Philips HDRW720 User manual - Page 85

ENGLISH Chapters Also known as 'scenes', a DVD movie can be broken up into sections much like the chapters of a book, that can be accessed quickly and easily via the DVD menu or remote control. NICAM NICAM is a digital sound transmission system. Using NICAM, you can transmit either 1 stereo channel or 2 separate mono channels. However, if reception is poor and the sound distorted you can turn off NICAM. NTSC National Television Systems Committee. The color TV broadcast system used in the US, Canada and Japan. An NTSC picture is made up of 525 horizontal lines and has inferior picture quality in comparison to the PAL system. All Australian-sold DVD players are NTSC compatible, however DVD's that are played on a television that is not compatible will appear in black and white. Region code Since DVD films are not normally released in all parts of the world at the same time, all DVD players have a specific regional code. Discs can be given a regional code. If the regional codes differ between the player and the disc, playback is not possible. The regional code of the DVD recorder is shown on the type plate at the back or bottom. Pan & Scan One method of converting a widescreen movie to fit in a standard 4:3 television is known as letterboxing (described above) and the other commonly found process is Pan and Scan (also known as Panning and Scanning). To retain a fullscreen 4x3 image, the most important part of each scene is chosen and the left and right edges of the scene are cropped. Obviously, this process results in a loss of some data and does not fully represent the film as it was intended to be portrayed by the director. As such, DVD enthusiasts are not overly fond of DVD's authored via this method. Macrovision Macrovision is a copy-protection technique intended to keep you from making copies of DVDs with your VCR. It works by continuously adjusting the video signal level that results in a recording where the brightness of the picture continuously fluctuates between light and dark, and the color levels fluctuate between oversaturated and washed out. Macrovision "encoded" DVDs contain a bit of data that tells the DVD player to activate its internal macrovision circuitry in order to prevent copying. Regional Coding A security system introduced to DVD at the request of Hollywood's major studios to ensure that DVD's released and sold in one region will not play on DVD machines in other regions. Movie distributors therefore maintain control over release dates of their films, as well as enabling discs to be produced that conform to different censorship laws, language and subtitle requirements. When a DVD disc is manufactured, a region code is applied at the authoring stage such that the final disc will play only on those players distributed in the designated world region. 78