widescreen black bars not aligned

[Beowulf]

I made a backup of this imported PAL Region 2 DVD I bought from the Netherlands. I had to convert it from PAL to NTSC because I do not have a region free DVD player. I had no problem doing this because I have done it before.

The DVD is only available in widescreen, so when I finally watched the copied DVD the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are not straight or aligned properly. I made three seperate copies and they all had the crooked bars. I was wondering if it was something I did or is the source DVD just crap? Thanks

[Mug Funky]

try looking at the source as well :) it may be the culprit.

also, i've noticed some TVs are a tad crooked in the image they play back (mine for instance...), so it could just be a wonky TV image, but i'm sure you'd have noticed it before.

btw, couldn't you have just removed the region-protection and left the video as is? or by "region-free" do you mean "NTSC only"?

i wish there were no need to standards-convert. PAL land is almost there - just a few legacy TVs that were sold prior to the eraly '90s are PAL only - everything else out there can do all formats. it should be like this the world over, but unfortunately some countries refuse to recognise the existence of other standards :devil:

that said, NTSC discs sell really badly in australia, but they are available, and play perfectly in all but the most antique of equipment (even an old '50s B&W TV can play back both standards if you mess with the vertical-hold. colour encoding is a problem though, so it doesn't work on colour TVs unless you output PAL 60, which is a sort of hybrid standard).

[theReal]

PAL 60, which is a sort of hybrid standard AFAIK Brazil uses this, called PAL-M. It's the PAL system with 525/60 (as opposed to 625/50 in Europe)

[Shinigami-Sama]

yeah
i;d love a hybrid tv
but my hd is close, it'l play back pal clips w/o problems, on the moni however..
but everyone once and a while the bars look crokend on my tv
but meh