Using a British television set in Germany

Do British televisions work over here, can you use them in Germany?

Related topic: Using a German television set in the UK

I don't know of any law which forbids them.

You can use them, but not for picking up terrestrial transmissions. All you get is picture but no sound... unless your box is ultra-modern and is capable receiving of PAL-G and PAL-I signals.

You can however use them without problem with a video or satellite system, connected with a scart cable.

I think they will also be ok for a Playstation or something similar.

...and of course you'll have to change the power plug on the end!

No problems here using a British TV with a separate satellite box attached via Scart socket. German TV's are unable to pick up sound from the UHF connection of the British satellite box... picture only.

Some newer models may work because they have a receiver that can handle both UK and German UHF.

The problem is sound and picture here are on different frequencies as to the uk. You can have you tv set changed in any tv shop for a few euro's.

Lads please excuse my lack of technical knowledge but I am blonde.

English TVs do work here if you run them through a German video for the sound so you change channels on the video. MY ex and I did this but we could never work out how to record things from normal TV only from Premiere.

Hope I've helped!

purple muffin, did you hav an english video?
if so this would also need changing

No with the UK TV we used a German video and it worked.

I did have an English video and as far as I remember it only worked with UK TV and just for watching videos.

But I don't think you have to change it as we were using our English video and German TV for a while and as far as I remember it worked as I used to video Coronation Street when I went out and watch it. DOn't think you can video normal German TV though

@ CF thanks

Yes, I know. My point was that some modern TVs can handle both frequencies without having to be modified.

of course the german video can handle the video/audio and the tv is then being used as a monitor. obviously the cable from video to tv was scart/AV

english video cant pick up german video/audio together.


yes but you could not video german tv. english video cannot handle german video/audio. but you can watch german tv direct.

In theory, I wanted to have a Hitachi TV modified and Hitachi refused to supply the dealer with the necessary parts. They said the set was too old - at 5 years! - and I should buy a new one.

That was 15 years ago and I've never bought anything from Hitachi since!

For what it's worth I converted my Video recorder myself when I arrived here about 15 years ago, although not for the faint hearted it was no problem to convert, simply unsoldering the ceramic ZF filter, cutting a few tracks on the circuit board and soldering in the wires to a universal ZF modul which can automatically switch between the 2 ZF frequencies (I think it was 6.5Mhz for UK and 7Mhz for Germany) I don't know if they are still available these days but the most expensive part of the whole operation was buying a circuit diagram from a specialist circuit diagram supplier in Hamburg. Any good TV repair man "should" be able to do it at a reasonable price. If my memory still serves me the module cost about 40 DM.

...but then again that was 15 years ago so who knows

yep I done mine too many moons ago.
most tv's nowadays have a free slot so you may only need to put an add in card in or swap them around

Do uk/irish televisions work over here? I recently got my stuff sent over from home and tried to use the television I only bought in October of last year. It is a BEKA tv and when I was tuning it in it asks which country are you in (from a list of about 20), I picked Deutschland and it tuned in all of the channels. The problem is that every channel is only picking up noise and I cant fine tune it out. We were using an old german tv before this that was able to pick up all of the channels and the sound but it is very old and needs about 15 minutes to warm up until the picture comes through, so I am a bit nervous about using it as the reason I bought my new tv is because my last one blew up a little bit when I was watching it one night.

I have seen a few threads here offering to sell a uk tv that can be used for just watching dvds so that is why I am thinking that I wont be able to use the tv to watch television here.

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Correct. You'll be needing a much more expensive TV from England, or any old German one I believe.

Check if there is a setting in the Tuning/installation menu..

It may say "System.. I"
Change that to B/G

Good luck

or if your TV isn't a mulit-PAL system, just buy yourself a DVB-T receiver and stab-antenna. Yuor TV will work with this. I assume you are currently using it with cable?

ok cheers will try that. i would have just thought that it didnt work but for the fact that it asks you which country you are living it.

the higher end TVs tend to be multi-PAL or multi-standard TVs so if yours is such a TV you may be in luck. On my TV I also have two settings, one to state which country i am in and another to select the standard.

Even if it did support the German PAL B/G standard, a UK TV is unlikely to have the wideband tuner needed to recieve ALL the channels available on the cable service here. As suggested earlier better to buy a cheap German VCR to act as a standards converter. New ones cost less than €50, used ones even less and provide the added advantage of record and playback of tapes (even from UK) - anyone remember videotapes?

Hi, as mentioned in other posts, I'm moving to Hamburg in March. We have quite a nice flatscreen telly, and are thinking about taking it with us. However, when we moved FROM Germany TO Britain about ten years ago, our German tv had a picture in England, but no sound! It was something to do with the way they tune the receiver or something.

Also, as we are going to be shipping everything from England, and the tv is a monster tube (not lcd) telly, would it be more cost effective to flog here, thus saving the money on the weight of shipping it, and buying another telly over there?

Actually, I'm going to post a new thread regarding Emigrating to Germany, if anyone has any tips or experiences to share, for instance wether it would be better to hire a van and drive ourselves over, or get it shipped and fly ourselves, would be gratefully received.

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Lee, give the old search function a go first as most of your questions will already have been asked and answered.

Using a British television set in Germany

I was about to offer the search function to him before he got Keydecked but was too late.

Although he was lucky, Keydeck clearly in a friday chillout mode.

Hi all, i'll moving to Munich soon and was looking for a bit of advice on electrical equipment ie TVs. I just recently bought a 32" LCD TV and was wondering if it would be compatible in Munich, might sound a daft question but i'm not sure whether it would pick up channels or if it would actually blow up when i plugged it in because of different frequencies lol The TV was bought in the UK

Thanks in advance

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Using a British television set in Germany

Presuming you bought it in the UK from your profile it operates on the same voltage and frequencies as here.

Unfortunately the PAL system is different so you would only get picture and no sound.

Not true my Philips telly adjusted itself with no intervention. There will be no problem.

It'll get neither picture nor sound if it only has an analogue tuner in it for use with a normal terrestrial antenna as Munich now has exclusively terrestrial digital services. It'll only get a subset of available cable channels, and then probably without sound, as UK TVs have neither hyper-band tuners nor in most cases PAL B/G compatibility (Philips and one or two other "quality" makes are an exception). It should work fine with any set-top box, be it satellite or digital terrestrial, and of course if it's "HD-Ready" with HDMI connector then it will be fine for both German and UK (Sky) HD services if a suitable satellite dish is installed.

We have a british goodmans tv set, and after reading the advice here decided simply to buy a medion dvd recorder which we could plug our cable tv into. we thought this would fulfil the same function as the german vcr mentioned above. it doesn't seem to work though, no way of tuning tv through dvd player. please help

you should be able to plug your cable TV box straight into your TV, at the very least with a normal RF antenna cable, or using a SCART lead. A DVD player does not usually have a tuner built in, so it is correct that you have no way of tuning through it.

You aren't "tuning the TV through the DVD player (recorder)" - A pre-requisite for all of this is that your recorder can record from the cable service - i.e. has an "antenna-in" socket - most do. Connect your recorder to the TV using SCART (only) and make sure your TV is switched to the SCART input (usually "Ext", "0" or "AV" on the TV remote control). Make sure you can play back (both see and hear) DVDs to be sure you've done it right. Then remove the DVD and see if you can see the cable channels - change channels with the DVD remote only. It's possible/likely you will have to have the recorder scan all the TV channels and store them first. How this is done depends on the model or recorder.