PAL and NTSC - TV Formats

[DMbaseball1604]

I know this question has been brought up a few times regarding dvd's and other stuff..but this is regarding the TV formats. I was able to find a few episodes of Top Gear from the 5th season in high definition..and I'm guessing they are compressed b/c they are 700mb a piece, they would be a lot bigger if they werent compressed. I know you couldnt just burn an AVI file directly to dvd as it is..but I was wondering if anyone else had found these and if you were able to watch it on tv or anything, just out of curiousity. The picture is great though..so if you havent seen these its pretty cool, I think the picture is better than that of DVD...but you can tell when the picture switches from a high def camera back to a regular camera..assuming its actually high def and not digital or something..

[AlienDB7]

You can get a DVD player with DivX support to play the AVI on TV. The philips and RJTech ones are pretty popular over here in Canada. You can find them for less than $100 now.

[TransAm]

If you have an 'older' DVD player you will probably find it plays VCD or SVCD - I burn a lot of UK-sourced TV shows to CD, after converting the AVI to SVCD or VCD NTSC format - I find it's ok. It takes a while to encode (even on a P4 2.4Ghz, 1Gig RAM) but I set it up before I go to bed and it's all done in the morning. I use Nero to do all this.