Region Free Question (1 Viewer)

[Daryl Stovall]

Jeff, I believed you mentioned earlier in another post that you have a Malata. Does it have a pal speedup problem when playing reg. 2 Buffys'? I'm seriously considering biting the bullet & purchasing one.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Daryl, I don't have a Malata. I recommend them but I'm suffering with an APEX 600-A for PAL viewing

I don't think you quite understand how this workd

Theatrical film, and most TV shows are shot 24 frames per second (fps)

PAL is 25 fps

NTSC (our TVs) are 30 fps (well, 29.97, but close enough)

Since you can divide both 24 and 30 evenly by 6, you can perform what is known as 3:2 pulldown, which basically means that you go 3 frames, repeat 1 frame, 2 frames, repeat 1 frame, 3 frames, repeat and so on. This allows easy transfer to NTSC.

However with PAL, given that you're dealing with an increase of 1 frame per second, it's impossible to evenly distribute repeated frames. THEREFORE the film is sped up by 4% to compensate.

The speedup is present in the signal, the original data file. Some software DVD players for PCs claim to adjust for speedup, but your mileage may vary there. I've found it to be buggy at best.

So in summary, NO PLAYER ON THE MARKET compensates for speedup, and software solutions are iffy at best.

 

[Jeff Mason]

Actually, while Jeff is correct, you can adjust for speedup on some models and get close to the actual (true) speed, however there are limitations.

Some DVD players designed for Karaoke have incremental pitch control. On my machine, this is in preset increments, which amount to about 3.5% each. Therefore, I can slow down PAL discs by 3.5% instead of 4%, which at least makes the viewing a lot more pleasant. The downside, of course, is you can only do this with analog audio output, so you wouldn't be able to take advantage of digital 2.0 or 5.1 tracks with this scenario.

Just some information for what it's worth.

 

[Daryl Stovall]

Just Ordered/purchased the Malata 520S region free player.
Should have it sometime next week. Is this considered one of their better models?

 

[Daryl Stovall]

Rec'd the Malata 520S, but to my surprise the remote doesn't have a on/off (power) button, is this common with this/all Malata models? Other than that, it works fine. In fact the PAL speedup isnt as annoying as in some other the prior models i've experienced.

 

[Adam_ME]

Rec'd the Malata 520S, but to my surprise the remote doesn't have a on/off (power) button, is this common with this/all Malata models?

No, it's not common. The previous model, the N996, had a power button on the remote. I don't mind having to turn off the player manually, but this causes it to reset the settings on the scaling feature. It's the only major complaint I have with the 520.

 

[Daryl Stovall]

Thanks. I'm somewhat of a novice to the technical aspects of dvd player bells & whistles, but what is scaling & the benefit of it?

 

[Jeff Kleist]

You can "blow up" a non-anamorphic disc to fill a 16:9 screen and you can eliminate overscan