ATI macrovision woes

[Yendalf]

Firstly, my system,

Win 2000 SP2, 1Ghz Athlon, 256Mb RAM,
ATI all in wonder pro 128
latest drivers from ATI site
Virtualdub and ATI MMC 7.1
Ferguson 6-head NICAM VCR and standard U.K. UHF antenna

My problem,
When I try to capture video from a VHS tape, the ATI capture board incorrectly detects macrovision.
This causes the capture device to loop the video every second from the point the macrovision detection triggered, totally ruining the capture.

The source tapes I have were mainly recorded from terrestial British UHF T.V, on BBC 2, I have episodes of "Red Dwarf" and "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" which are very very good quality on the VHS playback, so I don't understand why the macrovision copy-protection is being triggered by the card. It even triggers occasionally when recording direct from live TV, straight from the antenna, and the quality of the signal we receive is excellent.
I know for a fact that there is no macrovision signal on my source material, is this a driver problem?
Anybody else had this problem, I'll have to buy another capture card If I can't solve this.
I understand the motive of ATI putting protection onto its capture cards in order to protect copyrighted material, but surely this should in no way affect people legitimately converting their treasured VHS (non-copyrighted) collection to digital format, when there is plainly no violation of copyright!
AArgh!
Yendalf

[daveross]

Unfortunately this is a well known issue. I know of no cure, other than to buy a "Sima Copy Master" (I think they are called) device that connects inline between the source and ATI's input. I have the All In Wonder Radeon 32MB DDR Sdram, and have the exact same annoying problem. One of those things where if I new ahead of time, I wouldn't have bought the card....one of those things, that none of the reviews seemed to mention, which is ironic since one of the AIW cards main features is video capture. There is a software hack, which supposedly works on older cards actually, it definitely didn't work on my Radeon. Go to the videocards.ati newsgroup and ask for it.

[Yendalf]

Daveross,

Thanks for the confirmation that I'm not the only one with the problem. I don't think I'll be buying an ATI capture card again in a hurry. The problem is, buying a card is such a minefield. If the hardware reveiwers don't mention these sorts of problems, then we never know which manufactur's cards to avoid. So instead, we learn by our mistakes. I'll follow up your leads though,
Regards,
Yendalf

[El_Mero_Zooter]

there was a software Macro-Video-In patch kickn around doom9.org's site, but apparently only works wit a certain driver module and win2k on older ATI 's as mentioned earlier..

ztr