Trying to beat Macrovision as cheaply as possible

[DPK99]

Hello,

I currently have an older television with a built in VCR. What really irratates me is that any DVD with the Macrovision technology will not work because it thinks that I have a VCR connected to record the DVD. Most DVDs are unwatchable for me because of the Macrovision, and considering that my TV works just fine for my purposes, I don't want to have to buy a new television. I guess that I can buy a macrovision decoder/stabilizer thingy to stop the bs macrovision. However, if I buy a DVD player where a region free hack is available will that also disable the macrovision.

Did I mention this issue really pisses me off? Grrr.

[RowMan]

There are very few DVD players now that can turn off the copy protection method you mentioned. Your best bet for your TV/VCR set up would probably be to do a search for DIGITAL VIDEO STABILIZER in something like Yahoo! Shopping to find a device that you can put between your DVD player and TV/VCR. You should be able to find something for between $20 and $30 that will suit your needs.

You could also make and play back-ups of your DVDs. Back-ups have all copy protections stripped out.

[wulf109]

Look on ebay for an Apex DVD player. The Ad-660,AD-500WM,and AD-1500 can be firmware flashed to removes macrovision. The AD-3201 can be de-macroed from the remote control.

[jman98]

Region free mode has nothing at all to do with Macrovision. In fact, given Macrovision's love of lawsuits or threats to file them, very very few current DVD players, if any, will disable Macrovision. It's not too hard to find current DVD players that will play discs in region free mode, but it's getting very hard to find any that will turn off Macrovision.

[wayne421]

The Philips DVP-642 has a firmware version that disables Macrovision. I believe it's also Region 0 and PAL->NTSC as well, but you'd have to do some forum searching to confirm that.

[Bob W]

http://www.facetvideo.com/xcart/customer/product.php?productid=83&cat=0&page=1