I wonder if anybody can help me?

Due to illness our usual summer holiday is very late this year and, having looked at the weather at our destination (France) it doesn't look very promising.

I thought, therefore, that I would take my portable DVD player with me. The property does have a TV in it though but I do not know whether I could put the DVD through it using a scart lead as, obviously, the screen on the portable isn't great for two people to watch.

Does anybody out there know whether a french tv is likely to have the usual connections that we have on the back of ours?

Since the French designed the SCART interface and have forced all TV sets sold in France to have one since the early 80s, I'd say the chances of the TV having one are pretty high

As mjk79 says, the French invented the (bloody awful) SCART or Peritel connector so I'd say there is a pretty good chance you will find one on a French TV!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART

Thanks.

Mind you, a French SECAM telly might find it hard work giving you a picture from a PAL DVD, you might get black and white out of it at best.

No PAL or SECAM involved, you watch via RGB, which gives a greatly improved picture anyway.

and the French, being the inventors of the SECAM system (for politcal readsons - read de Gaulle...) now realise they're isolated being surrounded by neighbours all on the PAL system have, for quite a while now, insisted on all new TVs having a PAL chip. Never had any probs on my frequent visits to France.

However, that's all now by the by what with the advent of digital TV throughout Europe.....

i have been reading various bits of flack about scart and i cannot understand why this is? fair enough i use hdmi now but in the past it has been so easy to plug in especially in hard to reach places, the picture was much improved over rf and there was the swtiching it did too.

One of the biggest complaints of the scart plug was it's poor design - it was big and bulky and had no retaining screws so it often would get tugged out of the socket, or partially, causing sound but no picture or vice versa.

Oddly enough, there are now some scart plugs that do have little spring clips built into the metal surround which helps keep it in place... shame it's only taken 20 years for that to come around! - I think it should have been more like a 25pin serial connector (like on older printers) but with 21 pins so people wouldn't blow up their printers connecting it to a TV

Certainly it has been a versatile connection coping with composite, S-Video and RGB along with stereo in/out and signal switching so it can't be that bad.

Imagine the amount of RCA plugs we'd need to do the equivilent! (oh, yeah ask a non european lol)

When we took our motorhome to France this year, we had no problem picking up the Digital Terrestrial channels on our portable LCD TV. As for DVD, when we used to stay in cottages, I took my cheapy portable DVD player and had no problems using it via scart

The Peritel socket was used as political device to stop the import of Japanese colour TV's into France. A lot of early sets had a socket and no internal connections from what I can remember. At the time the Japanese were not allowed to import TV's with a screen size larger than 18 inches.
And the peritel socket was seen as another way to protect the home industry.

Surely not!

The French having their own unique TV standards!

All sounds quite plausible to me.