PAL and SECAM are television standards and as such, DVDs created for those regions need to be converted for playback in other regions. That's why this one DVD player I saw at HKFlix.com is so cool. It's region free and can convert the PAL/SECAM colour schemes to NTSC, plus it has the X/Y scaling so you can fit the PAL aspect ratio to North American televisions (PAL's AR is 5:3, or 1.66:1). You can also use it to compensate for overscan on your TV. Unfortunately, @ ~ $270 US, it's a little out of my starving student budgetary constraints, or I'd snap it up.