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  1. Does anyone know why Fox Office Box Movies on Foxtel cannot be recorded (VHS) without the screen playing up (recorded copy twists and goes darker on play back).

    I have been lead to beleive that this is because the movies broadcast by foxtel on those channels are protected with Macrovision.

    Is this right and if so (of if not) how can i get around this problem so i can record of these channels
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  2. Certain brands of VHS recorders will ignore the Macrovision signal and record. RCA was the brand I'm aware of that would work. This was 5 years ago.
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  3. The Old One SatStorm's Avatar
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    Welcome to the forum

    The cheapest way to handle macrovision, is to buy a cheap bt8xxx capture card and use it with the btwincap drivers, you can found on the tools section of this site.
    Those cards ain't the marvels of the modern technology, but offer solutions on those problems, basicly because of the great third party driver support they have.

    If you don't have already an encoder for converting avi to mpeg 2 (like CCE or TMPGenc for example), then I suggest you the 3rd alternative: Mainconcept 1.4.2.
    I suggest MC because you gonna need an encoder neitherless and beyond this, the specific application includes a tool that capture realtime to mpeg 2 with excellent results (if you have a more than 2GHz CPU). MC is more expensive than CCE Basic and TMPGenc (almost double price), but offers you this specific fuction (realtime mpeg 2 capturing), so think of it like buying 2 applications.

    IMHO, for someone who wish to capture realtime analogue sources with macrovision protection (like VHS tapes and DVB channels), the combo of a bt8xxx card, btwincap drivers, huffyuv code (or PicVIDEO) and Mainconcept 1.4.2 is the best and overall cheapest solution.

    The other root to capture macrovision transmissions, is to buy de-macrovision devices, TBC units, advance VCRs, and signal amplifiers. Using those things, the results gonna be slighty better than using direct a bt8xxx card and the specific drivers. But the price difference is huge, don't mention that the differerence we are talking isn't visible to typical VHS sources or bad / mediocre DVB transmissions.

    If you don't like mpeg 2 realtime captures, then the alternative, is to capture to avi. This can be done with freeware tools, like virtualdub or virtualvcr, using a codec called Huffyuv. Then, you have to convert your avi to mpeg 2, which you need an encoder.
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