Greece Is The Word

MichaelS wrote on 6/8/2007, 8:52 AM

I've been asked to prepare a DVD for shipment to Greece. I'm concerned about compatibility.

The DVD will be for a consumer's personal use and prepared using DVDA.

Is it necessary to make the NTSC > PAL conversion, or is it reasonable to expect European players to handle NTSC.

Are there other options or avenues that I need to be concerned with?

As always, to everyone, thanks for your support!

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 6/8/2007, 10:59 AM

I asked my friends in England what format they wanted and they said NTSC. I asked my friend in Spain what he wanted and he said NTSC. I would guess you should inquire what they want as there are several different PALs.
JJK

JoeMess wrote on 6/8/2007, 12:11 PM

My team is about to send off our German masters to manufacturing and our French masters will be following in a couple of weeks. I spent a lot of time figuring out what the real situation is with DVD in Europe. It boils down to this.

On the audio side the Europeans pushed back dramatically on AC-3 being the standard for audio during the original ratification of the consumer DVD spec in the dvd forum. (Concerns about a mandatory royalty to Dolby.) Instead the European market would use MPEG-2 audio supporting 7.1 channels as opposed to AC-3's 5.1. The Europeans started to realize that this was probably a mistake, and changed the spec so European DVD players have been required to support AC-3 audio as well since 1997. On the video component, most mid to high end European players support playback and real-time conversion of NTSC frame size and data-rate to PAL frame size and data-rate, but the quality tends to be dodgy. We converted all of our video assets to PAL to support our European releases. (Thus native playback and no dodgy real-time conversion or risk of loss of bottom end players.) Auditioning your PAL project is a bit trickier. If you are going to do more/or commercial PAL projects, invest in an external monitor that supports PAL so you can see the native result. The DVD players on the US market that support PAL do really dodgy conversion as well, and your video will tend to look way worse than it actually is.

Best regards,

Joe

johnmeyer wrote on 6/8/2007, 12:33 PM

I know that parts of Greece use Secam. Not sure if that impacts anything. Never had any interaction with this standard.

JackW wrote on 6/8/2007, 3:46 PM

DVD Replica has a pretty good list, which I believe is comprehensive, of countries using PAL (http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/palnations.php), NTSC (http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/ntscnations.php) and SECAM (http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/secamnations.php)

If you want to cross reference these, take a look at this site : http://www.psreporter.com/secam_system_tv_standard.html

According to both sites, Greece uses SECAM Type B

Jack

MichaelS wrote on 6/8/2007, 8:36 PM

It's evident that I should do a bit more homework. I think I'll try to contact my customer in Greece to get specifics. The language barrier will be a problem, but maybe through the magic of Babel Fish I can communicate the question. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for the guidance!

newhope wrote on 6/10/2007, 6:00 PM

I have relatives in Greece and have sent PAL DVDs, I'm based in Australia and we use the PAL standard, to them without any problems. Haven't done anything on the 'commercial' scale though.

Basically, as stated before, a lot of PAL DVD players will do NTSC to PAL realtime conversion but you are btter off coverting to PAL yourself and supplying the DVD in PAL format.

SECAM, a French standard, works with PAL and there isn't a SECAM format for DVD that I know of so PAL is your best bet if you want to ensure compatibility.

Most PAL DVD players will replay AC3 audio but an MPEG audio track in addition to the AC3 is always a good fallback if space on the disk isn't a concern.

New Hope Media