can i use ubuntu without reformatting my harddrives

While you do not need to reformat your hard drives to install Ubuntu, if you want to install Ubuntu in the normal way, you will need unpartitioned space on the installation drive. If such space doesn't exist, the installer can automatically shrink down existing partitions to create it, while preserving the data on the drive. However, while the risk of data loss during this operation is small, it's high enough that you should always make sure to have a current backup of any important files on the drive, before performing it.

Important files should be kept backed up in general, so the additional need to make sure the backup is current is not typically very onerous. And the majority of instances of dynamic partition resizing do not result in data loss. But if you decide you want to avoid dynamic partition resizing, then rather than installing Ubuntu in the usual way, you could install it with Wubi (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer). Before doing this, you may want to familiarize yourself with the features and limitations of Wubi (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_%28Ubuntu%29).

Hello Skyler Brenay,

you can install Ubuntu side by side to Windows 7, you can let the Ubuntu installer decide how to format your hard drives. He will resize the windows partition so make sure you have at least a minimum of around 20gb (absolut minimum i think, more is even better) needed for ubuntu. He will create after resizing some new partitions.

Hope i could help you

Greetings

I'm not familiar with a file format called NTSC, but if you're referring to video files containing videos created from recording NTSC television (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntsc), then yes, generally speaking video file formats and and encodings supported in Windows are also supported in Ubuntu. In Windows, it is often necessary to obtain codecs from third-party sources. In Ubuntu, this is less often necessary, but still sometimes necessary (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats and http://medibuntu.org).

That's really a separate question from the question about formatting, so if you need further information about it, I recommend you post a new question. If you want, you can post a link to the new question here, and I'll make sure to subscribe to the new question and, if nobody else gets to it first, I'll try to help you with it.