VHS Blue Screen

[Marco33]

It plays fine to the TV. If I play it to the PC I get sound but, no picture. Now, if I fast foward I can see it on the pc fast fowarding. As soon as I hit play it goes back to blue screen. I've tried both the Comp & video inputs.

Wierd.

[txpharoah]

Process of elimination. First try another VCR.

[miamicanes]

If it's an ATI card, it's probably because the videotape is Macrovision protected. When you're fast-forwarding the tape, the video card can't "see" Macrovision's signature, so it shows it. When the tape plays at normal speed, it sees the Macrovision signature and dutifully turns itself off to keep Hollywood's lawyers happy.

The good news is that there's a DLL patch floating around that disables that particular annoying behavior, which -- as you've discovered -- also happens to prevent entirely legitimate and 100% legal activities like using your computer as a TV for watching videotapes. It worked with my old AIW 128pro, and should work with all the AIWs up to the 8500 (the 9700 has a new Rage Theatre chip and probably had the protection beefed up to circumvent the circumvention...)

As an alternative, you could hunt down a JVC HR-S7800U VCR on Ebay or froogle.com. They're around $120 used and $200-250 new. They have a built-in timebase corrector and should clean up the output enough to sneak past the detection routine. They also happen to be wonderful VCRs for S/VHS videocapture in general: S-Video outputs, digital noise reduction and image stabilization, S-VHS, and auto-tracking. Ever since I got mine, I haven't felt any need to capture to HuffyUV and clean up/compress with TMPGenc. On-the-fly VBR MPEG-2 with MMC from the S7800U's output still isn't quite as good, but the difference isn't big enough to justify spending 8 hours encoding 2 hours of video just to use 2600kbit/sec instead of 3000.

[Marco33]

How about the In line signal amplifier from radio shack. I here they unwitingly bypass the macrovision.

[tomasine17]

Hey MIAMICANES, can you provide a link to the DLL patch that you are referring to? I'd be interested in checking it out before I buy a new vcr with a built in tbc. Thanks!

[miamicanes]

It's been aeons since I've touched it, and at the moment my desktop PC is in tiny pieces & I'm reduced to using my laptop until Epox finishes replacing the bad capacitors on my motherboard. However, I'm pretty sure they're available or linked to on doom9.org(?)

Personally, I recommend getting a VCR like the JVC S7800U instead. They're fairly cheap (check eBay and froogle.com), and will give you just about the sharpest, cleanest, most stable S-video signal that can possibly be ripped from a nasty, mangled old macrovision-riddled videotape. By cutting down on the noise that the MPEG encoder needs to deal with, you'll have more bits available to encode good detail instead