Is This True

[HighPlainsDrifter]

Someone i know told me if you where to buy a DVD over in europe, you wont be able to watch it on your DVD player in the US.......DVD's and DVD Players are compatable only in regards to you live........is this true?

If not can i buy MM Season 2 on Ebay or AmazonUK, and still watch it on my DVD Player here in St.Louis,Mo?

[Guest Seraphim]

DVD is divided into 6 regions. North America is 1 and Europe and Japan is 2. Players are designed, generally, to play only discs specified to play in such re gion. However, even if you get a R2 or a Region 0 (plays all regions) player, you'd still have to deal with the different video foramt. North America and Japan are NTSC. Most of the world uses the PAL format. It's strange as PAL is inferior to NTSC. Unless you have a TV that can run in PAL format, getting a player that can play it is pointless. The picture will likely scroll horribly on a NTSC tv

[Guest OS_]

The easiest way is to use a computer to watch the dvd, the regions are pretty easy to hack and you don't have to worry about the different video formats.

And PAL isn't inferior. It has higher resolution and better color. Both systems have frame rate issues. https://www.alkenmrs.com/video/standards.html

Edited September 26, 2004 by OS_

[Guest Chascarrillo]

There are DVD players that play all regions and also perform PAL-to-NTSC conversions real-time with no loss of quality - the most common are by Malata - and so don't require a PAL TV set. There are PAL-to-NTSC conversion boxes available from stores like Radio Shack, but you then have to get a region-free DVD player (or a player from the region that the disc is from) - and even then those boxes are fairly expensive (they're more commonly used by video transfer companies).

Hopefully, one of these days the courts will rule region encoding as illegal - which it quite likely is - and we won't have to worry about these arcane problems.