I captured from the DVD.

Hi,

I would guess that this is the copyguard protection doing its work. I don't know the principal behind copyguard, but it permits you to see good video on a monitor but craps the signal as soon as you try to record it.

Do we have a technical wiz on the forum?

Gilles

Hi, farss

In case, you didn't realised.
That 'wierd' thing in the video is actually intentional.
It's some kinda of copyright protection built into the DVD. (Quite surprise that VV manage to overcome it)

Anyway, for an old lady, .... what the heck!

Regards

You may be right, except given who had authored it I'd seriously doubt they would have used it. And as a test I could quite easily copy major hollywood releases.

Macrovision usually shows up as a black band in the middle of the image so it definately wasn't that. All of these copy protection schemes are useless at stopping the professional pirates in asia who are the ones ripping off the studios and the consumers come to think of it.

Believe me I'm not into pirating DVDs, at around $10 a blank and $30 for the legit thing here it just doesn't make economic sense. I can see how it happens elsewhere though, in my limited travels I was staggered at the price of DVDs and it seems the places where its cheaper to buy blank DVDs the more it costs to buy a pressed one.

FWIW and all...

Your average DVD player has built in a feature to make it hard to do analog copy - that's why the picture you see on your TV reflects only a fraction of the quality of the DVD video, is limited to some so-called VHS comparable level. That is part of the spec so-to-speak, a necessary element before Hollywood allowed their films to be ported over to DVDs in the first place. It gives a weak but acceptable signal to your TV on top of that.

Anyway, would guess that's the source of your difficulties, or one of em as the DVD video was off spec it sounds like. Come across something like this again and might want to just transfer the vobs to your hard drive.

DVD players deliver an excellent image to analog TVs. The problem in this instance is that the DVD has Macrovision encoding. There are several varieties of Macrovision, and they all have slightly different effects.

There are several ways around Macrovision. Some DVD players can be trained to "turn off" Macrovision encoding. My Apex AD-1500, for example, can be loaded with an earlier firmware release that doesn't do the Macrovision thing. Another alternative is to get a cheap box that intercepts the Macrovision pulses before sending the signal on to the VCR.

Do a Google search for "Macrovision defeat" and you'll have a lot of reading material. Here's one site: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrovision

riredale et al,
believe me I know about the macrovision thing!
Just about every DVD player ever made has a way to disable it, even if you can't do that a TBC will eliminate it anyway.

What I suspect is the source of the problem is the frame rate. I had hoped I could get VV to tell what the source fps were but I think it will only get that info from the AVI headers and as I'd captured through an A to D converter that info didn't exist.

Despite what others have said the signals coming out of DVD players (apart from the macrovision) is of excellent quality. Most people, particularly in this country, miss out on it though because they have to use composite connections into the TV. I managed to get a DVD player with RGB (NOT YUV) outputs and feed that into the tele. Difference is staggering.

Just to satisfy my curiosity I'll borrow a wavefrom monitor and look at the signal coming out of the DVD player.

Another spin on this discussion:

I have found that I can capture just about anything from DVD and VHS with my old DC10+. It doesn't seem to care what constraints were in the source material. I can even copy through my DC10+ without tearing or rolling.

You'll probably find it has a time base corrector on it analogue inputs.
Basically what macrovision does is supply wobbly sync. TVs are designed to cope with that as the stuff coming off air may not be too rock solid.

Consumer VCRs on the other hand aren't.

But what really threw me in this instance was if my A/D converter was using its TBC to strip macrovision then what ended up in VV should have been clean. It wasn't until I rendered it to a new file that all was well.

"Despite what others have said the signals coming out of DVD players (apart from the macrovision) is of excellent quality. "

True enough, but you're also talking about something [Std. TV] that is designed to accept a crappy signal several decades ago, so it's not that hard to satisfy it. Seriously, from everything I've ever read when they were discussing the DVD format to be, the only way they could get the studios to sign on, to release their movies on DVD was to include the css copyprotection, and design the players so that they were limited to what they called VHS quality. A very good VHS, better then any tape I've ever played VHS quality, but not quite as nice as what you get viewing a DVD on your PC monitor.

[know someone will say that the PC monitor is a better device, which is true, but if the higher quality alone is all it took, then wouldn't TV play on your PC monitor look that much better then the same station on a TV - in my experience it doesn't]

THey knew there were methods around Macrovision, and thought css would eliminate digital copies, so they wanted to prevent analog copy at full quality as that would still provide a means of pirating their movie properties.

But that's just trivia anyway... Folks long ago discovered the advantages of ripping a CD vs analog recording, to the point that it's a built-in with Windows (why you select digital/analog in the CD drive properties). DVDs are basically the same in that they store digital content. Where and when it's legal, no real reason to record anything - just transfer the video data making a one to one copy. After all, it's the same thing as transferring DV video digitally, & no one would debate that the digital transfer is superior to capturing analog from a DV source - 'least I hope not in this forum.

FWIW, adding to this after a bit of an info search, cannot for find a quick source either corraborating or denying anything about DVD player signal or picture quality being purposely limited - going from memory it was several years ago as DVD was being developed that I read this from several reputable sources. Regardless, as the std TV is incapable of displaying DVDs at full resolution, practically speaking it would make little sense for a player to do more then necessary when there would be nothing to testify to the extra effort. Another testiment to ripping *when/where legal* if nothing else.

These might be of interest:
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/officialfaq.html#1.11
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/officialfaq.html#3.4

Mikkie,
your quite right in many ways. Biggest problem I find is the connection between the DVD player and the TV. Most DVD players out here and I guess most of the world give you a choice of composite, SVideo and YUV. Obviously a component feed is going to give you the best result.

Now try buying a TV that doesn't cost the earth with YUV input!
I was lucky enough to pick up a 16:9 TV but guess what, no YUV or SVideo. But it does have RGB on SCART. So just recently I bought a DVD player with SCART RGB out, SVideo out and composite and decoded Dolby. Next drama was finding a SCART to SCART cable.

Anyway all got patched together and the difference is pretty dramatic, no more mosquitoes around graphics, much of the moire is gone, just beautiful.

And the other thing that tends to get overlooked is aspect ratio. Most DVDs are 2:1 letterboxed to 16:9 or if you only have a 4:3 TV then it letterboxed to 4:3. Not exactly a cinematic experience, a bit of picture in a sea of black. What image there is must have about 300 line of vertical resolution if that.

To compliment that we bought a SD digital decoder so even the off air pictures look great, if you see how good SD can look you find it hard to justify the drama over HD. And oh yes it feeds the TV with RGB as well. Now all I need is a SCART switch!

"Not exactly a cinematic experience, a bit of picture in a sea of black. What image there is must have about 300 line of vertical resolution if that."

More then right about that...

Widescreen, letterboxed is so popular it can go to ridiculous lengths... One W/S movie the other night was a great example, as the full-screen version had at least 95% of the widescreen width, but the W/S version had only a bit more then half the height as the bars were added afterwards over the original film image. Might have gotten away with it except for the many face closeups, where the 4:3 version showed the full face, and the letterboxed cut off everything from the top of the eyes up, and the lower lip down!

Oh well, envy your setup - sounds very nice.

Its far from perfect but for the money I've spent I'm pretty happy with it.

The tele is made in Turkey of all places, only cost AUD 699 which was a bargain.

Of course now all the 4:3 footage I've shot looks pretty sad on the 16:9 screen.

Don't think the good lady will accept that as a reason to buy another camera though.

And even if she did then just how am I going to record 5.1 sound on our travels :)

"Don't think the good lady will accept that as a reason to buy another camera though."

Don't ask... Start looking at anamorphic convertors, the very expensive ones, and explain how it'll save money rather then buying a new camera. Let her come to the conclusion that it might make better economic sense to buy the camera instead of the lens setup. She might even think better of the whole thing as you're taking her advice.

"And even if she did then just how am I going to record 5.1 sound on our travels :) "

Teasing really, the image that comes to mind is a modified roof top antenae with lav mics taped to the extremeties. Sounds like something I'd come up with to shock and anoy - I really like provoking folks and watching the reactions, and mounted to a car's rooftop, that'd do it. Might even get a windscreen maker to underwrite the experience, thinking about the Columbia Sportware ads.