Advantages of Conversion

There are several advantages that DVD offers over VHS. For the purpose of video conversions, the primary benefits are related to the longevity of DVD and the elimination of quality degradation with time, which is inherent in VHS. DVDs offer a higher quality picture by means of a high resolution and digital storage. In addition, DVD sound is stored like CD sound, digitally. Because the data is written and read by lasers, there is no physical contact between the DVD and the player. VCRs must pass the tape over a playback head to read the tape. This pass causes wear on the tape and degrades the quality each time the tape is viewed. DVDs are more resistant to damage than tapes during playback, are more tolerant of temperatures, and will last for decades with repeated and constant playback.

• Each disc holds about 2 hours of high-quality digital video stored in MPEG-2
• Supports wide screen movies on standard or wide screen TVs (4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios)
• Has up to 8 tracks of digital audio (for multiple languages, DVS, etc), each with as many as 8 channels
• Supports menus and simple interactive features (for games, quizzes, etc)
• Supports multilingual identifying text (title name, album name, song name, cast, crew, etc)
• Provides instant rewind and fast forward features
• Supports instant search to title, chapter, music track, and time-code
• Are very durable (no wear from playing, only from physical damage)
• Are not susceptible to magnetic fields and are more resistant to heat than tape
• Compact size (easy to handle, store, and ship)

Standards and Specifications

Different parts of the World today use, however, different video standards for broadcasting, recording, and playback.

Here's is a partial list:

VHS Standards	Countries
NTSC	Canada, USA, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Taiwan
PAL	UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Gibraltar, Hungary, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, South Africa, Ireland, Malta, Turkey, Israel, etc.
M-PAL	Brazil
N-PAL	Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay
SECAM	France
MESECAM	Greece, Russia, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia

For market control reasons, the new storage medium called DVD also has this division between NTSC and PAL, as well as between Regions. DVD discs contain Regional Codes, which can be used to prevent the playback of certain discs depending upon the geographical area it is played in. The various studios and home video companies lobbied to make sure this coding system was a required part of the current DVD standards, because they wished to control how their DVD titles are exported to other countries. In most instances, discs manufactured in one region will usually only play on players that were manufactured in that same region. However, the regional coding system is entirely optional, and discs without Regional Codes will play on any player in any country, limited only by the following: PAL DVDs can play only on PAL DVD players and NTSC DVDs can play only on NTSC DVD players (and on DVD players that can play both PAL and NTSC-which is the case of most players available in Europe).

For your information, the Regions are:

Distribution of Regional Codes, by Country
Regional Codes	Countries
Region 0	All Countries
Region 1	The U.S., U.S. territories and Canada
Region 2	Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Egypt, South Africa, Greenland
Region 3	Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong
Region 4	Mexico, South America, Central America, Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Caribbean
Region 5	Russia, Eastern Europe, India, most of Africa, North Korea, Mongolia
Region 6	China
Region 7	RESERVED
Region 8	Airlines/Cruise ships

It is QAI's standard procedure to convert ANY of the above VHS videos into NTSC DVDs with Region Coding 0, viewable on most DVD players, worldwide, since the DVDs created will have No Region Coding and since all DVD players sold in PAL countries play both DVD-PAL and DVD-NTSC.

Media Types

DVD stands for D igital V ersatile D isc. The video and audio information stored on it uses a compression system called MPEG-2. The commercial DVD movies use MPEG-2 compression. This is the media type and compression standard that will be used by QAI.

VideoCD (VCD) and SuperVideoCD (SVCD) are based on an older video compression system known as MPEG-1 and aren't anywhere near as good at squeezing material onto a single disc. They're also significantly lower in both audio and video quality. VCD has the same quality as VHS.

Compression Technologies

The Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) defined a series of standards for compressing or reducing the file size of video to make it easier for computers to handle and store. AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) is an audio/video file that is first captured in the process of creating DVDs. An AVI file needs to be compressed to either MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 before storage on a disc.

• MPEG-1 is recorded on a CD popularly known as the VCD format. MPEG-1 enables about 70 minutes of video and audio to be stored on a single CD-ROM disc of 650-700 Mbytes. As stated above, the quality is the same as VHS.
• MPEG-2 is a standard for coding and compressing video at higher data rates thus creating larger files than with MPEG-1 and enabling a resolution four times greater than MPEG-1. MPEG-2 is recorded on DVDs, which store files as large as 4.7GB.