Road Bike Racing - Dwars door Vlaanderen

Won by Baden Cooke. Peter van Petegem had a chance until the last Km. These "tours de cobblestones" are great fun to watch!

Cheers...Gary

Any chance you could tape a few and send them across the pond?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that the TV format in Europe is different than the US. They use PAL format in many countries and we use NTSC format (we are all slowly moving towards HDTV I guess).

Conversion costs a bunch. I remember a bit of this from days in a corporate video job. That's why Euro TV looks better than ours. More scan lines per inch. Figures:(

I never understood the whole bull**** - PAL here, NTSC there... the same problem I have with those Region 1 NTSC-DVD´s. I don´t know why they don´t use one system worldwide. Maybe a license thing or just to seperate markets and to earn twice...

:mad:

Video players can sometimes play both (mine records in PAL but will also play NTSC) and I've sold PAL videos to the states.

Richard

The formats for VCRs are as described above. You can buy VCRs that record PAL, and play both, which we did because of having a bunch of tapes from the USA. You can also get dual recording ones as I recall, but they are incredibly expensive. And as mentioned, they can be converted, but it is usually expensive.

While the VCR format thing (not to mention Beta, etc.) are real technological infighting issues for businesses. The DVD region thing is pure marketing and sales cartel stuff. Producers want protection in their own regions. Of course, there are many ways around that, and mine was to buy a French model that can be changed to all-region via the remote. You can get chips, and firmware writers, and all sorts of other types of fixes, though warranties usually go away if you do.

Lately, one company (whoever put out "The Perfect Storm") has apparently built out-of-region blocking into the alternate header blocks on the DVD. Now that was pretty crass, in my opinion.

Cheers...Gary

For Region 1 NTSC-DVD´s I use my DVD-ROM and this DVD-Genie-Software with which you can switch the regional settings. So no real problem with that.
I heard about those region-free DVD-Players but I assume they are not really good and usable yet. A friend of mine bought one in Switzerland and it works, ok, but it has difficulties with NTSC. Colors are strange, red becomes a kind of green and so on. So, you don´t have much fun with NTSC-DVD´s. But this seems to be an error of this specific player I assume.

Mine works a treat (I have had it over a year now). I buy DVDs everywhere in Europe and the U.S. with have had no problems at all changing regions. The neat thing with the Thompson is that I can change back and forth using the remote control. :)

Cheers...Gary

I'll have to check my VCR manual but, even if my VCR doesn't play PAL, I can easily convert and transfer at my university's media lab. I am a journalism professor after all...

So if any Euros want to send tapes to the Northern colonies, that's be just marvie!