn't recur. Therefore I thought this technology would overlap into DVD territory. I'm waiting for them to be around USD$200 before I buy one. I still hope when I do buy one I won't have any problems with DVDs from other countries.
Robyn Lesley
"And when she shines she really shows you all she can." --Duran Duran, Rio
"Well, then, you're already going to hell, so you might as well get the lenses; you'll see the brimstone better." --Amy Barksdale, Daria
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Call me cynical, but the manufacturers and record companies seem to me to have rued the day a worldwide standard (CD) was brought in. Rather than to have worked to invent one and improve compatibility, they've spent enormous amounts of time, money and effort on encrypting things so you can't copy them and on adding facilities to tie disks to a single region. This (IMHO anyway) killed DAT, for example.
The PAL/NTSC incompatibility (and for that matter PAL/SECAM if you happen to want to send tapes from the UK to France) is there because different colo(u)r TV standards were decided on when colour (or color) TV was first brought out in the countries involved; technical decisions were taken to use one standard or the other. Also when color (or colour) TV was first designed and broadcast, there were FAR fewer video tape machines around than there are now, and less intercontinental travel, so compatibility or the lack of it between the standards of different countries just wasn't important. Some countries used different standards for political purposes (for instance I seem to remember that the German Democratic Republic deliberately used a different standard from West Germany so that East Germans couldn't watch West German TV easily).
As Shez says, DVD has been *intentionally* crippled to avoid people from (say) the UK buying DVDs cheaper in the States than they can get them at home. CDs in the States seem to cost about the same numerically in US$ as they do in £ (which means they're about one and a half times more expensive in the UK); the DVD manufacturers naturally want to keep this sort of ripoff - sorry, "differential market" - going.
Make sure you ask about this when you do buy one, Robyn!
Setting followups to poster as this is getting well off-topic!
Shez wrote:
Having bought a DVD a while ago, I can tell you that they still have that stupid regional coding thing, but a lot of titles are internationally coded. (But many aren't-- I guess they're finding new ways to toture people overseas by dribbling out movies... I've never understood the practice m'self.)
rich.
"Unethical is only two letters away from ethical..." -- Paul Michael Mercurio
This is quite correct, cirtainly what my video seems to do with an american tape...unfortunatly this kinda confuses the TV card in the back of my computer which wants PAL format signals to be 50Hz....still I can actually watch the episodes...just that I get a frame and a bit (due to PAL having more lines), or if I set the video format to NTSC I get full frames, but in B&W only :-)
Yeah I have a friend that has one of the un-zoned DVD players, had to have it shipped in from the states tho....and yes cirtain DVD players can have the zoning info cicumvented by hardware hacks much akin to the ones that allow you to use 'backup' disks in your playstation....
Oh Yeah thatnks again Bob, have now seen Through a Lens, Daria!, Daria Dance Party & The lost Girls......
Phill.
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