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One of the things that Macrovision does on a commercial VHS tape can be seen on an oscilloscope. There are four little blips that are over on the left side of the display that will suddenly start to rise from out of the pedestal up to the top (100 IRE, or whetever the pgm material is hitting at the top). This takes a couple seconds. They stay there a while, then they sink back down into the pedestal (full black), or maybe just below that (kinda hard to see on my scope). And this action is throughout the duration of the Macrovision encoded material. This, of course, is in addition to the luma fluctuations and the striping crap.
I found that the Sima SCC does, indeed, get rid of the four blips, which I was really happy to see. It also straightened out the fluctuating luma, etc., and sends out a nice picture. It's also a pretty nice video corrector for the low price, since all the controls can go plus or minus equally, rather than just increase various parts of the video (red, green, blue, brightness, contrast, etc.). Quite a "bang for the buck" on that little box.
Interestingly enough, running that "macrovision stripped" signal out of the Sima SCC into a Sony DVMC-DA2, I found that after a few seconds of playing a Macrovision encoded VHS tape, the little red light still comes on that, on the DVMC-DA2, means "copy protected". So, there's yet more to the Macrovision encoded material that the Sima SCC isn't actually getting rid of.
What's really funny, however, is that the DVMC-DA2 will still faithfully convert that analog video to DV and happily send it out over IEEE-1394. I guess the little red light is there to warn me about what a bad boy I am, or something! Meanwhile, the Sony TRV-900 refuses to record that analog signal out of the Sima SCC... so there's still some part of the encoding that's definitely not being stripped.
MSP6.5 vidcap will faithfully capture it using the Ulead Directshow Capture Plugin. I get a nice looking DV file out of it. But the raw file still has Macrovision encoding that the Sony TRV-900 will see if I try to send it right back out off the timeline. I found that if I re-render it to another file, the Macrovision is no longer detected by the camcorder. In other words, I can do what I want with it, even though it requires a time-consuming render. I don't, however, need to do anything to it in order to play it out off the timeline (unaltered) via the DVMC-DA2, and onto VHS, despite the little red light coming on in that direction, too.
I know that most of the threads here tend to be more Matrox capture card oriented, and the Macrovision issues are mostly focused on those hardware and driver subjects. But I've been a lurker here for the past couple years since abandoning Matrox and going completely "DV" with my cheesy little SIIG IEEE-1394 card. I thought that my relatively easy work-arounds for Macrovision might be interesting to some of the "ole gang" here, though.
Jeff B
I found that the Sima SCC does, indeed, get rid of the four blips, which I was really happy to see. It also straightened out the fluctuating luma, etc., and sends out a nice picture. It's also a pretty nice video corrector for the low price, since all the controls can go plus or minus equally, rather than just increase various parts of the video (red, green, blue, brightness, contrast, etc.). Quite a "bang for the buck" on that little box.
Interestingly enough, running that "macrovision stripped" signal out of the Sima SCC into a Sony DVMC-DA2, I found that after a few seconds of playing a Macrovision encoded VHS tape, the little red light still comes on that, on the DVMC-DA2, means "copy protected". So, there's yet more to the Macrovision encoded material that the Sima SCC isn't actually getting rid of.
What's really funny, however, is that the DVMC-DA2 will still faithfully convert that analog video to DV and happily send it out over IEEE-1394. I guess the little red light is there to warn me about what a bad boy I am, or something! Meanwhile, the Sony TRV-900 refuses to record that analog signal out of the Sima SCC... so there's still some part of the encoding that's definitely not being stripped.
MSP6.5 vidcap will faithfully capture it using the Ulead Directshow Capture Plugin. I get a nice looking DV file out of it. But the raw file still has Macrovision encoding that the Sony TRV-900 will see if I try to send it right back out off the timeline. I found that if I re-render it to another file, the Macrovision is no longer detected by the camcorder. In other words, I can do what I want with it, even though it requires a time-consuming render. I don't, however, need to do anything to it in order to play it out off the timeline (unaltered) via the DVMC-DA2, and onto VHS, despite the little red light coming on in that direction, too.
I know that most of the threads here tend to be more Matrox capture card oriented, and the Macrovision issues are mostly focused on those hardware and driver subjects. But I've been a lurker here for the past couple years since abandoning Matrox and going completely "DV" with my cheesy little SIIG IEEE-1394 card. I thought that my relatively easy work-arounds for Macrovision might be interesting to some of the "ole gang" here, though.
Jeff B
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