Help! Overseas playback question (Monaco).

[William Smyth]

I have a corporate client that I produced a video for. I delivered them both a DVD and a BluRay disc (both NTSC). Now, they are attending an industry trade show in Monaco. The venue is providing them with an HD Monitor and a DVD player (I assume both are PAL, but the PR person I'm dealing with from the company is not technically savvy, nor has she been able to get me a direct conversation with someone form the venue). So, I contacted local dub house about making a PAL DVD for them. (Not cheap, by the way).

Also to throw a wrinkle in to my situation, the client, hand carried an US bought BluRay player, with a power converter to Monaco. Will an NTSC BluRay player, with an NTSC BluRay disc work with a European HD monitor?

Adding to the confusion is that Monaco uses something called C/PAL, GL/SECAM.

Aaaargh...

Thanks!

[Andrew Dean]

I doubt this is much help, but here in New Zealand (pal land) as long as you don't have a region-lock player and a region-locked dvd, our dvd players are happy playing both pal and ntsc dvds. (never tried bluray, sorry).

Its totally worth trying to poke your existing dvd into a player in monaco if that is at all possible. The u.s. is ntsc-only and 110v-only for consumer electronics, but the programming and hardware in the rest of the world tends to be multi-system. I would say the odds are leaning in your favor that what they provided will play back your disc. Thats not a guarantee, of course, but its totally worth shoving your dvd in to find out before remastering a disc for that purpose.

Cheers!
-a

[Liam Hall]

PAL, NTSC, SECAM etc are standard definition analogue TV formats. HD is HD and it's digital. Your client will be fine - assuming he has the right cables.

[William Smyth]

Thanks Andrew.

Thankfully I heard from the man himself, the man in charge of all things technical at the show. It turns out that a PAL DVD is what the need. I'm happy that that is a fairly simple solution.

[Chris Soucy]

If you created the DVD yourself, as long as you did not set a region code when burning the disc (all burning software sets the region code by default to 0, play all regions) then it will quite happily play in pretty well any PAL DVD player.

(An aside: Many PAL region DVD players now have, by default, the region code set to 0 straight out of the box, so that it doesn't matter whether the DVD has a region code set or not. Those that have it set to something other than 0 can be hacked to set it to 0. You just need to do the appropriate Google on the make/ model number and it will come to light.)

As for the NTSC, 60 Hz 110 - 120 Volt BluRay, all Full HD screens will play any flavour of HD whether 50/ 60 HZ based, so the answer is yes, it will work with a PAL region Full HD screen.


CS