PC Tv Card?

Question

HI. I Live in Europe where we have the PAL system and I bought and installed a NTSC PC tv card and all it gives me is bad quality sound-less black and white channels.

Is the reason cause its ntsc?

THX.

Answer 1

Yes it is because it is NTSC.

NTSC and PAL are similar. They should both be reverse compatible with the original black and white. But NTSC's Color Scheme and PAL's Colour scheme are different.

After NTSC was developed, it was given the nick name "Never the Same Color Twice" and the development of colour in Europe took this into account when developing PAL. NTSC does not have any self correction for color. PAL tries to deal with this color problem inherent with NTSC.

Other differences arise - NTSC is usually sent at 30 frames per second and PAL at 25 frames per second. This was due to interference cause by AC mains frequency and the old analog sets... North America being 60 Hz and Europe being 50 Hz. The idea was to line up the blanking pulse with the current. -- Most TV receivers can display 25 or 30 fps signals. The difference in the colo(u)r schemes of both systems also changed the total number of horizontal lines actually displayed in the picture. NTSC displaying 480 and PAL displaying 525.

So... ultimately your NTSC receiver is displaying the PAL signal at the lowest common denominator between the two systems... the original Monochrome signal that both systems were derrived from.

What is more odd is that you can't set your card to PAL. Almost every Video Capture card I have ever seen - Including TV Tuner cards have an option in their software to set it to NTSC or PAL. The TV crads also always had an option to set the RF channel tuning schemes to particular countries. So, take a stroll through the software settings of your card... You can probably set it to PAL.

--If not, there are other programs for accessing the video from your card, Try them --- They may have the option if your software doesn't.