Why Does This Work? VHS to DV Camera.

[rkr1958]

Just curious. Anyway, we have a collection of VHS tapes, mostly my son's Disney movies, that we want to backup to DVD to save wear and tear on the tapes, etc. Anyway, I own a Sony TRV-320 Digital Video Camera but it will (should) not, according to its documentation, copy any signal with Macrovision. What the heck I thought I'd give the following a try and it work to my suprise. I hooked up my DV camera to my VCR line out using a RCA cable (i.e., L/R audio and video analog to Digital). My camera will record the tape if I started recording before I hit play on the VCR. [If I hit play first my Sony DV camera will not record]. I then transfer the recorded video from my camera to my PC via firewire. Then, edit (minor) the avi, encode to MPEG-2, author and burn ... vola, I got a DVD backup of a VHS tape. Is it this simple? Shouldn't the Macrovision have been more of a problem? I certaintly expected it to be. I've been wanting to backup my VHS movies for a while now but though I'd have to add a special capture card to my PC for this. It just suprised me that this method work on copy protected tapes. By the way, my VHS player is a Toshiba W522.

[bugster]

Interesting!!. My guess would be the cam only checks for Macrovision when you first hit record. If it sees the right signal it refuses to continue. By starting the Record Before the VCR you bypass this 'feature'.

[Jester700]

The next step is to see if it will also work in passthrough, instead of actually recording to DV and playing back.

This IS interesting. Your VCR wouldn't happen to be old, would it? I've seen a couple old VCRs where the sync circuits were so slow that they were unaffected by macrovision. Well, one version of macrovision, anyway.

[rkr1958]

I got my VCR about a year ago from Best Buy. It was on special for around $50.

I also like to try the pass through. The only problem is that my VCR is hook to my TV in a separate room from my PC. However, If this approach keeps working (i.e., my initial attempt wasn't a fluke) then I'll probably move it where my PC is and try the VHS player to DV Camera to PC passthrough. That would save me the step of recording to tape.

[handyguy]

I haven't tried it but in theory it could work. The theory was that they only check for mvision protection during the first ten seconds.