On Friday 01 March 2002 02:54 pm, jjohnson wrote: > Sorry for the newbie questions, but what is macrovision? Macrovision is a little hack thought up by some movie industry sycophants designed to keep you from copying movies to a VCR. I believe it works by adjusting the bias of the vertical retrace signal sent to your TV. Your TV doesn't really care about the bias, however it fools the automatic gain control of your VCR into thinking the picture is "too bright" or "too dark". As a result the VCR attempts to adjust the image gain resulting in a recording that goes light and dark. A way to thwart macrovision on early VCRs was to open it up, find the AGC sensitivity potentiometer and turn it all the way down. Since Macrovision is a copy protection mechanism, under the DMCA anything that scrubs Macrovision is a "Circumvention Device". I know that macrovision scrubbers used to be fairly easy to come by. They went by various names such as "Video Stabilizer" or "Color Corrector" attempting to avoid making direct reference to the fact that they get rid of macrovision. I understand one with quality components does improve your overall video. Living in the U.S. however, I of course would never own such a device. It's all rather annoying. I have a Sony Vaio laptop. It is a very nice laptop with a composite video out. But I can't use the composite video out because the Vaio came with a DVD drive so Sony put macrovision on the video out and my VCR's composite in goes through the AGC whether you are recording or not. All DVDs have the option to enable macrovision on their output. I have come across a couple non-macrovision-protected DVDs. None from the major studios though. -Joe
