Of Muppets & Men

[Skeeter Muppet]

Originally posted by Amy
I would just LOVE a copy of the book but you simply can not get it in my backwards little country!!!

Two words: E-Bay.

Wait...wouldn't that be one word?


-Kim

 

[Billy's Girl]

E-bay? What is this?

 

[anathema]

Originally posted by scarecroe
It's included on the Region 2 DVD release of The Very Best Of The Muppet Show which will ship from Amazon to the US. You'll need a region-free/all-region DVD player to play it though.

There's a bit more to it than that, the player will also need to be able to handle PAL discs, which I gather ain't too common in the US.

 

[scarecroe]

Originally posted by anathema
There's a bit more to it than that, the player will also need to be able to handle PAL discs, which I gather ain't too common in the US.

Aren't all (or most anyway) Region 2 discs formatted in PAL? I wouldn't worry anyway, as I've never heard of a region-free/all-region DVD player that couldn't handle PAL, SECAM and NTSC.

 

[anathema]

Originally posted by scarecroe
Aren't all (or most anyway) Region 2 discs formatted in PAL? I wouldn't worry anyway, as I've never heard of a region-free/all-region DVD player that couldn't handle PAL, SECAM and NTSC.

Nope - Japan is R2, and NTSC (same as the US). There's no such thing as a SECAM DVD (actually, there's no such thing as a PAL or NTSC DVD either, but that's a much longer story

It would therefore make a lot of sense to have a US player modded for R2, since Japanese discs would play straight off, but you should still check for compatibility with European discs, just in case!

 

[scarecroe]

Originally posted by anathema
there's no such thing as a PAL or NTSC DVD either, but that's a much longer story

So then why should someone be concerned with making sure their region-free/all-region DVD player is going to play PAL? As far as I understood, PAL was the video format used in the UK.

 

[anathema]

Originally posted by scarecroe
So then why should someone be concerned with making sure their region-free/all-region DVD player is going to play PAL? As far as I understood, PAL was the video format used in the UK.

Yes and no What's commonly referred to as 'PAL' is indeed the video format used in the UK and most of the world outside the Americas and Japan. That said, it's a misnomer - PAL is only actually the colour system. The main video image is more correctly described as '625/50', which is used by most countries, including several which don't use PAL for the colour. The Americas and Japan use '525/60', usually with NTSC colour. In each case, the first number is the number of lines per picture, and the second is the number of fields per second (a field is half a frame).

It's this '625/50' bit which your DVD player needs to be able to handle, in the same way that a UK player needs to be able to handle '525/60' discs if you want to play a US title. All UK players can do this, since (region 2) Japan also uses '525/60'. A R4 player (Australia) can handle UK discs which are coded for R4, since they use the same video standard as the UK, but is far less likely to be able to handle US discs. Similarly, a US player which can do '625/50' is not common, since there's not much of a market for European imports. Additionally, the US player would normally have to do a complete conversion on the signal, which is expensive, whereas the UK equivalent would rely on the fact that most modern UK TV sets can already handle a '525/60' signal (since there is a market for US imports over here

PAL, NTSC, SECAM and most of the others are analogue composite colour formats. Once you get into digital video, there ain't no such thing DVDs use the component YUV colour-space, or more correctly, the YCrCb space, which is entirely digital. The DVD player can convert this data to analogue PAL, NTSC, SECAM or whatever for connection to a TV, but the only technical difference between a 'PAL' and an 'NTSC' disc is the '625/50' or '525/60' image. The colour data remains much the same.

However, it's pretty much become a de-facto thing to describe the UK system as 'PAL' and the US one as 'NTSC'. This doesn't help when you want to talk about Brazil, who use '525/60' with PAL colour for broadcast! AFAIK their DVDs are labelled as 'NTSC'.

To complete the trivia, the various acronyms stand for:

- NTSC : National Television Standards Committee
- PAL : Phase Alternate Line
- SECAM : Sequential Couleur Avec Memoire

NTSC was named after the organisation that authorised it; the other two are technical descriptions of the systems. SECAM was developed to overcome certain problems associated with PAL, which was itself developed to fix the faults present in NTSC. NTSC is frequently called 'Never Twice the Same Colour', and with good reason ; SECAM stands for 'System Essentially Contrary to the American Method' (it's pretty much incompatible with anything, and was actually impossible to edit when first introduced) ; and PAL stands for 'Perfection At Last' (if you're European), or 'Picture Always Lousy' (if you're not

 

[Skeeter Muppet]

Originally posted by Amy
E-bay? What is this?

A website for auctions. You go to www.ebay.com and then type whatever you're looking for in the search box; in this case "Muppets and Men." Then you'll get a list of auctions that have that particular item up for bid. Of course, then you'd have to go through the whole headache of bidding and trying not to be outbid by someone else...

...but it's worth it!


-Kim

 

[aminal]

FORMAT

It says on the amazon advert under format that European machines will handle it, over here i thinkthey call them multi region players