guba.com has a wonderful documentary on the Roman Empire directed by Serge Tigneres, who I think is a Spaniard living in France, for France 5 TV, produced & funded by NHK Tokyo, and run through SBS TV Australia (and narrated by David Ritchie) for the British and Aussie market. It is in PAL and there is no US Region 1 variety.
While one may download the 6 clips and edit them together , all but the first of 6 are in a slightly different letterbox and audio codec. I ended up settling for a two-part video, the fist of 6 and then 2-6. I should have sprang for the DVD, but why purchase a disc when I'll just have your trouble of region every time I wish to see a favorite? Technology can be a drag (especially when the greedbags that be are doing their thing) sometimes. What you are experiencing sounds like a video codec issues, not a region issue. May be a new DV or HDV-PAL which (I think) are h.264. And while the output of the player must be to frame size and minimum frame rate, the encoded video doesn't. That's where codecs come in. *HOW TO CONVERT PAL DVD's to NTSC and VICE VERSA* *(Edited Version)* Most countries in the world use the PAL video standard which has a frame rate of 25 frames per second (fps). The US, Canada and Japan use NTSC which has a rate of 29.97 fps. Most DVD's are encoded from videotape with a rate of 24 fps and are interlaced. The MPEG streams on the DVD contain instructions regarding how to treat the video information for display depending upon the type of DVD player. For example, to play a stream in PAL format, each frame of the video is shown twice, video and audio data is interlaced and both audio and video are "speeded up" by 4%. The audio then becomes slightly sharp from its original recording, The data can be displayed non interlaced (progressive scan) for component (RGB) video and on computer monitors. While not an authority, this isn't bad: Many DVD players are supposed to be able to play both types of video formats. You could test this with a DVD that has been copied with removal of region codes. Perhaps the manual from your DVD player contains instructions as to how to view both systems from the menu control. If your player gives a message "not NTSC" or "not PAL" if probably won't work. With the message "wrong region code" when an NTSC or PAL disc is inserted, try a copied disc as mentioned above. There are no doubt PAL DVD's in countries favoring NTSC and vice versa. Those who visit other countries and purchase DVD's there may be surprised when the title cannot be watched when returning home. You can purchase "Region FREE" DVD players from a variety of sources. These have the region checking disabled and chipsets that will display all types of media. I purchased one of these and it did work but with significant vertical columnar artifacts which could not be removed. These devices can be very expensive and where is the warranty for a hacked device? They are not necessary for viewing DVD's on a computer when region codes are disabled. Newer elaborate copy protections do not affect playback on a computer, either, since you are not copying to the hard drive, just decoding the VOB's with software. With four DVD players in the house, it seemed to me to be much simpler to convert the purchased DVD's with PAL format to NTSC and watch the copies. On 10/26/2010 1:04 AM, Horst wrote: > Thanks Bob, >
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