DVD's PAL - NTSC

What file format is used for DVD’s – some are ref’d as PAL or NTSC?
(TX’s standards!)

Wouldn’t they be a common format?

Thanks

MPEG2.

Which provides “D1” video, which is either 720×480 at 30fps, or 720×576 at 25fps.

The reason for the disparity is because motion, especially sideways panning, needs a very complicated process to make it look correct. If you have ever played an NTSC disc on a PAL unit, you’ll have noticed horrid judder. This is because the DVD player has a simplistic conversion method which is basically to play five frames and throw away the sixth.

However since the US (NTSC) and Europe (PAL) are in different “zones”, most of these issues are glossed over by the fact that region coding usually stops these effects being noticed. But, then, there are region 0 discs and there are half-assed conversions (I have a box set from around 1998 that was released as NTSC because they couldn’t be bothered).

These days with HD TVs and Blu-ray and such, it’s probably possible to kick the TV into a 60Hz move so it looks fine, something you often couldn’t do back in 1998.

Note: due to American exceptionalism, it is extremely common that a PAL DVD will be able to play an NTSC disc either by basic transcoding (frame dropping) or by outputting an NTSC signal (usually a lazy conversion to PAL-60 that a number of TVs of the DVD era are capable of displaying). The same is not true in reverse, many American DVD players choke with a PAL disc and simply cannot handle 576i signals. Though with the advent of HD baking in both legacy standards, this is hopefully less of a problem then it was…

And then you have Blu-ray at 24/1.001 (commonly referred to as 23.976) fps, which is usually sped up to 24 with most modern combinations of player and TV. It makes you wonder why they didn’t just record the discs at 24.

The same is not true in reverse, many American DVD players choke with a PAL disc and simply cannot handle 576i signals. Though with the advent of HD baking in both legacy standards, this is hopefully less of a problem then it was…

A US Playstation 3 will not play 50 Hz Blu-ray, whereas an international PS3 will happily play 60 Hz. Go figure.

What we think of as 30fps NTSC is actually running at 29.976fps. Because of this, and the prevalence of American equipment, they managed to bastardise the 24fps (ciné) frame rate with a 23.976 option.
Why? Simple. Broadcast. 23.976 can be converted to 29.976 with a simple 3:2 pulldown which maps 4 film frames on to 5 television frames. Because NTSC way back when decided that the simplest way to mask interference from colour information was to slightly tweak the frame rate (this making the interference become random noise instead of a fixed pattern), half a century later we are blessed with all these weird frame rates that just won’t die off. But, then, NTSC was a disgusting hack anyway, IMHO…

But, then, NTSC was a disgusting hack anyway, IMHO…

Absolutely. It’s a dodgy standard

It makes you wonder why they didn’t just record the discs at 24.

I just noticed that my Blu-ray of “Stargate” is actually true 24 fps. So it’s possible!

You can get MPEG decoders that analyse the motion vectors and reconstruct the missing frames.

I used to collect imported DVD’s twenty odd years ago, and built a PC which had a motion vectoring chip on the motherboard for MPEG2 playback. The quality was exceptional (for DVD at the time) and horizontal pans were smooth as silk.