Macrovision blues

[xn855]

I have a bunch of DVDs in my collection. All of them are genuine DVDs that I bought with my own money (for a ripped off price by the way). So recently I've been working on a project which involves capturing some parts from various related DVDs and making a separate movie. This by law is defined as personal use since I'm doing this for myself only.

This is how I captured:
DVD Player output -> into DV Camcorder input -> PC firewire input.
Note that it's not possible to record the DVD video to the camcorder like this because it says "Copy Inhibit." However, if you do DVD -> Camcorder -> PC DIRECTLY, just using the camcorder as a digital firewire bypass it's fine because the PC doesn't care about macrovision. So this worked for me, and I now had myself all the sources I need for my movie in excellent quality DV-AVI format.

Next I edited the clips, put in effects, arranged them how I wanted, etc.., and exported to VCD. However, I do not want to delete my sources because I will add some parts to my collage movie in the future. I'm not leaving this is on the hard drive because its too big and not safe in case the hard drive dies. I do not have a portable drive to put the 20GB of sources. So the best solution is to output the edited sources back to the camcorder and store them on DV tape for future use.

So I try this. I connect the camcorder to the PC via firewire, open the clips, they display on the camcorder LCD, and I hit record. BUT, 2 seconds later the camcorder stops recording and says "copy inhibit". I was shocked. Turns out the macrovision flag probably exists in every frame of the DV file. and it keeps screwing me up.

So far I've figured out one way to fix this - re-encode all the sources to regular uncompressed AVI files and then back to DV. I think this will kill the macrovision. However, this will require tons of disk space that I don't have (because uncompressed AVI is so huge), and tons of time that I dont have even if I was to do it in parts (because it takes way too long to export all the DV-AVIs to uncompressed AVI and then back again.

If anyone can help me here it will be greatly appreciated. I need to be able to record my DV sources on dv tape. I guess the best solution would be to run the DV-AVI files through some program that de-macrovisions them. Anyone know of such a program? Thanks.

[FOO]

You are doing it the hard way.

If you use something like DVDDecrypter to read the
DVDs directly into the computer , they will be region free,
encryption free, and macrovision free. And it's lots faster

[ZippyP.]

You are doing it the hard way.
...read the DVDs directly into the computer , they will be region free,
encryption free, and macrovision free. And it's lots faster

And better quality too!

Get a DVD rom drive for your PC.