TVs compatible, from one continent to the next??

Actually, the real problem was that the networks didn't give a damn about getting the color right.

This changed (I think) sometime in the late 70s. I've owned a number of color TVs since then (want me to list them?), and don't remember even once having touched the Hue control (incorrectly called the Tint control on most sets).

It's significant, though, that if the average [censored] is given free hand to adjust the Hue control, flesh tones almost always wind up on the green side.

There are specific standards for color temperature and color accuracy. Any "good" set should have a user selectable setting for 6500D. Many sets have have essentially perfect primaries ("perfect" in that they meet the standards). Most sets have slightly "off" tracking, however.

Left to my own devices, I tend to set the color temperature rather high --

The principal problem is that the out-of-the-box settings almost always have the brightness and contrast jacked way up, so the naive viewer will be impressed. This is roughly equivalent to "the louder speaker sounds better".

When was the last time you adjusted the Hue control on an NTSC receiver? That's not a rhetorical question.

The over the air signals were also spaced differently than PAL and instead of FM audio like everyone else in the world, they used AM. So even if you could maniptulate your TV tuner into picking up the video signal, and did not mind watching it in black and white, there was no sound.

The rest of the world that did adopt SECAM used the PAL over the air channel spacing and audio carriers, so that a PAL VCR could record/play the signals with very little modification if any at all and a PAL TV could play them in black and white, with audio.

The system was called MESECAM (Middle East Secam because many arab countries adopted it). I think the Warsaw Pact countries, Soviet Union and China (PRC) also did, but the Soviet VCRs ran at a different speed than the regular ones.

There was also NTSC 4.43, which was a 60Hz NTSC signal with the color subcarrier at 4.43 mHz. It was developed as a cheap way of adding NTSC capability to multisystem VCRs and TV sets, but was never broadcast over the air.

That's why I said that the OP must of either spent the last 30 years under a rock or in the US. In the US no one cared, everything was NTSC or converted to it for sale, while elsewhere in the world, everyone was trying to get multisystem TV sets and VCRs.

You could buy them the US too, but only in stores that catered to foreigners, visitors and sailors on leave.

Geoff.

The reason I care is the opposite of that. There are only two DVDR-with-harddrives for sale in the US, and one is cheaper than the one I have, which itself is inferior in design. The other may be better or not. However there are other models for sale in Australia, and probably other parts of the world. I want to buy one from Australia and use it here.

What i had in mind wasn't** a multi-standard receiver but their adopting one standard for the whole world, something they didnt' do with B&W or color tv, for understandable reasons.

From reading the first few replies I guess the reason there is no single standard now is so that the digital tv would play on analog televisions, that making a set-top box or digital to analogue converter which would also change frame rate was considered hard.

(Strangely it does refer to needing matching regions, but gives no indication on the box, on the player, or in the manual, what region it is. My friend said it played the US and Europe and Japan, regions 1 and 2.

If that is the case, how is it possible I have a DVD that is PAL, but all regions?

(I bought it by mistake, didn't notice the PAL, can't play it on my DVD player**, but can on the computer. **The DVD player in the other thread is broken.)

There are three possibilities of video encoded on DVDs. NTSC film (24/1001 frames per second), PAL (film and video 25 frames per second) and and NTSC video 30/1001 frames per second.

The video encoding is based upon the source material.

Region encoding has absolutely nothing to do with the source material, it has to do with encryption method to limit sales in various countries.

DVD players sold in the US will automatically play the video on the disk as NTSC unless they use an HDMI output, where they will may just pass it and let the TV set figure out how to play it or convert it anyway.

The same with DVD players sold in PAL countries, however most of them have a setup option to either convert everything to PAL, convert it to NTSC, or leave it the way it is for a multisystem TV.

Geoff.

But thoss were in the analog signals. When they went to digital, why didn't they stop using PAL or stop using NTSC? That is my point.

What tied them to both PAL and ntsc at the same time?

Regional pride?

Or was it because they wanted current analog tvs to be able to receive digital signals that went through a set-top digital to analog converter, and some tvs wanted 50 cycle and others 60 cycle, so if the air-borne signal was the same, it couldnt' be converted to one of 50 or 60?

Please see my question higher up.

Sadly not when locked to mains as that frequency drifts. By rather a lot in electronic terms.

I think you're reading in the political bit. Different countries had settled on different mains frequencies rather before such things mattered much.

That is total nonsense. The TV licence is needed in the UK just to operated a TV receiver - regardless of where the progs are transmitted from. And they were single channel sets originally, because only the BBC transmitted TV and only the one channel. Not many in the UK would have been interested in French language broadcasts. ;-)

Think you're well into hindsight. When the UK PAL system was finalised (1960?), computers were some esoteric device in a lab. But in any case a major priority of any colour TV system then was that it can be easily receivable on a monochrome only set - and not make that set more expensive to produce.

What exactly do you want? Here in Israel you can buy a DVB-T set top box for 300 NIS ($75 US) with one having been on sale a few weeks ago for

It has a USB port, but no storage, which allows you to plug in a disk drive or USB memory stick, and record off the air. If your program provider uses the EPG (electronic programing guide) material, you can use it to set the device to record the programs.

The recordings are raw MPEG TS (transport streams) files. Which you can use a PC to convert to something useful. You have to unplug the drive from the unit and plug it into your PC, there is no PC to device connection.

I think the devices are single threaded, you can only watch one program, or record one program, or play one recording at a time.

You can also buy a USB tuner stick for 99 NIS that plugs into a PC and lets you use the PC as a TV set or PVR. They all come with included software, which IMHO sucks, you can buy a program off the internet called DVBViewer which is pretty good for 15 euros. Note that you will need around a 2.6 gHz (or the equivilant multi core) PC to properly decode and record 720P or better video.

You just need to be careful that the device you are buying supports the compression standard used for the video, besides the transmission standard. Israel's service is very new, so they decided to use H.264 video encoding and AAC (aka MP4a) audio encoding. Not all of the boxes on the market could decode them nor some of the programs for the USB sticks.

Geoff.

Why would the rest of the world want multi-standard TVs? You might if you lived within reception distance of another country with a language you understood well and it used a different system - but how often does this happen?

In the UK, PAL VHS would playback NTSC tapes on a PAL TV for many a year. Bit of a cludge, but it worked well enough for the poor quality of VHS.

"mm"

You trolling bloody IDIOT !!

..... Phil

Because they could. :-)

Seriuosly the digital standards were developed with keeping the old systems in play, even if they were no longer needed.

It really did not matter. Maybe in 1983 when digtially encrypted HBO satellite receviers were designed, but in 2005 when the US conversion started, it was simple enough to use anything they wanted and produce NTSC or PAL or computer RGB output or all three on a set top box.

The actual encoding is not PAL or NTSC anyway. H.264 which is the current standard for high end compression does not have a fixed frame rate. I mentioned that in a previous posting.

With a fast enough decoder chip you can take any resoltuion and frame rate and put out anything else. My Western Digitial TV Live unit will take almost any compressed video file up to 1080P60 (1080x720 60 frames a second) and put it out on the fly, with audio in sync from 480i60 (standard NTSC), or 560i50 (standard PAL), in composite, 480P60 or 560P60 in component, or digital in HDMI with several choices in between.

Why you could not slap an ATSC or DVB-T or the Japanese standard tuner chip (or all three) on it instead of a USB port or ethernet is more of a matter of product placement than anything else.

Geoff.

That's almost irrelevant. When the UK went to digital TV broadcasts (was that around 2000 with Sky's digital terrestrial service?) there was no no need to continue to support PAL. After all much of their material was NTSC anyway. They were encoding the signals in one place, so there was no restriction on what equipment was used except cost, and on the set end they could of used anything they wanted.

I expect they chose PAL because it was the existing standard, and they could buy subassemblies cheaply.

However ATSC was compeltely different. It was supposed to be a new standard, not a re-hashing of an old one. There was no need to keep NTSC compability as long as it could be created in set top boxes.

Note that there were and still are two other incompatble digital TV standards in use in the US. The cable companies use one of their own, and the DBS companies use a different one. Since there are two competing DBS companies, each using their own incompatible encryption, you could say there are four incompatible ones.

They all use some sort of MPEG TS transmission, but the streams can not be read with the other company's devices.

Geoff.

Actually, the sync pulses keep the horizontal and vertical scanning in the receiver at the same frequency and phase as the transmitted signal.

This might have been a consideration, but the principal concern was "hum bars" in the receiver. Modern power supplies are sufficiently well-filtered that this isn't a concern.

Actually, it's more like 1/3.

Actually, it was within the picture (luminance) information. NTSC has always had a potential video bandwidth of 4.2 MHz.

Actually, it was dropped because it didn't seem possible at the time to design a reasonably priced receiver that would take full advantage of this feature (in particular, the elimnation of the Hue control). Also, the US distribution system didn't have problems with non-linear phase, so PAL had little practical advantage.

Also, the original proposal used red and blue color-difference signals, rather than the more-efficient I and Q. The original NTSC proposal was virtually identical to PAL. (If you don't believe this, I have a copy of "Electronics" magazine that confirms it.)

SECAM stands for "sequential avec memoire".

SECAM was actually adopted because the French were idiots. They wanted a system that was relatively easy to record on videotape. Unfortunately, it made the receiver more-complex and expensive. A classic example of lousy engineering.

Actually there are more differences between PAL and NTSC color encoding than the alternation of the phase:

As a note, much of the advantage of points 2), 3) and 4) was lost on early sets which just used 0.5 MHz bandwidth for decoding both chroma components and bandwidth limiting the luminance signal to minimize chroma-luma crosstalk. Also most sets did not use the NTSC primary phosphors so a lot of the advantages of NTSC were lost for a few decades. When integrated circuits became available, dual bandwidth chroma decoders started appearing as well as comb filters to separate the luminance and chroma signals. More accurate phosphors were also gradually used in sets. The result was a major improvement in picture quality with the original 1953 broadcast standards. No such receiver improvement was possible with the PAL system. Regarding VITS, that was introduced, but very few sets used it.

David

No. Sky doesn't broadcast terrestrial signals in the UK. Satellite and cable only.

Terrestrial digital started in '98 with a consortium including the BBC and ITV.

So you think they should have gone to NTSC? Why would the Uk replace a better newer system with an older inferior one?

Digital was in addition to the UHF PAL service - with it carrying all the same channels and more.

PAL has nothing to do with any digital transmission. Some of the originating sources may still have been PAL at some point though. STBs had a PAL output for use with sets with no line input.

That applies to any STB. What goes in is irrelevant provided it will interface with the domestic TV.

So the US is in a bit of a mess? ;-)

That's business politics for you.

Wouldn't it be nice if you actually knew what were talking about?

Both NTSC and PAL use subcarrier phase to convey hue. (The amplitude is roughly the saturation.) Both systems are sensitive to non-linear phase errors.

Because PAL alternates phase between lines, the non-linear color errors are in opposite directions, and the eye tends to average them out -- at the expense of saturation. (Complementary colors sum to white.) High levels of non-linear phase can produce visible "saturation banding" on a PAL set, just as they can cause "color banding" on an NTSC set.

PAL was adopted in Europe because European distribution systems suffered from relatively high levels of non-linear phase. The American distribution system did not, so abandoning phase alternation was not a major loss.

The wildly inaccurate reverse acronym was based on sloppy engineering in the studio -- nothing inherent in NTSC.

I doubt that any American member of this group has adjusted the Hue control on their NTSC set for at least 30 years.

That isn't immediately clear to me. How badly would pahse alteration affect the frequency components of the subcarrier?

You left out 3.5. The I and Q primaries' color and bandwidth are based on how the eye actually perceives color. NTSC not only transmits more color information, but uses the available bandwidth more effectively.

Actually, most early sets (at least RCA) had full-bandwidth color. RCA continued to offer such sets for two or three years. I suspect many current sets using digital processing are full-bandwidth, but there's no easy way to know which is which.

Not that I'm aware of. Such sets require a second delay line, which runs up the cost.

Correct.

Oh? Why?

It happened all over Europe, all of the time. But the big draw was "foreign films".

No they would not. They had to be kludged to do it in the first place and often were.The TV sets had to be capable of syncing at 60 fields per second instead of 50, the video speeds of the recorders had to be modified and the NTSC color signals inverted every other line.

Those VCRs were actually multisystem VCRs with EXTRA circuitry to convert NTSC to PAL (by the line inversion). What they lacked was the 3.57mHz color carrier circuitry and may of had NTSC 4.43.

Geoff.