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Quick note: PAL DVDs are not necessarily better than NTSC DVDs

Posted by Christine Tham (R) on February 22, 2008 at 20:53:34

In Reply to: Welcome back :-) posted by Ole Lund Christensen on February 21, 2008 at 10:14:45:

*** Remember many of my DVDs are PAL, much better than NTSC. ***

Yes, PAL as a video standard has a higher frame resolution than NTSC, but unfortunately life is not quite so simple.

I have reviewed hundreds of PAL Region 4 DVDs (which are often the same as Region 2 DVDs), and in many cases compared them directly with Region 1 NTSC DVDs.

PAL DVDs theoretically should be better than NTSC DVDs, apart from the following issues, which are rather common:
1. Many PAL DVD transfers originate from an NTSC source. If you freeze frame many PAL DVDs, you may notice NTSC to PAL conversion artefacts - typically combing due to a two NTSC frames being composited onto a single PAL frame (as PAL has a lower frame rate than NTSC).
2. Many (in fact at one stage almost all) PAL DVDs are authored with the progressive flag turned off, which confuses many deinterlacing algorithms. Worse still, some PAL DVDs are encoded in interlaced mode even though the source is progressive. If you have a good DVD authoring tool, you can rip DVDs and inspect their encoding parameters. What you discover for PAL DVDs may shock you.
3. All PAL DVDs authored from 24 fps film suffer from a 4% speed up in audio. Many people, including myself, notice a difference in audio quality caused by this speedup. Even some DVDs that try to compensate for the pitch shift (eg. Lord of the Rings PAL version) introduce additional artefacts from the pitch normalization process (which is audible to people with good ears).

Because of the above problems, I generally avoid buying PAL DVDs unless they are really cheap and I'm not that fussed about quality. I have seen PAL DVDs that look better than the NTSC equivalent, but I have never encountered a PAL DVD that sounded better than NTSC, and sound is pretty important to me.

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