Suddenly I get "Playback prohibited by area limitations"
 

I burned a FCP3 DVD in PAL format to send to a friend over seas. The next time I burned a DVD with the setting back on NTSC and I try to play it on my Sony DVD player I get a "Playback prohibited by area limitations" screen. When I play it back on my portable DVD player it runs but there are a lot of horizontal breakup lines when there is a lot of movement. I tried reloading iDVD rebooting the computer recompressing the movie to Quicktime again but I still get the playback prohibited. Anyone have a similar problem? Any suggestions? Would it have anything to do with FPS or mbits/sec?

I don't use iDVD, but just for starters.... PAL is 720x576 at 25fps and NTSC is 720x480 at 30fps. When you sent your friend the PAL DVD did it contain source material in that format? I don't think iDVD will convert NTSC to PAL, so you may have created something odd if you didn't have PAL video to start off with.

Same thing going the other way. If your source material was PAL then choosing NTSC probably wouldn't convert it to the proper format and this might cause problems like you describe.

The "area limitations" almost sounds like it's a region issue however. Region coding is used on commercial DVD's to restrict their distribution to certain geographic areas (so they can release movies at different times in Europe and the United States). Typically home-made DVD's don't have region codes. But I wonder if somehow you have added one to your DVD's?

You might want to visit Apple's support forum here:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...aYnCTdD.1@idvd

Thanks for you response Boyd. After you replied I looked at my post again and realized I wasn't clear on what I was doing. The PAL burn was for a compleatly different video. The DVD was burned on iDVD which has a switch for PAL or NTSC. After the PAL burn I switched back to NTSC and closed the iDVD program. Afew days later, after finishing another video on FCP3, I burned that video in the iDVD program and have not been able to get a DVD to run on my Sony DVD player. I'm not copying the PAL DVD. I was thinking that possibly there was some sort of glitch in the iDVD program that others have experiencd and might be able to help me correct. I do have a thread on the Apple support forum but no one has responded yet.

I did gather that from your earlier post. However I'm still curious about the format for both the PAL DVD and the NTSC DVD that you burned.

PAL DVD - did you shoot this video with a PAL camera at 720x576 and 25fps?

NTSC DVD - did you shoot this video with an NTSC camera at 720x480 and 30fps?