worth to buy NTSC DVD?

[johnhamler1]

I am in europe, and will go to the USA soon.

is it worth to buy US dvd when the PAL has a better quality?.
580 lines instead of 480?

in this case I will take my burner with me, but I try to save some weight when I take my laptop on the plane.I have already eavy binders to take with me.
and I dont have one of these small DVD burner installed.

how much cost a DVD burner external in the USA?
how much good media cost?
here in this f### EU it is around 0.8$ per disc.
do they sell spindle of 50, good quality at walmart?

how much cost DVD at a blockbuster to rent? :D

edit: Wilbert corrected title :)

[Dimmer]

If you intend to watch DVD on a regular TV in the US then you'll have no choice but to buy NTSC DVD since there are no PAL TV sets available to the general consumer. There are cheap ($50) players that convert PAL to NTSC on the fly but of course with a loss of picture quality.

If you plan to watch them on a computer then by all means bring your own DVDs.

If your main interest to bring some new DVDs back to Europe, you'll have to rent some and see for yourself whether it's worth it. US DVDs often have more extra features than European ones. Transfer quality sometimes is better, too.

External burner would probably start from just over $100. Check on-line stores to get idea about the pricing.

As for the spindles, there is no way to tell if the discs are good without buying one. It could turn out to be Taiyo Yuden just as well as CMC for 40 cents. You can also find Princo for 10 cents and genuine Verbatim in jewel case $3 each.

[Mug Funky]

for movies (especially mainstream stuff like hollywood/european), the PAL version will be better.

for TV shows that originate in the US or other NTSC countries, it's often best to get the NTSC version, simply because the PAL ones will come from the same source and be standards-converted. quality will be no better in this case.

of course, there are exceptions depending on the budget of the show and who licensed it, etc. some companies care more about PAL than others.

also, special features depend more on who releases the discs (and with what budget) than what country they're released in - there's good stuff and crap in all countries.

so i'd say stock up on your favourite TV series while you're in the US, but don't bother with movies.

[zilog jones]

of course, there are exceptions depending on the budget of the show and who licensed it, etc. some companies care more about PAL than others.
I think these "exceptions" are becoming a lot more common with more recent shows, as a lot of stuff is now HD mastered, especially in the case of filmed US shows. But even if you look at, say the PAL version of the A-Team, it looks like a proper PAL master (though maybe it was remastered recently? I dunno) - but then compare this to Cheers, which is a hideous blurry mess.

[scharfis_brain]

The "A-Team", "Knight Rider", "TOS - Star Trek" and lots of other 70's and 80's series had been shot on Film and had been transferred to PAL by doinig a completely new telecine to PAL, because standards conversion in this time was more complicated/costly than doing a new telecine.

That's why these series look better in PAL than in NTSC, even if their origin was NTSC-land.

Today, a cheap fieldblending conversion of such video is much cheaper, than a new Telecine...

[MvB]

One Question related to quality:

Lets say, we have 8 Mbit/s NTSC-Film, Resolution 720x480, 23.976 fps (not video!).
Does the PAL version normally have a higher biterate? With the same bitrate the PAL version should be about 20% less quality than the NTSC version, or not (25 fps, 720x576)?
Why are a lot of people always telling PAL would be better?
As of my own experience i prefer a crisp an sharp NTSC picture over the very often less sharp PAL picture of similar bitrate. NTSC has less physical resolution, but should have a higher bitrate/pixel.

Do you think it's possible reach the subjective picture quality (e.g. sharpness) of a high bitrate NTSC film (23.976) with a PAL DVD?

[zilog jones]

It depends on what you regard as "quality" - either the higher bitrate, or the higher resolution. Though, the main reason I prefer watching film on PAL is because of the smoother telecine - 3:2 pulldown has always looked uneven and "jerky" to me.

[scharfis_brain]

@MvB: hmm. I have several DVDs here, whose image is so crisp, that aliasing occurs!
Those DVD are flickering like hell on TV :)

I like that :)

Of course, there are also a lot of PAL DVDs whose origin was a 480p-source, which has gotten resized and sped up. This is - of course - pure evil. But it is due to lazyness of the DVD-producers, and their ability to produce a superduperhypercrisp NEW DVD-transfer :(

[bongoman31]

I prefer Best Buy to Walmart for media; but that's just me. Best Buy has sale on Verbatim's right now, for about $ .35

[Mug Funky]

whoa... wrong thread?

anyhoo:
Do you think it's possible reach the subjective picture quality (e.g. sharpness) of a high bitrate NTSC film (23.976) with a PAL DVD?

YES! :)

depending on the source and the encoder used, MPEG-2 should be reaching perceptual transparency at around 6500kbps avg for both NTSC and PAL. this even includes field-blended stuff, or whatever. the only blips are where quantizers have to be raised steeply to keep under max bitrate.

also, hypersharp, flickery, shimmery pictures are not very pleasant to look at (even on a progressive screen!) - it's called "aliasing", and i see it all the time on NTSC sources, unfortunately. most PAL stuff looks kinda soft because (a) it's been standards-converted, and hence resized, or (b) a vertical filter has been applied to prevent (or at least mitigate) annoying shimmering from too-sharp an image.

line shimmer is theoretically more of a problem in PAL because of the lower refresh rate, but in practice it looks less bad because the lines are smaller and closer together. it's a trade-off. the data-rates are very similar for NTSC and PAL, but one has more spatial resolution, and one has more temporal resolution (which is often wasted seeing as film most certainly does not go at 30fps!).

however, 23.976 NTSC with rff flags will give more bits-per-pixel than PAL, for the same number of frames. it's rare that this will translate into extra quality, unless the film is being pushed to the extremes of low bitrate - like Blade 3, which has the cinema release AND the director's cut on the same disc, or Ong Bak which has the french cut and the thai cut on the same disc*



* though we went to considerable pains to make both look the best that they could, including having some poor tester-monkey watch it like 10 times looking for blocks, and some poor encoder-monkey chipping at the bad bits until it all looked awesome.

[Joe Fenton]

however, 23.976 NTSC with rff flags will give more bits-per-pixel than PAL, for the same number of frames. it's rare that this will translate into extra quality, unless the film is being pushed to the extremes of low bitrate - like Blade 3, which has the cinema release AND the director's cut on the same disc, or Ong Bak which has the french cut and the thai cut on the same disc*

Unless you get SuperBit DVDs. Sometimes called something else, what these type of DVDs do is use EVERY SINGLE BYTE on the DVD for storing data. Instead of using a fixed (average) rate and filling (for example) 2/3 of a DVD9, they adjust the bitrate to fill the entire disc. This is the one case where you will see a difference in quality between NTSC and PAL.

[MvB]

I have some of the superbit editions, e.g. fifth element. And what i see there i've never seen on pal dvd regarding quality.

Does anybody know if there is a superbit - PAL equivalent?

But maybe you're right and there is normally not so much difference between the versions of a movie on PAL or NTSC dvd except the pitch and speed.

[scharfis_brain]

here two examples for VERY nice and crisp transfers:

1) Star Trek - Insurrection
http://home.arcor.de/scharfis_brain/samples/crisp-aufstand.jpg

2) Falling Down
http://home.arcor.de/scharfis_brain/samples/crisp-fallingdown.jpg

I do also own other DVDs with such crisp PAL images.
And they are definitely no superbit editions.

Examples for supercrisp PAL can also be found in Music-Videos.
eg. Holly Valance - Naughty Girl

[Mug Funky]

This is the one case where you will see a difference in quality between NTSC and PAL.

dunno about that one. like i say, NTSC has more room for bits/pixel than PAL when pushed to the max, but we're talking about where these encodes are in the realm of being perceptually transparent.

also, for a superbit encode to completely use every bit, it'd have to be a constant-quant encode, which is impossible within DVD specs. the last superbit i scanned was a linear quantscale with a "half-mpeg" matrix (that is, the standard matrix divided by 2, rounded down), averaging a quantiser of 1.8. it was a pure film (ie 100% film, not some 99.9% thing or anything). bitrate never got above DVD max - the DTS-ES and AC3 tracks.

a lot of PAL DVDs could be considered superbit, but i don't know of anyone who's released any (though there's tons of DVDs that are at max bitrate all the way through - that's just good practice if your feature is short enough).

i consider it good enough if one can't tell the difference between the digibeta and the encode (barring colour issues, as these media use different chroma sampling which can be visible on certain sources). i guess to me it's the difference between LAME's presets - a standard encode (~190kbps) and an "insane" encode (320kbps CBR) will sound exactly the same pretty much all the time, and if something fails on the standard encode, it's likely to also fail on the insane one. mpeg-2 is much like this with regular and superbit - IMHO the differences are unimportant, and on shorter features the difference can be nonexistant. the most important factor is the master quality, not the encode quality - no amount of bits will remove dot-crawls and the like.

[edit]
Examples for supercrisp PAL can also be found in Music-Videos.
eg. Holly Valance - Naughty Girl

lol home and away! (sorry dude)
a lot of ads are super-sharp too - i think because ads are short enough that the producers can afford decent stock and decent telecine, whereas most australian film is still shot on 16mm and graded in analog.

[Joe Fenton]

IMHO the differences are unimportant, and on shorter features the difference can be nonexistant. the most important factor is the master quality, not the encode quality - no amount of bits will remove dot-crawls and the like.

I'll agree on that. The differences on a good transfer from a good master between the different formats is probably beyond the ability of the average person to discern, but a poor transfer or poor master is obvious to just about anyone.

[johnhamler1]

what about the sound 5:1??

here in europe, sometimes, it is not synchronized, can you believe that?. they sell us movie with bad sound!!!

scandalous!