I bought a Philips entertainment system. The DVD player is DVD711, that says it will play cd-r, vcd and dvd. When I put a vcd into the player it plays fine, but I get no color. I tried the same vcd in my friends dvd player and it works fine. I got the latest firmware upgrade, and went through all the threads, but don't know what to do. The tv it is playing on is brand new philips as well, but I don't see anywhere on it that is is mulisync or has that feature. I am screwed or this there something I am not doing right. Presently I am converting the vcd to 29fps as it is now 25. I don't know if this will fix my problem or not. Please Help!!!!

Thanks in advance,

-- Joe Mumm (emh25@msn.com), January 21, 2002

Answers

Sometimes this problem is caused by a PAL/NTSC mismatch. I'm assuming you live in the US or Canada since you want to convert 25 fps (PAL) to 29 (actually you need to use 29.97). Some DVD players can correctly convert PAL to NTSC for display, but not all. You might check to see if the output of your Philips DVD player can be set to NTSC. For example, my Apex allows me to set the output video signal to NTSC, PAL or AUTO (this means send out the exact same signal as the video source and only works if you have a multistandard TV). Make sure your Pioneer is set to display NTSC output, not AUTO. This may not be configurable. If not, your Philips simply can't correctly convert PAL to NTSC, so converting your video to NTSC frame rates might work, although you have to be careful because adding extra frames can be problematic. Just FYI, 24 fps is also valid for NTSC VCD as this is a NTSC film frame rate.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 22, 2002.