HD-TV in Europe
 

I plan on getting Sky-HD soon. (it's a package with HD channels, mixed with SD) Mainly for my tv I recently brought.

Anyway, Sky has 10 Movie Channels (1-10) with two HD Movie Channels. It's 12 really, but the HD are duplicates of 9 & 10.

None of the films they show are in widescreen, so does anyone know whether they'd show the films in widescreen on the HD channels?

Mainly a european question, but their site has nothing.

Danke.

Eh? Sky's movie channels have shown everything in widescreen (where appropriate of course) for several years now. It might be that your digibox is set up wrongly, since IIRC the default setting is to crop all 16:9 material to 4:3.

Since an HD broadcast is always widescreen, and all HDTVs in the UK are widescreen, I'd say it's a certainty that Sky's HD movie channels will show movies in widescreen just as their regular movie channels do.

under theory, wouldn't PAL HiDef have greater clarity than NTSC HiDef?

NTSC and PAL don't factor in when discussion high-definition resolutions. I'll leave a more definitive response to someone like Josh Z, who's much savvier about what different countries are doing than I am, but I believe both Europe and the U.S. are using the same resolutions for their HD material...it's the frame rate that could potentially differ (24fps for filmed content vs. 25fps). There's a thread about this on AVS.

My big question is: wouldn't that mean a disc that's R0 would play on either machine regardless of PAL or NTSC?

Dunno about R0, but as far as other regions go, here's what Synapse Films' Don May, Jr. had to say:

I have a number of R0 NTSC DVDs I could use to test and at least one R2 PAL disc, but I don't have any region-free PAL discs.

I thought Europe was SECAM, when you state Europe you're including the UK -right?


nearly all the DVD-Singles I get from the UK are region free PAL, which incidently play on my non-modified Phillips player (who knew?).

SECAM is almost exclusively used in/around France, but this has nothing to do with HDTV either. SECAM is a standard definition video standard.

thanks for the explanation there, I never understood where or what SECAM was implemented.

Well, they're not supposed to be region free for SD-DVD's. I didn't expect that they would be. BUT...I'm curious to know if they would handle PAL since, with HD, there really is no NTSC/PAL any more.

Telewest Cable is the same. There isn't a setting on the box (and a friend received a newer box that didn't have one either) that will allow the change from 4:3 to 16:9 so all of the films are in 4:3 even if you have a 16:9 TV. I can't say whether or not the HD channels will be the same since I don't know if they'll supply a different box for it.

I was in Dixons today and some other shops and they had Telewest Cable HD and also SkyHD and compared to some of the HD demos that were being displayed, the channels looks terrible. It was the first time I'd seen them though so there's the possibility that it wasn't setup properly (in two different shops...).

SECAM is also just a broadcast standard. DVDs in SECAM countries are released in PAL format. (There were SECAM VHS tapes in some countries, but it wasn't widely used.)

The Toshiba HD-A1 will not play PAL DVDs regardless of region coding. As you say, there really is no NTSC/PAL when it comes to high-def, so that shouldn't even be a factor to worry about.

But it will be for people in other PAL countries. That's what I'm talking about.

I'm sure they'll release a PAL version of the player for those countries, just as most manufacturers do for regular DVD players now.

Any idea when it will be available in Israel?
 

How much it will cost?
Thanks