I Have a lot of PAL Videos, but moving to NTSC country. Am i Screwed???

At the moment i live in the UK and do a lot of capturing from TV (mainly Sky Digital Satellite stuff). All these vids are initially captured in DV (PAL at 25fps of course) then converted to PAL MPEG 2 with resolution 720x576. I watch a lot of them on my TV from my computer and ofcourse they look great, but soon i will probably move to the USA where all the TV's and everything are NTSC and are made to display 30fps video and i think also at a different resolution aswell. I've never watched PAL on an NTSC TV but heard its not a good idea. so basically am i screwed if i go to the US? Will all my videos be worthless ?

NO. Yes. Maybe. I can't get any more specific than that. Basically it depends on a few factors. Do you deinterlace? Is your PC powerfull enough to do it on the output? I have DVD players that can play back PAL SVCD content just fine on an NTSC TV. But considdering that you are using computer output interlace might be an issue. Since there is a tiny drop in vertical resolution resizing for output of interlaced material could cause issues. But apart from that there is no big issue ahead of you.

Thanks for your reply. I dont deinterlace, i leave all of my videos interlaced as my intention is to watch them on a TV rather than my monitor. This would also be my intention after moving to the US, to basically "stream" my stored vids from my computer to my TV. But im just worried about how these PAL 25fps (interlaced) videos would look on an NTSC 30fps TV after being streemed. any idea's? would it be affected at all or would there be absolutely no problem and look the same as watching on a PAL TV ??

Due to the interlacing there will be artifacts when you resize. Unless you deinterlace first. You can use one of the many deinterlacing methods in ffdshow to process the decoded stream as it is sent to the TV. It should work like a charm and reduce artifacts to basically none. And 25fps should not be a problem either. In isolated instances you might notice a very slight jerkyness of motion. Apart from that it is not such a big deal. If you are taking your PC though why not a PAL TV as well? Or are you just visiting for a short time?

um... this isn't the dark ages... TVs will do both these days. it's a matter of whether you're wanting to invest in new equipment. if you're going to go on capturing, you may need an NTSC card (not sure if cap cards are switchable. in a perfect world they are, but we all know this world is far from perfect). i'm sure you can find a TV in the USA somewhere that will do PAL (sure enough, pretty much every TV for the last ~8 years has been NTSC capable in PAL land). if you don't mind b&w playback and have a TV too old to be multiformat, then you can tweak the vertical hold until the PAL picture stays still (i tried this once... it was funny as hell but ultimately useless, because it didn't find the chroma, and if it did, wouldn't know what to do with it)

Unlike in Europe, tv sets which accept both ntsc and pal are not too common in the US. That's why many threads in home theater forums deal with standalone players doing a decent pal->ntsc conversion ...

France actually uses Secam which is close to PAL but not exactly the same ;) A few former Eastern Bloc countries also use Secam afaik.

as neo-neko suggested, it can be deinterlaced in real time with proper cpu. another solution is to convert to 30-interlaced using avisynth in real time (never tried it though). so it should be deinterlace (50fps) -> convert to 60 with avisynth (not speedup, just dup more frames).

also since you mention you watch most from pc to tv it should be mentioned that all modern tv-out(that i know of at least) has selectable output format. so you can select to output NTSC and the gfx card will do the format conversion for you on the fly. in your case you would probably see black bars on the sides (since NTSC has less lines) to keep the aspect ratio correct of the film you are watching.