I recently bought a Philips dvd-711 and when i tried to play Dragonball Z Buring Battle(VCD), all i got was a grey picture and crappy audio. But i played Godzilla 2000(VCD) and it played fine. I was wondering if the DBZ disc was in PAL format and that the TV couldn't understand it. If so should i get a different player, and what would you suggest. Keep in mind i have a NTSC TV.

Thanks for the help.

-- Jeffrey Richardet (jeffreyrichardet@msn.com), September 08, 2000

Answers

No it cannot. You can check by opening the .dat file in Mediaplayer and right click on the video and select statics. If it's 25 it pal, if it's 23.97 or 29.97 it's NTSC.

Pal generally looks BW and flickers on a NTSC tv.

-- eric (eric@nospam.snowmoon.com), September 08, 2000.

DVD players in general sense what framerate a VCD video stream has and output in analogue: if 25fps then the output is PAL and if 29.97fps then it's NTSC. No conversion is done. To keep up with that you then have to have a multi-system TV. Changing your DVD player won't help.

-- Mehmet T (turk690@yahoo.com), September 09, 2000.

I have a pioneer, and like all pioneer they have a flexable frame buffer. They decompress the source then output it to your system. I can playback PAL VCD's or SVCD's without a hitch. It does all the conversion for me. So the DVD does matte to some extent.

-- eric (eric@nospam.snowmoon.com), September 09, 2000.

I have a Philips 725 bought in August 1999 and it does on-the-fly conversions to NTSC for playing on a PAL TV. I also have multisystem TV's which of course do not have the same problems.

So far no one has complained about not being able to play my PAL VCD or SVCD demo disks in the States and not all who have received them have multisystem TV's. The 711 is a later model and I would be surprised if it did not do an on-the-fly conversion from one TV system to the other.

Is there a difference in the commercial VCD product v's those that we make in our PC's that may cause an interchange problem?

-- Ross Mclennan (rmclennan@esc.net.au), September 12, 2000.

The 711 will also convert NTSC for a PAL tv, the problem is it wont convert PAL to a NTSC tv. I just called Phillips and they said they don't have a fix for it. I'm thinking of getting rid of it. Any suggestions for a decent dvd player that plays PAL and NTSC vcds on CD-R's ?

-- Andy Strawn (andystrawn@yahoo.com), December 17, 2000.

I had a Philips Magnavox DVD Player awhile back. When I tried to play a PAL VCD from Hong Kong it displayed everything in color with sound but the image was stretched out and the subtitles were off the screen.

I sold the player because of this problem (yes really) and plan on getting a Pioneer DV-C503. I've heard it will play both NTSC/PAL discs (even on cdrw's) and even display them in the correct format. So if it in PAL and you have an NTSC TV it will display them correctly and do all the coverting somehow.

I've also heard Apex DVD Players will do the same thing.

I'd rather go with a SONY 5 disc DVD changer but i'm not 100% sure if it will play NTSC/PAL VCDs!

(the pioneer seems like a cheap piece of junk, sorry)

Hope this helps!

-- Travis Dockweiler (tdockweiler@hotmail.com), December 27, 2000.