What about VHS ripping?

[snafoo]

I have one of those RXII video stabilizers. I just got it recently. I think it is faulty, as i attempted to copy a VHS tape from the early 2000's that had copyright protection on it, (it was from a TV show) and the SONY VRD-MC5 i am using gave me an error message, saying this, that copyrighted material was detected, and the video cannot be copied. Has anyone ever had such an experience? The strange thing is, i also attempted to copy a storebought VHS hollywood movie tape, and it successfully copied. I got no errors on the screen of the VRD-MC5. Also, are there any other brands of these devices that copy VHS to DVD, and that bypass the copy protection? Under the Fair Use Copy law, or whatever it's called, i am entitled to backup my video tapes. One more thing with these RXII devices. Does anyone know of a 9V power adapter to use with it? I understand that 9v batteries don't last very long in them.

[themaster1]

See here: http://www.xdimax.com/grex/grex.html#BUY

[VWestlife]

Not all "storebought VHS hollywood movie tapes" have MacroVision copy protection on them. It wasn't used at all prior to 1985, and even thereafter, only about half to two-thirds of all major movies on VHS had it.

And not all "video stabilizers" remove enough of the MacroVision encoding to prevent DVD recorders from detecting it. See the videos on YouTube by people like ThriftyAV and 12voltvids testing various devices.

[lordsmurf]

See here: http://www.xdimax.com/grex/grex.html#BUY

That Grex is garbage for analog videotapes.

It works brilliantly between DVD recorders, where a digital copyright flag was added to the broadcast. I ran into that with MLB game recordings, on my Philips HDD recorder, in the mid 2010s. The recordings could not be transferred. Using the Grex, I could re-record the XP mode recording to a new XP mode recording on another DVD recorder (and on a DVD to extract).

And this is why:

And not all "video stabilizers" remove enough of the MacroVision encoding

Grex just makes a mess, often bright/dark issues.

The RXII video stabilizers never worked well. Not in the 80s, not now.

ripping.

FYI, the term is "capturing" (ingest, record, transfer, digitize).

"Ripping" is a specific jargon reserved for extracting digital content from within a digital system (digital tape, optical disc, etc). It does not apply to analog videotapes, especially not VHS.

Terms matter.

[dvd3500]

See here: http://www.xdimax.com/grex/grex.html#BUY

Terms matter.

Thank goodness he only gets 2 as president. ...

[VWestlife]

Digital recorders don't just look for the MacroVision black/white pulses, they also look for CGMS on line 20 of the VBI, right next to the closed captioning on line 21. Thus it is very difficult to strip CGMS out of the video signal without also stripping out the captioning.
CGMS-A - Wikipedia

[lordsmurf]

terms matter.

thank goodness he only gets 2 as president. ... :-d

Hahaha!

[GAhere]

I have one of those RXII video stabilizers. I just got it recently. I think it is faulty, as i attempted to copy a VHS tape from the early 2000's that had copyright protection on it, (it was from a TV show) and the SONY VRD-MC5 i am using gave me an error message, saying this, that copyrighted material was detected, and the video cannot be copied.

If the "TV show" was recorded "off the air" via tuner, there is absolutely no way that the VHS recording had "copyright protection.

Now if the VHS tape was a prerecorded store bought version, then yes it could have copyright protection, but not all prerecorded store bought VHS tapes featured copyright protection.

The main copyright protection used on prerecorded store bought VHS tapes was Macrovision, it was an analog interference signal that was added to the horizontal sync pulses. TVs would ignore the interference but other VCRs or other video recording devices and depending on how sensitive the video recording device was it would often falsely detect a non existent Macrovision signal. Newer video recording devices such as yours may be extra sensitive to the very poor unstable horizontal sync pulses typically found with VHS which will result in copy protection to be triggered.

Typically there have been a lot of cheap macrovision removal devices on the market that would filter out the specific Macrovision signal that would fix that problem, however I suspect that what you have is a very unstable VHS tape and those removers do not address unstable video sync pulses.

For very unstable/damaged video sync, the only fix I am aware of is if you could find a working professional video studio full time base corrector. Professional TBCs used in video studios would strip out both horizontal and vertical sync pulses from the video, recreate new stable pulses and combine the video with the new pulses. Was mandatory to use that type of TBC to be able to copy VHS to professional video equipment for editing or broadcast use.

It should be noted no VHS recorder was ever capable of adding macrovision or any other copy protection to the tape its self, the copy protection had to be inserted in the editing process to the master tape to be used for copy distribution. Macrovision or other copy protection schemes has licensing costs associated with them, which would have made VHS more expensive.

I am not aware of any copy protection ever being broadcast OTA on analog channels so recording from OTA to VHS would result in copy protection free recordings.

[lordsmurf]

I am not aware of any copy protection ever being broadcast OTA on analog channels

There was, but I don't recall details off-hand. It's just been too long to remember everything.

[GAhere]

I am not aware of any copy protection ever being broadcast OTA on analog channels

There was, but I don't recall details off-hand. It's just been too long to remember everything.

I can only speak for US NTSC broadcasting rules and standards, PAL and SECAM and other countries may have had other rules and standards that may have allowed for mangling the video.

US broadcasters in order to broadcast, had to follow all NTSC analog standards, intentionally allowing or adding anything outside of the NTSC standards to the OTA broadcast meant the station(s) would be "out of spec" and could result in fines and or loss of operators license privileges..

NTSC analog video specs never allowed for copy protection.

Macrovision would fall into the category that would have been 100% no no to broadcast as it is a interference inserted into the Horizontal sync signal.

The ONLY place any "copy protection" could have been snuck in was during the blanking between retraces and that was eventually used for digital closed captioning and national standard time clock info which was added only a few years before the change to digital ATSC. I have a couple of VHS VCRs which would autoset the time and date from the blanking frames, but absolutely no provisions to detect copy protection from the OTA tuner nor make tapes with copy protection.

And yes, I did work for a company back in the mid '80s that was at the time a big player in the "big three" TV broadcast market as they owned a lot of TV stations as subsidiaries not to mention sat up and downlinks, wasn't the main business of the company I worked for. Had a lot of fun working with the broadcast quality A/V equipment editing suite they had and yes, they created and edited material for broadcast use as a side gig to recoup the money invested in the editing suites..

[GAhere]

As a side note.

US NTSC analog broadcasts transmitted the video via "Vestigial Sideband", audio was transmitted as FM.

Vestigial sideband is a modified form of Single Side Band. Single Side Band basically started out as AM (amplitude modulation) was mixed with a carrier, the the result was mixed together to cancel half of the AM signal, the result was less bandwidth needed to transmit further for the same power. At the receiver you needed to detect the carrier signal to be able to undo the process.

Vestigial side band did not fully remove half of the the AM but did allow one to fit enough video bandwidth into the transmission for a reasonable looking picture and had the advantage of being able to transmit the video further per watt of power than if it was AM only.

The TV set had to detect and undo everything back to normal video and audio signals from the RF broadcast, having early TVs with actual audio inputs and outputs was not really a normal thing and that came much later in the life of TVs. Pretty much A/V in/outs were only found in broadcast equipment and those were monitors with no tuners.

It should also be noted, early video specs were designed around CRT TVs, CRT TVs had built in free running horizontal and vertical oscillators. The H and V oscillators would "sync" and lock to the H and V sync pulses in the video, this feature allowed for natural noise in the broadcast to be present which would normally disrupt your picture.

VCRs on the other hand depend on having a correctly formed video signal on the composite input, and it was discovered that a certain waveform frequency super imposed over top of the Horizontal sync pulses was sufficient enough to interfere with the ability to copy a video from one VTR to another VTR directly via composite video connections. Macrovision was the main copy protection that employed this technique, there were others. However, these methods could be defeated by using the RF modulator on the playback VTR and and the tuner on the recording VTR.. However the result was a really, really bad looking copy of a copy.

Reason it worked was because the RF modulator built into the VTR did not include the the copy protection signal as the modulator was designed to provide a RF output which mimics broadcast standards..

Newer non CRT TVs on the other hand often suffered from the interference from macrovision that was superimposed in video tapes when connected through the A/V connections and those affected required those little low cost "stabilizers" to be inserted into the video chain. I have one of those cheap stabilizers that took a 9V battery laying around, bought it for under $10 twenty some years ago.. Worked by detecting, then inverting the frequency and then adding the inverted signal to the video effectively cancelling the macrovision waveform, didn't really "stabilize" anything, just reduced the interference enough so the TV was no longer affected so it wasn't a TBC.

[lordsmurf]

I can only speak for US NTSC broadcasting rules and standards, PAL and SECAM and other countries may have had other rules and standards that may have allowed for mangling the video.

I refer to U.S., but more cable/satellite than OTA, and 2000s

And yes, I did work for a company back in the mid '80s that was at the time a big player in the "big three" TV broadcast market as they owned a lot of TV stations as subsidiaries not to mention sat up and downlinks, wasn't the main business of the company I worked for. Had a lot of fun working with the broadcast quality A/V equipment editing suite they had and yes, they created and edited material for broadcast use as a side gig to recoup the money invested in the editing suites..

Nice to meet you.

This site used to have a lot of professionals, back in the '00s. They've all retired, or worse. It feels lonely at times. Only a few of us "forum old timers" are still here. Some pro, some hobby, some retired.

[GAhere]

I can only speak for US NTSC broadcasting rules and standards, PAL and SECAM and other countries may have had other rules and standards that may have allowed for mangling the video.

I refer to U.S., but more cable/satellite than OTA, and 2000s

And yes, I did work for a company back in the mid '80s that was at the time a big player in the "big three" TV broadcast market as they owned a lot of TV stations as subsidiaries not to mention sat up and downlinks, wasn't the main business of the company I worked for. Had a lot of fun working with the broadcast quality A/V equipment editing suite they had and yes, they created and edited material for broadcast use as a side gig to recoup the money invested in the editing suites..

Nice to meet you.

This site used to have a lot of professionals, back in the '00s. They've all retired, or worse. It feels lonely at times. Only a few of us "forum old timers" are still here. Some pro, some hobby, some retired.

Nice to meet you too!

Started my work life playing with TV broadcast quality equipment (Sony 1" VTRs with built in TBCs, Grass Valley switcher/Editor, broadcast cameras and lighting and lots of other forgotten equipment), then working for some small TV, A/V, VCR, Big dish "C" band repair shops. Eventually landed a computer tech job for a now defunct hardware store chain then moved to a high tech robotics company setting up PCs, servers and associated hardware. Last company got bought out by a competitor in the market that gutted my company and products which we made and assembled in the US in order to only sell their fully outsourced low quality products sub assemblies made outside of the US. Our customers would often tell our service people that the sale should have been to other way around as the new offerings were low quality junk.. Darn shame for sure.

Now retired from the rat race..

[VWestlife]

A video copy protection system was developed by Eidak for use by broadcast and cable TV, which worked by monkeying around with the number of scan lines, which would throw off the timing of a VCR. Cable TV systems were interested in using it, but it was not compatible with closed-captioning unless TV manufacturers added extra circuitry to support the Eidak system, which delayed implementation until cable TV systems were beginning to switch to digital in the mid-1990s, so most never bothered using the Eidak system.

So it is possible, but unlikely that some videotape recordings of cable TV might be affected by use of the Eidak system.