This is actually the first of 3 posts regarding our latest discoveries in film literature.
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Here is a tidbit we came across recently regarding playing of off-shore origin DVDs on US domestic equipment....
Television broadcast/display encoding standards:
All TV equipment uses one of several format standards for decoding/displaying video information on TV monitors. There are 3 major standard categories worldwide: NTSC (National Television System Committee), PAL (Phase Alternating Line), and SECAM (SEquential Color And Memory).
The coverage areas for each of these 3 standards worldwide are:
NTSC: North/South America (except Brazil,Argentina, Uruguay), and Phillipines, SouthKorea, Taiwan, Japan.
PAL: Brazil,Argentina,Uruguay, Europe (except France), Asia except SECAM/NTSC areas, Africa except SECAM areas, Austrialia & Pacific
SECAM: France, former Soviet Union areas, Africa except PAL areas
Most TV equipment, unless the manufacturer offers multi-standard equipment option, uses a single standard.
In the US, most equipment is NTSC only, with some exceptions.
DVD Region Codes:
The DVD zone code is a copy protection method, which uses a single digit number 0-8 and ALL. All DVD playback equipment is set for the single Zone in which it is principally used, with some exceptions. Computer DVD drives use a single Zone number at a time but limited number of changes of Zone.
DVD media is set either to a single zone, or more recently, enabled for ALL zones. The zones are:
0: None, or informally implied "worldwide"
1: US,Canada, US Territories, Bermuda
2: West/Central Europe, West Asia, Egypt, Japan, SouthAfrica, Swaziland, British overseas territories, French overseas territories.
3: SouthEast Asia, South Korea, China(Non-PRC)
4: Oceania, Central/South America, Carribean, Mexico
5: Ukraine, Belarus, Russion, Africa, Central/South Asia, Mongolia, NorthKorea.
6: China(PRC), HongKong
7: Reserved for future or other use
8: International venues (aircraft, cruise ships, etc)
ALL: All codes set, playable on any venue or equipment
Why all this?
We have all hitherto been oblivious to this, because US media is all Broadcast std NTSC and DVD Region 1,
hence this designation is considered uniformly implicit in the US, hence there are no markings whatever of this kind on US domestic media. One only cares when purchasing exterior origin media productions, in which case one must look carefully for correct markings to assure playability.
We have recently purchased a number of international film items, and all of them were MARKED as to Playback standard and DVD region. All but one were marked NTSC/ALL and all of those played. We did not make any note of this until one was marked PAL/ALL and did not play on our home TV system player. The culprit in that case, was the TV broadcast standard PAL, which caused our PHD domestic appliance player not to be able to even read the Region code to determine that it was ALL. The DVD did play on all of our laptops, which are apparently smart enough to recognize and adapt to the PAL/NTSC issue. Now it is known why on some occasions we have recently been seen mysteriously gathered round a laptop to view a DVD.
So now you know and are proactively informed of this fascinating bit of trivia.
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