I recently purchased a VHS music video thru e-bay from a person in Great Britain. When I try to play the video in my VCR it runs at too fast a speed (like playing a 33 1/3 record at 45 rpm).The picture is totally obscured and the sound is like the Chipmunks. Is there a different setting I must use to play this video? Thank you! Uncle
I assume that you’re in the states… Grate Britain’s video format is in PAL. The United States, among with other selected countries, is in NTSC. PAL broadcasting system relies on 25 frames per second. NTSC is broadcasted, or filmed, at 29.97 fps. The difference in frames per second is causing your purchased VHS tape to play back in faster frame rate than originally recorded—hence the chipmunk sounds. The only way I could think to overcome this obstacle (and by no means the only one); purchase yourself a PAL format VHS player if your purchased VHS tape is THAT important. You can, then, view the tape or even use the player to feed through the computer to convert into NTSC format. ShowBiz has the capability to convert from NTSC to PAL and vice versa. However, I have noticed that my collection of Wallace and Gromit played a little bit slower and it was cropped the very top and the bottom of the screen. This phenomenon is caused due to the difference in video dimension between PAL and NTSC.
