Wednesday, January 30, 2008

British VHS tapes?

I have a question for teh intertubes:

In obtaining footage of a British performance artist I want to teach, I ordered 2 videos from a British arts agency. I popped in the tapes tonight, and found that neither one played on either of the two working VCRs I own.

Did I miss something? Is the British VHS format different from the North American one? Is there a quick fix? By 4 pm tomorrow?

Help!

ETA: Help indeed. After confirmation of my fears by commenters (who are clearly smarter than I am!), I found that the European format is called PAL, and after doing a quick Google search on PAL and my university, I got to the university's Classroom Technology office, who now have the two tapes, a blank VHS, and my gratitude. I should have a VHS (for classroom use only, of course) with the necessary material by 4pm, just in time for class!

3 comments:

Jenny said...

Yes, they're different. I had a British prof who had this issue every time. The only fix is to see if your AV/library has a British VCR you can check out or get or whatever. :) Good luck!

Sisyphus said...

Also try the film and/or theater depts.

There are different "regions" and you can only play North American region tapes or dvds on a NA player. There's also a separate Asian region so don't go asking the East Asian languages department cause it won't solve your problem.

Pilgrim/Heretic said...

Same is true for DVDs, by the way, just so you know. Sad but true.