I am working on a DVD project that will involve direct marketing in the US and abroad.

I need to know what nations use PAL vs NTSC as their DVD formats, and whether a DVD produced here in the US with region coding set to 0, and output in both NTSC and PAL will work in players in the US, Canada, Europe, the Mideast, Asia and South America.

It's not a small project, and we are preparing to finalize our duplication numbers.We want to target the right DVD video format (NTSC or PAL) to the right area and the numbers of each will be affected by the areas they play.

I've seen information on region coding, but I can't seem to find a breakdown on PAL vs NTSC. (And what does that mean in areas that use SEACAM?)

Can anyone help?

Someone else may post a high-tech answer: I don't have that knowledge.

Slightly off-topic, I am wondering if your campaign assumes that the intended recipients of your direct marketing all have standalone DVD players or whether you are also aiming for PC-users having a DVD drive?

My limited experience suggests that in some places there will be more people who just have a DVD player in their PC. Quite possibly of limited interest to you at this time, there is a FAQ on this site concerning DVD-ROM: link

If that did prove to be the result of your research you may coinsider that producing a VCD will ensure that your message is spread more widely. A low-tech option, I know, and not the answer to your question(s).

I have a link to that I think on my old site, let me see if it works...

http://www.geocities.com/freeregiondvd/tvstandards.html

Yeah, that's a listing of major countries and their TV standards.

PAL and SECAM are encoded EXACTLY the same way in DVD land. It is up to the player to be programmed to play SECAM if needed.

Wow. That was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for the information, it will be a great help as we finalize our duplication numbers and prepare to send out the DVD's.

In response to off-topic, the demographic group that we are targeting with this material is actually almost as likely to have a PC with a DVD-ROM slot as a stand alone player, so we are targeting both and have included a Web based section and hotlinks.

As a practical matter, most people in the PAL world have multi-standard TVs and thus can play NTSC DVDs with no problem, but in North America practically all TVs are NTSC only. Thus if you are to pick one standard, a R0 NTSC DVD would be playable by the greatest number of people.

Ted

<small></small>.... anyone?

In Europe, the higher end TVs are capable of pulling the RGB signal from the DVD player, which also can play NTSC DVDs. They have a much easier time than us R1 NTSC folks on watching R1 NTSC titles.