bit player
New Member
Have never posted here before but here goes. I have recently become interested in viewing VHS tapes from England (they actually seem to have a relatively free press over there, unlike the U.S.). Their video tapes are encoded using the PAL format. I don't know exactly what all the differences are between our NTSC and their PAL format, just that PAL uses 625 lines at 50 frames per second whereas NSTC uses 525 liunes at 60 frames per second. I have some tapes I want to buy but nothing to play them on. You have to spend at least $100 on ebay to get a used PAL-playing VCR (a new PAL/NTSC player will run you $300). The thing is, I have fixed a bunch of VCRs in my time, and there are several laying around that work fine. The fact that I have seen VCRs on ebay that play both PAL and NTSC indicates to me that there is nothing mechanically different that needs to be done (well, what I mean is it appears that you don't need two separate physical video head drums, for example, but then I'm not sure). What I am wondering is, what kind of job would it be to convert an NTSC VCR to play a PAL tape. Would that just be totally undoable? Would love to here any opinions on this.
As a computer programmer, from a programming point of view, if these VCRs were somehow constructed in software, and assuming the only differences are as stated above, and assuming you had access to the source code, it would be CAKE to reprogram it from 525 lines to 625 lines, and from 60 to 50 fps, assuming the original programmer did a good job. It would just be merely redefining 2 global constants. I am just hoping/wondering if your typical VCR might possibly be designed in such a way that this kind of trivial tweaking could actually do that job, or perhaps replacing/adding a few components here and there.
As a computer programmer, from a programming point of view, if these VCRs were somehow constructed in software, and assuming the only differences are as stated above, and assuming you had access to the source code, it would be CAKE to reprogram it from 525 lines to 625 lines, and from 60 to 50 fps, assuming the original programmer did a good job. It would just be merely redefining 2 global constants. I am just hoping/wondering if your typical VCR might possibly be designed in such a way that this kind of trivial tweaking could actually do that job, or perhaps replacing/adding a few components here and there.