PAL is different than NTSC, and I'm not counting the area outside of the visible area as that would be pointless. :-)
NTSC is actualyl advertised as having 720x525 resolution, but only 480 vertical lines are visible, and I've never heard of a game console that supported greater than 640 pixels across. To do otherwise would mean a non-square pixel aspect ratio.
"Tv's only have a resolution of 640*480??"
Well actually, it's more complicated than that.
TV's have 480 vertical lines of resolution, but only HALF those lines (even/odd) are updated each frame. The feilds are drawn at 60 fields per second. So you only get one full screen picture change 30 times a second.
The result of this is that either you get 30fps progressive video, (progressive means full screen changes) or you get 60fps interlaced, or you get half the vertical resolution and 60fps. Interlaced means that you get flickering and jagged edges. If you capture an interlaced TV show on your PC and display it on your monitor, it looks like crap because you can see the interlacing really easily on a monitor whereas it is harder to see on the TV because the TV phosphors are slower to change which leads to the images having a bit of motion blur.
I think some of the newer TV's can display so FRAMES epr second, and I know that some consoles like the GameCube have special filters built into the hardware to blur the feilds a bit to hide the interlacing and still be able to get high resolution and high framerates.
And something else interesting to note is that movies are 24 frames per second. As you can't display 24 FPS video on a TV which can only display 30fps video, they have to do a special conversion called a "3:2 pulldown". This means that one progressive frame is placed on three feilds in a row, (even odd even) and then the next progressive frame is placed on two feilds in a row (odd even) and so on (odd even odd) (even odd) (repeat)
This results in some artifacts, and DVD players try to compensate for this. And when you want to then capture these kinds of movies to your PC, not only do you have to deal with the interlacing, but now have to deal with the pulldown. So you do an "inverse pulldown" which reverses the interlacing and the 3:2 pulldown, and converts the mvoie back to 24 frames per second progressive.
NTSC is actualyl advertised as having 720x525 resolution, but only 480 vertical lines are visible, and I've never heard of a game console that supported greater than 640 pixels across. To do otherwise would mean a non-square pixel aspect ratio.
"Tv's only have a resolution of 640*480??"
Well actually, it's more complicated than that.
TV's have 480 vertical lines of resolution, but only HALF those lines (even/odd) are updated each frame. The feilds are drawn at 60 fields per second. So you only get one full screen picture change 30 times a second.
The result of this is that either you get 30fps progressive video, (progressive means full screen changes) or you get 60fps interlaced, or you get half the vertical resolution and 60fps. Interlaced means that you get flickering and jagged edges. If you capture an interlaced TV show on your PC and display it on your monitor, it looks like crap because you can see the interlacing really easily on a monitor whereas it is harder to see on the TV because the TV phosphors are slower to change which leads to the images having a bit of motion blur.
I think some of the newer TV's can display so FRAMES epr second, and I know that some consoles like the GameCube have special filters built into the hardware to blur the feilds a bit to hide the interlacing and still be able to get high resolution and high framerates.
And something else interesting to note is that movies are 24 frames per second. As you can't display 24 FPS video on a TV which can only display 30fps video, they have to do a special conversion called a "3:2 pulldown". This means that one progressive frame is placed on three feilds in a row, (even odd even) and then the next progressive frame is placed on two feilds in a row (odd even) and so on (odd even odd) (even odd) (repeat)
This results in some artifacts, and DVD players try to compensate for this. And when you want to then capture these kinds of movies to your PC, not only do you have to deal with the interlacing, but now have to deal with the pulldown. So you do an "inverse pulldown" which reverses the interlacing and the 3:2 pulldown, and converts the mvoie back to 24 frames per second progressive.