English televisions

[ChipshopCharlie]

Hi,

 

Apologies if this one’s been asked before, I have looked but couldn’t find an answer.

 

I shall be moving to France soon and, having recently spent a fair chunk of cash to replace my English television, I’m now wondering if it’ll work in France. The house I’ll be moving to has a satellite dish to receive English television, although I’d also like to pick up French tv (hopefully to help with learning the language). Does anybody know if my set will be able to work with the signal from the satellite box?

 

I’ve also got an English freeview digital receiver and assume it won’t work in France – is this right?

 

Any help much appreciated.

 

Charlie

[Martin963]

Your new TV will work with the Astra 2 satellite dish via a Sky box.  It will work with any other digital sat receiver provided you hook up using SCART leads.

French TV via an aerial is trickier,  the UK uses system I with PAL colour.   The French analogue signals are system L with SECAM colour.   A trawl through the specs of the TV instruction book should reveal whether you can switch the tuninh from I/PAL to L/SECAM.   A few years ago UK retailed sets were exclusively I/PAL,  quite a few now can cope with SECAM via SCART but you may find that L via the aerial simply isn't in the options.

A modernish freeview box may work in France if it can cope with 8k symbols,  the UK system uses 2k,  which is inferior for many reasons.   An old Ondigital box will be 2k only in all probability.   But DTT (digital terrestrial TV) coverage in France is limited at the moment to Paris,  Lyon,  Marseille,  most of Britanny,  Niort area and Toulouse and Lille.   If you live anywhere else you'll have to wait and see as the rest of the network is brought on stream over the next five years.

Too late now,  but in these circumstances it's probably better to buy a TV in France as they are all SECAM/PAL compatible.

If anything isn't clear please post again and we'll try and help.

[edyth]

We brought our large screen Thomson TV with us for use with the satellite and when the local electrician installed the dish he split the cable and put one into the TV so we get French TV via the terrestrial aerial and the other to the digibox for the freeview BBC etc. We use a separate hand control for each and can swap between French and English.  It works fine - great reception. Maybe our TV is "SECAM/PAL compatible" as Martin mentions in his post.

We had bought a small French TV when we arrived thinking the Thomson set would not be able to receive the French channels and we wanted to have French television as well.

It took the electrician a couple of minutes to retune the set for the 5 French channels we get and the French TV is now in the bedroom. Brilliant!

Good luck with your setup.

Edith

[Baz]

Edith, you were fortunate in choosing a Thomson tv as they are one of  very few manufactures that sell SECAM/PAL compatible sets in the UK.

Baz

[tinaw]

We had to replace our UK TV about 18 months ago and for the same reason would like to take it to France if possible.  I spent quite some time looking up the specifications of our Sony TV (typically we couldn’t find the manual!) and as it has a built in digibox and is listed as PAL/SECAM I thought we would be OK. In the end I rang Sony to check and they said absoulutly not to receiving French TV. They said the SECAM listed referred to video.

 

Splitting the cable sounds like it may be an option and of course Sony or whoever aren’t about to tell you this can be done!

 

Best of luck

Tina

[Martin963]

If you are CERTAIN that your UK sourced TV is SECAM compatible via the SCART inputs but NOT able to receive system L via the aerial,  the simplest solution is to buy a cheap VCR in France.   This will tune in the French analogue terrestrials via the aerial,  which can then be viewed on the TV by linking up with SCART and selecting the relevant AV input.   In other words you use the VCR as a tuner.  However,  if you don't have a SECAM compatible TV this method will produce black and white pictures.

Having said that,  the Philips 610 DVD recorder converts SECAM to PAL (in this it is fairly exceptional,  Panasonics bought in the UK don't).  So if you splashed out on the Philips in France it SHOULD (but please don't hold me to it) be able to be used as a UHF (and VHF) system L tuner and produce colour even on a PAL only TV.

I haven't actually tried that scenario out,  but can confirm that a UK sourced Philips 610 converts the SECAM French TV signals off analogue Altantic Bird 3 into PAL which can then be viewed (via SCART of course) in colour on UK PAL sets. 

But as I said earlier - if you can - buy the stuff in France where it is by definition going to be system L and SECAM capable.

[Nick Trollope]

[quote]If you are CERTAIN that your UK sourced TV is SECAM compatible via the SCART inputs but NOT able to receive system L via the aerial, the simplest solution is to buy a cheap VCR in France. This will...[/quote]

I'm sorry, but I don't see how this will work. No cheap VCRs produce RGB from the SCART socket (they would need an superfluous encoder) and the video output from the SCART socket will be the same as the video encoding on the RF signal - SECAM, which won't work on a PAL-only TV.

Or am I missing something?

 

[Martin963]

Hi Nick

Sorry – probably didn’t make it clear.

You are right – no cheap VCR produces RGB on Scart. But they DO produce composite video which matches the colour system of whatever they are tuned in to. By composite video we mean that the colour subcarrier is carried with the luminance signal, the latter being base-band (ie not modulated onto a RF carrier).

If the UK purchased TV doesn’t tune the French L system the connection of an aerial direct to the TV clearly isn’t going to work (the main problem as I’m sure you know is that the sync pulses are the "wrong" polarity).

Enter our French purchased VCR. It is set up so that its internal tuner (bought in France so L compatible) receives French signals from the aerial on the house, certainly TF1 FR2 and FR3, and maybe FR 5 and M6 if the local signal is strong enough. Maybe Canal + also, (probably on VHF). The VCR outputs composite video from its internal tuner on its SCART socket: composite video is carried on a different (single) pin to the R G & B pins.

Et voila, provided the UK TV is SECAM compatible on its SCART socket it will automatically detect that it’s receiving a SECAM signal on its AV (SCART) socket and switch to SECAM. It (the TV) should spot the absence of RGB and automatically switch back to composite – certainly all our TV’s do.

What I was getting at (as a result of a previous post) is that some UK purchased TV’s are SECAM compatible on their SCARTS even if they are NOT L compatible on their aerial input.

But of course if the TV is truly PAL only (and many are) then it wouldn’t work.