US video cd's in UK? Can do?

[oceaneer]

If I d/l some camcorder footage to a computer here in the US and burn it to a CD, will the resulting CD play in a cd player in England?

(The object of this exercise is to send home movies to the folks back home simply) but will it work, and if not how can I accomplish this?

Thanks

[gt40]

someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe anything you record on your dvd writer will be zone free- it will play anywhere.

the only issue is the ntsc/pal one.

[Peter B]

It will depend on your Folks dvd player, if it can play NTSC (USA format) as well as PAL (UK format) you will have no problems.

However, if they can use PAL only the you will need to create PAL VCDs, this is achieved in the encoding process. PAL is 25 fps and a resolution of 352x288. NTSC is 29.97 fps and 320x240.

Depending on how you encode it this could cause some issues. I would first produce an NTSC one in your native format and send it. I live in a PAL country and nearly every DVD player can handel NTSC. This is not necessairly true in reverse, USA market is so big they can make models exclusively.

If you need to convert your footage to PAL I would use Tmpgenc, select PAL VCD and allow it to convert the frame rate. I haven't tried it but if that has problems you may need to try Virtual DUb to change the frame rate and frame serve it to TMPGenc

[Ray Austin]

I would say burnt to a cd it should work fine. Like mpeg1 or WMV.
But let them know only to play it in the computer. It won't work in a set-top player.

I think if you burnt it to a DVD that is where you may run into problems. But burnt to a cd windows media player will play it, so it would be universal.

DVD is dealt with differently.... and would more than likely need to be in PAL format.

[gt40]

As Peter B said, it will be dependant on your DVD player. I have played PAL encoded svcd and dvd on my Samsung here with no problem.