Do video CDs have to be created specially for being able to play in countries where SECAM is the standard? I have seen a lot of discussisons in this forum about PAL and NTSC, but not about SECAM. Appreciate any help.

-- K. subramanian (ks2@pacbell.net), April 15, 2000

Answers

The VideoCDs are not *really* PAL or NTSC. They should rather be called 288/25 and 240/29,97 instead of PAL and NTSC because this is the only thing that differs among them: the rate and dimensions of the frames.

NTSC, PAL and SECAM are in reality analog TV standards involving framerates and scanlines, but also a buch of features such as bandwidth, colour coding, luminance modulation, audio carrier, etc, etc. as well, which have nothing to do with VCDs. The VCDs themselves contain just plain frames, digitally coded, and a header indicating the rate at which these frames are supposed to display. The VCD players then pick up these frames at the desired rate and add all the other necessary things (frequencies, colour coding, etc) in order to transmit to the TV a legal NTSC or PAL signal.

I'm not absolute sure about SECAM, but I believe to recall that it shares with PAL the framerate of 25 (legally 625/50 just like PAL), so if this is correct a so called "PAL VCD" could be equally and fairly called "SECAM VCD" and so then it's a job for the VCD/DVD player to send a SECAM signal to the TV. In short, the player needs to be SECAM.

-- Matias (mpetrel@fi.uba.ar), April 18, 2000.