Video Asylum

Posted by Aroc (A) on April 09, 2003 at 09:45:46

In Reply to: Authenticity of Pink Floyd Pulse DVD needed....please posted by musicluver on April 08, 2003 at 11:44:08:

When I tried to play it it would not work in my 5 year old mitsubishi dvd player. Thats the first time that my player refused to play a disc. It gave a message reading, " not an ntsc disc".

Emphasis mine. Sounds like it might be a PAL (european, etc television) encoded disc and not a NTSC (united states, etc television) encoded disc. If your DVD player was the NTSC type, that would explain it.

I went to good guys and found a JVC dvd player that played it fine and I bought it.

It might be PAL capable or maybe does PAL-->NTSC conversion. The latter would be a useful feature. Especially if you plan on viewing lots of PAL content.

The disc plays fine on the JVC player though and the color quality is ok..not really dvd quality though.

Maybe it is a home brew version (encoded from vhs, beta, whatever) or perhaps the PAL-->NTSC conversion is causing the degredatation? (If that conversion is indeed occurring.)

I did search on this topic in google. I found this (a listing on Amazon U.S.) which seems to suggest the north american ntsc dvd has not been released yet. But this is by no means an "official" declaration. you may need to follow-up with the record label (or equivalent) to get an official answer. Additional hits in google seems to suggest this north american release may have been planned for March 2003. But I found no hard data.

Google did find some instances of a PAL encoded version of the disc. See http://www.musiccdvideo.com/view/4958.html. There were also several BBS postings that suggested a PAL version was available on DVD. Most of the mentioning RE: the NTSC DVD alluded that either 1. it wasn't released yet or 2. was planned for March 2003.

My gut feeling is that you may have an "authentic" PAL DVD. how authentic "authentic" is, remains to be verified. But is does seem that this DVD does in fact exist, authentic or not. It seems to be passed off as it is the real deal. Perhaps it is a real PAL disc? maybe someone else will have some more thoughts? Also try posting on the avsforums over at AVS. Lots of home theater ad DVD gurus over there.

:-)