Recently, I picked up a half-dozen relatively obscure sci-fi DVDs at a flea market (very cheap- got all six for a fiver.) Of course, at that price, they were pretty scratched up and a couple had labels from rental stores on 'em. When I got them home, three played fine but the three "ex-rental" discs got spit out by all my DVD recorders (in play mode) and one of my two DVD players. The only machine that would play these "bum" DVDs was my old Panasonic RV31, this thing will try to slog thru mud and usually makes it, amazing for a 7-year-old player.

Anyways I noticed besides scratching the three ex-rental DVDs had signs of corrosion eating into the edges, and figured I'd better back them up before they disintegrate altogether. Unfortunately neither of my XP boxes with Pioneer drives (111 and 115) could rip them, regardless of software used: the scratches instantly choked them with "cyclic redundancy errors". So thought I'd try a last-ditch analog backup connecting the Panasonic RV31 player to my Pioneer 640. Natch, the Pio instantly flashed its CPRM warning and stopped dead. So I borrowed back the DataVideo TBC-1000 I'd sold to a friend awhile ago. This allowed the backup to continue but somehow the CGMS "stop" signal would bleed thru every ten minutes or so, causing the recorder to pause and then resume. This really surprised me, given the conventional wisdom that modern TBCs regenerate the entire signal fed into them: apparently not the TBC-1000.

So I tried my old Sima CT-200 clarifier: I usually avoid using it because it adds artificial sharpening and color shifts, but it never fails to make a backup go smoothly. Sure enough, it worked flawlessly on all three worn-out discs. On a hunch, I doubled back and tried a test backup of several of my other (clean) commercial DVDs using the DataVideo TBC-1000: all failed with the same "pause-release" CGMS flag every few minutes. When I tried again with the Sima CT-200, no problems at all. Sooo... this does not bode well for using a TBC, or at least the DataVideo TBC-1000, to get around any future CPRM flags my cable company might implement. Really a drag, because the TBC outputs a reasonably clean signal compared with the Sima CT-200 clarifier, which is a bit off. But the Sima is bulletproof with anything I throw at it.

I guess my point in posting is to warn anyone who's thinking of selling off their Sima to buy a TBC: think twice. You may still need it in an emergency when a better-grade full TBC won't cut it.