Video players
 

I know this has been talked about before and I have looked at search but I need a quick answer.
Will an English Video Player play on a Canadian tv or will I have to ship out an English tv.
We are already here in BC but my daughter has some video collections she wants to ship and Im debating whether to buy new or let her ship them.

Re: Video players
 

UK videos will only work in a UK player. A UK player will only work with a Canadian TV if the Video player is able to output in both PAL (UK) and NTSC (North America) signals. I don't even know if video players are multiregion, I've only heard of multiregion DVD players.

To summarise: I wouldn't bother shipping them.

Re: Video players
 

Your best option would be to convert them to DVD and take those instead.... You must know someone with a DVD Recorder that could do this for you...

Re: Video players
 

yes my parents have one but its not that, its just my daughter who is 17 and still in england is giving me grief over coming to live in canada next year and so i am making her pack up her stuff now as our house has been sold so she will only moan if i tell her she cant take her collections too, its just an easy get out for me i guess!!!!

Re: Video players
 

Videos i seem to remember were also regional,try in an electic shop and ask if they can make it code free,as you would a DVD

Re: Video players
 

It's the video that is the problem. The VHS format is the same but the UK tapes will be encoded as PAL where as North America is all NTSC. A UK VCR will usually only output in PAL, some newer ones (if you cans till buy them) will output NTSC as well but only if that is the native format of the tape, i.e. if you put in a PAL cassette you get PAL out, if you put in NTSC you get NTSC out. To get one that will convert, i.e. you put in a PAL tape and it converts it to NTSC and outputs NTSC is more specialist and expensive. When I first moved to Canada several years ago there was only really one available at regular stores like Future Shop. It was a World VCR and did all the different formats and converted but it cost over $500 so was kind of only if you *really* need your tapes and back then there were no DVD recorders. Now I would do as stated above and have them copied to DVD. I did have a couple of tapes, such as our wedding which my Dad did on a PAL camcorder and my graduation and a couple of other things converted to an NTSC VHS tape at a conversion store.

With the TV it is making sure the TV can display the format you are outputting. So you can bring a UK PAL VCR to Canada and plug it into a 240V transformer and probably get it to work (not sure if the 60Hz cycle will throw off the drive motor, hopefully it is new and all electronic DC.). Trouble is your VCR will only be outputting your PAL VHS tapes in PAL format so you need a TV that can display PAL. Highly unlikely a North American TV will do it because there is little demand for PAL. Probably you are more likely to get it in a Japanese or cheap imported asian TV that might be made to display every format so they can ship them to any country. A loy of UK TVs will display NTSC, maybe because there is a demand for NTSC DVDs from the US (you get the same PAL vs NTSC issue with DVDs on top of the region coding). So probably if you really really wanted to play the tapes you should being both a UK VCR and UK TV and set the thing up as it's own system somewhere out of the way in the basement as no one will ever use it. You also have connector issues. SCART doesn't exist in North America and most TVs have built in cable tuners that take a co-ax cable or they have digital inputs like composite/component/HDMI etc. You won't get an RF connection and would need an RF Modulator to connect it. Most VCRs have a composite video output but usually UK ones used to mostly presuming you used SCART.

future Shop I just looked now only sell one VCR and Best Buy only sells two, or 3 models of DVD/VCR combo, none of which will convert PAL to NTSC.

One other thing you could do is stick a TV card in your PC and input the UK VCR to your PC and then output that in NTSC to your TV, that might work ok if you can get the VCR to work properly.

Re: Video players
 

My teenagers wanted to bring their videos so I just shipped the lot ....... TV, video, CD player, PS2 & games.........I'm glad I did as it's all in the basement & the kids often use them :thumbsup: also, it's 1 less thing for them to moan about :o

After about a year the TV broke & my son was gutted as he uses the PS2 on it but managed to get the TV repair dude here to fix it ........ yaaaay :)

Re: Video players
 

Akai make a multi zone Video tape deck, (they also make multi zone DVD).
It's good but ain't cheap though. Might be cheaper to buy some new movies.
http://www.planetomni.com/MSVCR_AKAI...00eg_DTL.shtml

Re: Video players
 

I know that it's common for British video players to accept NTSC playback as well as PAL, but it's probably very unlikely that US/C ones work in the same way.

If the videos do technically work in the recorder and it's just the PAL / 50hz playback that's the problem (not sure), the solution that I employ for my PAL Playstation 2 is to hook it up to a VGA box which enables me to use a computer monitor instead of a telly. A bit asinine but it costs more to import a telly than to actually buy one. :P

Re: Video players
 

Go here and ask

http://forum.videohelp.com/

Re: Video players
 

Note that this is primarily a problem with older TVs; the HDTVs I used at work would accept both PAL and NTSC signals, since they had to scale it to fit the screen either way.