Unless your DVD or video tape came from one of the countries listed at the right, it's in a format that your DVD player or VCR probably can't play -- either the PAL or possibly the SECAM format. Likewise, if you're planning to send a DVD or tape of Uncle Fred and Aunt Frieda's wedding anniversary to a friend in England, or Ghana, or Martinique or France, your friend probably won't be able to view your DVD or tape on her equipment. In either case, you're a candidate for a format conversion, a process in which your original DVD or tape is played through a converter which makes a copy of the original in the proper format: PAL for England, SECAM for France and NTSC for the U.S.A. You get back the original, unaltered. Please contact VideOccasions™ at 425-641-4811 or email us if you have questions after reading this material.

You can watch DVDs and video tapes from: Antigua Antilles-Netherlands Aruba Bahamas Barbados Belarus Beliz Berma Bolivia British Virgin Islands Burma Cambodia Camaroon Canada Cayman Islands Chile China ROC Columbia Costa Rica Cuba Cuacao Dominican Republic Egypt Equador El Salvador Ecuador Galapagos Islands Grenada Guam Guatemala Haiti Hawaii Honduras Jamaica Japan Korea, South Leward Islands Mexico Micronesia Midway Islands Nontserrat Myanmar (Burma) Nicaragua Okinawa Palau Panama Peru Philippines Puerto Rico Saba Islands Saipan Samoa St. Kits St. Lucia St. Thomas South Korea Surinam Taiwan Trinidad & Tobago U.S.A Venezuela Virgin Islands

• What we can't convert: Copyright and Copy Protected Materials
  • The good news is: you've found the commercial DVD or tape you've been looking for -- Disney's Song of the South, for example.

  • The bad news is twofold:
    • It's copyright protected, which makes it against the law for us to make a copy;

      To protect their copyrighted property, artists embed an electronic signal in the DVD or tape that prevents a copy from being made. Conversions are treated as "copying" by copy protected DVDs and tapes. Typically the picture will "roll over" every few seconds, colors will change rapidly and, in extreme cases, both the video and audio will become completely unstable and unusable.

      So we can't make a conversion of commercially produced DVDs and tapes for you even if we were willing to break the law, which we aren't!

      Some DVD players will play both NTSC and PAL/SECAM discs. Try yours and see. Otherwise, you'll have to look for an NTSC formated copy of the commercial material.

    • If it isn't copy protected, we still may not be able to do a conversion. There are 7 DVD encoding "regions," only two of which -- Region 0 and Region 1 -- are we able to convert. Standard U.S. DVD players won't play anything other than these two regions.

If you, your family or friends have made the DVD or tape, or it's something we've made for you at VideOccasions -- a DVD from old film, for example -- or the tape was made by relatives abroad, or if you have permission from an organization to copy the material, or your business had the tape produced, VideOccasions can put it into the appropriate format for you, whether it's NTSC, PAL or SECAM.

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Order Form for Tape Format Conversion

When shipping tapes for conversion to VideOccasions , please print and complete the Order Form, which contains shipping instructions and our mailing address. You can download the Order Form as a text file, selecting "PRINT" from the FILE MENU of your browser.

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• Shipping:

  Most of our customers ship tape to us via the U.S. Postal Service, although we also receive shipments via UPS and Fed Ex. We suggest that regardless of the method you choose to ship your tape you request “tracking” of the package so that both you and the carrier will know at all times the whereabouts of the tape package.

• The shipping address for VideOccasions may be found on the Order Form.

  Please contact VideOccasions by email or phone (425-641-4811) to discuss your format conversion if you feel the need to do so.

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Business Hours Phone: 425-641-4811
Monday - Friday	10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Pacific Time Zone
Thursday	10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Pacific Time Zone
And please remember: when it's 10:00 a.m. in New York, it's only 7:00 a.m. in Seattle!

We hope this has answered your questions regarding format conversion. If you have unanswered questions, call us at 425-641-4811 (remembering that when it's 10:00 a.m. on the East Coast, it's only 7:00 a.m. in Seattle) or e-mail us and we'll do our best to answer them.

Thanks for contacting VideOccasions.