Episode #79
PAL vs.NTSC

I have some close friends living for 18 months in the US. They miss the football and other sports from Australia, which is not available on US cable. I record it on my hard drive, then burn it to DVD, then post it and 2 weeks later , they receive it. Their local bar owner wants to have an Aussie night for them and play some of these DVDs on the large screen he has in the bar. The problem is that US television is broadcast in NTSC and Australia broadcasts in PAL. The bar owners dvd/screen is NOT multi-standard and hence the dvds are useless, unless played on their laptop.(Not a great viewing platform) Question 1. If they connected their laptop to the bar screen via s-video, would it work on a NTSC screen? Question 2. Do you know of any easy, cheap software to convert from PAL to NTSC? Many Thanks….

Keiran, Brisbane, QLD



You might want to check your DVD burning software to see if it supports burning to both PAL and NTSC — if it does, your solution may simply be to burn everything twice — you’d have to convert from one format to another using proprietary software anyhow, and at the very least this will make sure it’s good to go for burning to DVD.

You may also want to have your friends check to see if the TV over the bar features a VGA or DVI input for computers (many of the newer flat panel and DLP screens do) — if so, it should be as simple as connecting a VGA or DVI cable from the notebook to the screen and then mirroring the notebook screen if it doesn’t do it automatically.

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