Easycap isn't so Easycrappy

[Brad]

I bought one locally for $6 CAD because I'm trying to find a good USB stick that ignores Macrovision.

The worst part of this thing is the driver installation, but I can't blame that on the manufacturer. The included driver CD only claims to support WinXP through WinVista and I tried it on Win7. After figuring out which chipset this uses, it wasn't hard to find the necessary drivers online since someone else already did the detective work years ago.

Here's a comparison of DVD vs VHS via Easycap (Silan SC8113 based on NXP SAA7113) vs VHS via ATI 600 USB (TI TVP5150). I used a few Crop and AddBorders commands to line up the two VHS captures, as well as some basic ColorYUV manipulation.







Sadly this device doesn't seem to fulfill my goal of simple Macrovision capturing, as protected tapes result in uniformly bad levels. They don't vary between good and bad as one would expect.





I even tried turning down brightness and contrast to crazy-low levels where the image was basically flat grey + chroma. As the SAA7113's data sheet says it includes Macrovision detection, I suppose this may be a deliberate "feature".