Josh English <eng### [at] spiritonecom> wrote:

>I hate to ask this in a public post like this, but I'm in a bit of
>dilemma. I have to send a video tape to a friend who lives in Australia
>adn I need ot know if an American VHS tape will work or if there is a
>different standard in Australia. My local video experts know nothing
>about it, so I need to know how much more difficult this will be.

We use PAL, which is a different encoding format. The big difference is that we
use a different frame rate (25/50hz rather than 30/60hz), and have more lines
in each frame (i.e. the vertical resolution is higher).

The reason for this is simple - US TV's use 60hz since that's your power line
frequency. In earlier TV's, having a different frame rate than the AC power
would have caused banding/interference. Since Australia uses 50hz AC power (and
it's 240 volt rather than 110), we use 50hz (interlaced) TV signals. The lower
frame rate allows more lines to be packed into each frame, within the same
chunk of bandwidth. Hence the higher resolution ;)

Since NTSC tapes, therefore, have -lower- resolution than PAL, it is possible
to play them on Australian TV's, -provided- that the video cassette player that
your friend uses is a relatively modern one (since most of the newer ones have
NTSC playback as standard).

The converse isn't necessarily true - I doubt you'd be able to get a tape from
him and play it on your NTSC player, since it'd need to step up in resolution.

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