Hi guys,
Thanks for the suggestions. To answer some of the questions; I live in New Zealand (land of the Hobbits etc), which is a PAL country. Almost every other DVD release here is derived usually from the UK PAL masters as far as I can tell, but in this instance all of the backtracks sets are NTSC. No one locally seems to have it available in PAL. Most of the young sales people in video/CD stores seemingly didn’t even know there were different video formats. All DVD players sold in NZ are stickered as region 4, but will play anything straight out of the box without any problems. NZ has zero restrictions on parallel imports and our DVD players are open region and will play anything. The ‘Family Jewels’ set is definitely available in PAL as are all of the other AC/DC releases that I own.
Frink: Yep, I have already had a really good look around the internet for ‘AC/DC backtracks PAL’ and still couldn’t be certain if this set was in fact available in PAL or not. The first place I checked was Amazon UK and read the post about their set being NTSC. I even emailed 2 UK DVD online companies and 1 Australian company just to make sure. 1 UK company still hasn’t replied even though I sent them the email just under a week ago. The other 2 did reply with a stock standard reply referring me back to their product pages. They seem to list this set with the stock standard ‘all DVDs are in PAL format unless specified’, but no more info was given and it didn’t fill me with confidence that what they were selling really is a PAL set. The other sites I have looked at simply do not state what format it is in or list it as NTSC. I’ve also emailed ACDCrocks.com directly and asked them specifically about this, but they seem to be based in the USA and will only ship NTSC discs and told me that all of the set that they have are NTSC. I have a friend in Australia who is also going to have a look around for me in the local stores, but I haven’t heard back from him yet either.
So far I have not been able to get a definitive reply from my enquiries that says categorically that ‘YES, we have checked the box and definitely have this set in PAL, you should buy from us’. Also given that the same set in NZ seems to be cheaper by a significant amount than the UK/US/Aust prices (not including postage costs of course), I am reluctant to take a risk of importing one from the UK just to find out that it’s only available in NTSC up there too. In which case I may just as well buy it locally.
As you can see, I really have made some efforts to find out myself before posting to the forum. The reason I didn’t state all of the above lengthy detail in my original query is that I guessed that the longer the post, the less likely anyone is to actually read through it. I also thought that there would be at least a few Acca-Dacca fans on the forum who would already have bought the PAL set if available and would give a speedy and courteous reply. Kinda like ‘yeah mate, got mine in PAL from here’ sort of thing.
Anyways, many apologies for getting snippy or out of line with Mr ‘F***ing HotRod’, but I really did think his post was pretty cheeky. Simply replying to a thread because it has no posts yet isn’t very helpful. Neither is stating that ‘YES here is what you asked for – nahhh, haha gota ya dude!’ isn’t much help either and doesn’t win friends. I do however thank him most dearly for his undoubted wit and levity.
Having thought about it though, I guess Mr ‘F***ing HotRod’ did do me one favour in that he’s certainly helped spark some interest in what should have been a pretty low post thread (Yeah good on ya again HotRod).
Cheers guys.