VHS Video Pal

Moving from one country to another is a culture shock in many respects, but most people don't realize that movies brought to a foreign land may not work with that country's electronics. Take a trip from England to the United States, for example. All movies from the UK are in the PAL video format, but America uses the NTSC system.

If this were the case, the person moving would be stuck with their collection of VHS videos PAL without a VCR on which to play the videos. Sending the tapes back home to a friend or family member may cross some peoples' minds, but there's really no need to do that. With the proper VCR, PAL movies can be played on an NTSC TV, and vice versa.

One of these converter VCRs is somewhat of an expensive investment, but it can allow someone to watch all of their movies from their existing collection, and to purchase more movies from back home. Some folks may suggest selling off the entire used VHS video lot for money, but many titles released in the UK aren't available in America on VHS, or even on DVD.

The fact that many titles that were released on VHS aren't available on DVD yet is why most people hang onto their old video cassettes. It's a shame too, because it's much more affordable to convert PAL to NTSC when you're dealing with DVDs. However, when you factor in how inexpensive used VHS video tapes are these days, perhaps owning and converting PAL VHS movies to NTSC isn't as expensive as some may think.