Whats the difference between PAL and NTSC?
There are two television display systems in commercial use: PAL (common in Europe and parts of Asia) delivers a scanning/frame rate of 25 frames per second, while NTSC (used in the U.S. and Canada) delivers a scanning/frame rate of 29.97 frames per second. Currently there are no DVD players that convert from PAL to NTSC or vice versa. However, many PAL DVD players are able to display NTSC video on televisions that support what is known as the 60-Hz PAL system. For all DVD players in the U.S. and Canada, NTSC is the exclusive system in use.
In the “old days” of analog broadcasts and video tapes, PAL and NTSC video were so vastly different that only a special (and often very expensive) VCR or VCP could play both kinds of tapes. In fact, in those days, there were several types of PAL, several types of NTSC, a weird NTSC/PAL hybrid, and the unpopular SECAM formats. In the analog days, color systems were entirely incompatible, the framerates were different, and resolutions were different, and the power supplies were different per country. The digital age condensed everything into simply PAL and NTSC, saw the implementation of worldwide power circuits (only the plug is different), color was all stored universally as YUV data, and both framerate and resolution could be digitally augmented to suit the desired display.
