[LINK] DVD chips 'to kill illegal copying'

[Adam Todd]

At 12:54 PM 20/09/2006, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>At 12:39 PM 20/09/2006, Adam Todd wrote:
>>Yep I send out DVD's globally.  Your problem may well be sending DVD's 
>>you make in Australia to the USA.  You will be making PAL encoded video 
>>and sending it to the USA where for some reason they aren't hip and up 
>>with technology like Australia and use only NTSC.
>
>I have wondered about this and sent one of those free Kath and Kim DVDs to 
>my sister. They could play it, no problem. ???

Yeah to the sister!  She must be a rare one!  I all too often have 
Producers, Exhibitors and Distributors tell me they can't view the PAL disk 
and can I send an NTSC one.

Pitty really, when you consider that PAL is 1 frame faster than FILM and 
NTSC is 5.97 frames faster than film, it's such a shame to destroy the hard 
work and artistic elements by shoving them into a sloppy frame rate!  Not 
to mention NTSC "Never Twice Same Colour" is a major issue where colour is 
concerned.  Maybe that's why they have Color, rather than Colour?

I'd have to suspect in the last couple of years at LEAST, that Displays 
(Plasma, LCD etc) are protocol detecting.  I can't imagine that such 
equipment sold globally for a global market would be software restricted to 
NTSC only.  TV sets however very much are as the US market is so huge it's 
cheaper to remove the PAL and other protocol chips or code to reduce the 
cost of manufacture and testing.

DVD players as far as I'm aware pretty much universally read any protocol 
format.  It's not the DVD drive itself that does the output, but the 
accompanying decoder and processor board.  Again, I suspect that in many 
cases it's cheaper to make a single NTSC decoder as 200 million units would 
sell for that specific purpose whereas only a few might sell for PAL so why 
worry about licence and code and etc.

There are NO American Broadcasters that broadcast in PAL.

PITA!