[DougieD]

I need to burn some DVDs for friends in Europe, and from what I've read I will need to encode as PAL in order to for European PCs and DVD players to read them.

Is there anything else I should know about burning media for viewing in Europe? Is there any way to confirm the burn will play (short of buying a DVD player manufactured overseas)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[tsantee]

Your Mac plays PAL and NTSC discs so if you create a PAL DVD and play it on the Mac, it should play fine on PAL DVD players.

[opalla]

Most modern players in Europe "understand" NTSC and put out
a "PAL 60" signal, which is kind of incomplete, regarding to NTSC/PAL specification,
but can be displayd well (with colors) by european TVs.

Converting from NTSC to PAL reduces quality massively, if not done by
high quality (expensive) converters.

Send your friends a NTSC dvd, it will do.

I'm sitting in Germany, I know what we're talking about ... ;-)

[tsantee]

Most modern players in Europe "understand" NTSC and put out
a "PAL 60" signal, which is kind of incomplete, regarding to NTSC/PAL specification,
but can be displayd well (with colors) by european TVs.

Converting from NTSC to PAL reduces quality massively, if not done by
high quality (expensive) converters.

Send your friends a NTSC dvd, it will do.

I'm sitting in Germany, I know what we're talking about ... ;-)

I agree.

[DougieD]

Thanks so much for your help. I should have explained why I asked about testing. I've already sent some discs I burned using Toast to friends in Europe, but they were unable to play them either on a PC or standalone DVD player. This time around I thought I'd burn them using PAL and see if that does the trick.

Any idea why my friends in Europe might not have been able to watch the discs I sent? I tested them here before sending on a Mac, PC and standalone DVD player, and they worked fine.

Thanks again for all your help!

[tsantee]

Thanks so much for your help. I should have explained why I asked about testing. I've already sent some discs I burned using Toast to friends in Europe, but they were unable to play them either on a PC or standalone DVD player. This time around I thought I'd burn them using PAL and see if that does the trick.

Any idea why my friends in Europe might not have been able to watch the discs I sent? I tested them here before sending on a Mac, PC and standalone DVD player, and they worked fine.

Thanks again for all your help!

I can't guess why those discs would be any trouble. As I mentioned, computers don't care if a video DVD is PAL or NTSC. As long as it has a valid VIDEO_TS folder at the root level of the disc it should play. Did you use a good quality of blank disc?