i'm trying to buy a movie from amazon.com and it says "NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Great Britain," will the DVD still work in an american DVD player ? how will i know if my tv can handle it ?
TVs - 3 Answers
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1 :
If your DVD Player is multi region and your TV can handle PAL format (america uses NTSC) then yes otherwise no.
2 :
USA/Canada/Mexico use the NTSC system. Its images are 4:3 and 720x486. It has a frame rate of 29.97 frames per second. EU/Most other places in the world use the PAL system. Its images are 5:4 and 720x576. It has a frame rate of 25 frames per second. The two systems are incompatible. Devices in the US won't play back content (like DVDs) designed for EU (British) equipment. You would need to buy a multi-format DVD player (not cheap). Reg.2 means Region 2 (Britain). North America is Region 1. So again North American devices won't read the disc. You again need a multi-region player (not cheap). And even if you do have a mutli-region DVD player, its going to playback the format it gets. So it will spit out PAL. Which means you need a multi-format TV or a PAL to NTSC converter box (not super expensive, but another added cost). Multi-region electronics are specialty and expensive. If you just bought a normal TV for a good/average price and same w/ the DVD player, they won't be multi-region. Some DVD players can be hacked to become multi-region (google around for your model #). But that can't be done for the TV. So then you'd need to find a PAL capable TV or buy a converter box (an example, http://sewelldirect.com/mayflash-pal-to-ntsc-converter.asp ) DVD drives in computers can sometimes handle it though. But the catch is that quite often the computer will only allow you switch regions so many times before it locks the computer. So right now your computer is region 1. You buy the disc and play it and you've changed to region 2. Next time you use a north american disc you switch it to region 1 again. Voila, you've already burned like 2 of your 5 changes. So not too helpful. You could try that and see if the computer will do it for you. You could then along the way use some software to "rip" (extract) the contents and make a digital file. Then you could play that out to your TV using a media streamer (like stick it on an Xbox 360 or PS3). A lot more complication and work though.
3 :
I have noooo idea!
