VHS tapes recorded in SECAM to DVD (with colour)

don't know if they're still available, but I have a great samsung vhs deck that will playback virtually any vhs format and output to any format.

samsung sv-5000w

there are a bunch of them on sale on Ebay for a variety of prices starting at $ 61.00

The SCART adaptor will feed stereo audio and composite video (the yellow plug). If the player isn't SECAM capable then it can't produce the colour sub-carrier and pass it on into the composite output - SECAM's method of encoding the colour information is completely different from PAL and NTCS and so required different circuitry which is not included in players for USA or UK use. No amount of fiddling post-converter will do any good because the colour information isn't there in the first place. The only option is a player designed to handle SECAM, and even then I don't know what sort of output it will produce - presumably SECAM so only a converter specifically designed to be able to handle this will be any good. If it produces a RGB output it might be easier to find a converter, but it's most unlikely - I've never come across a VHS machine with RGB output (there is no point since the incoming signal and the tape itself are composite so RGB offers no quality improvement in the way it does with DVD). Possibly a combined DVD/VHS one would do this, but again it would pretty well have to be French.

Technical note: PAL and NTSC encode both the red and blue into a signal at a frequency which is within the frequency range of the luminance signal (the method of getting two colours into one signal is technically known as 'phase modulation in quadrature' - green is produced by subtracting the sum of red and blue from the luminance) - hence the 'cross colour' problems with for example striped ties. SECAM alternates the red and blue with alternate lines, thus avoiding some of the artefacts but reducing the vertical resolution of the colour part of the signal by half (it's already very low because of the need to get it into the sub-carrier: all the fine detail is in the luminance). So it's not just a question of adjusting the frequency reception of the sub-carrier for NTSC and PAL; even once the sub-carrier is read there is a different method of extracting the colour required.

The block of glass was a delay mechanism: because the colour information was severely filtered it got delayed in the process (this is inherent in analogue filters) and so the colour appeared slightly to the right of the luminance, resulting (for example) in car rear lights appearing actually outside the correct position. The glass block was used to delay the luminance so that it brought it into line with the colour (the signal was actually converted to audio, so that the passage through the block delayed it, then back to electrical). It sounds impossibly clunky but did actually work if correctly set up (which it often wasn't).