A few vhs which I have brought from India wont play here?

The problem is that the intercarrier sound separation on the Indian pal system and the UK pal system is different. India uses a 5.5Mhz intercarrier sound while the UK use 6.0Mhz intercarrier sound. There is nothing that you can do to make them playable as they are encoded differently regarding subcarrier information

videoguy
October 2006

That answer is not completely correct - in fact it is wrong in most aspects. First of all, Video Casettes are not Region coded - Region coding is only on DVDs.

The next bit is wrong too. Simply put all VHS VCRs use VHS as their recording code. NTSC, SECAM and PAL are the three major video COLOUR encoding systems - India uses PAL.

It's not a daft system at all. The US uses NTSC because it was the first country to broadcast colour TV. Us Europeans, using lessons learned from NTSC, produced a superior system called PAL. (The US couldn't go to PAL retrospectively because of the huge investment in NTSC.) The French chose SECAM in order to protect their indigenous electonics industry. Other countries followed the big three systems.

You don't 'need a foreign VCR to play a foreign tape'. Most modern VCRs can play PAL and NTSC. SECAM players are more rare.

Finally who said that India uses a different voltage to the UK?

Your problem may be tracking (badly recorded tape) especially as video piracy is rife in India.

To fix your problem I suggest visit your local Bollywood video store. They may be able to help.

Terry
September 2006

Well british VCR's Dont accept video casettes from other countries.Its like Britain and America. If americans buy VHS tapes from UK it will not play in there VCR due to the Region.
Each video recorder has a preset region.Other countries have systems like NTSC/Arcam and us Brits have PAL.
Its a daft system really but in order to play a foreign cassette u need the same type of vcr. But i wouldnt advise gettin a VCR from india due to different power voltages.

Hope this helps

jon
September 2006