Need suggestions for new capture card to record composite video

[Brad]

Windows is programmed to detect and block macrovision recording, no matter which video capture card you use. This guy has a WIndows fix which may or may not work for you.

Not true, and if you read the pages you linked you would have seen that.

Oh come on. Many Hauppauge products ignore Macrovision, among others. They just aren't uncompressed USB devices.

You can capture SD on a Hauppage HD-PVR. It's USB connected and uses the computer's resources to capture. And the capture software has some levels adjustments so you can tweak it to your liking before recording.

The Hauppauge HD PVR encodes to H.264 using a hardware chip that the drivers limit to 13Mbps. And someone posted that it's limited to 5Mbps for SD.

but the hd-pvr does not ignore macrovision.

I've yet to hear of someone say Macrovision prevented them from copying a tape using the HD PVR.

[artx2013]

To correct myself:
Windows IS programmed to block macrovision recording, but according to the biline.ca web site, a few video capture cards are able to defeat this Windows programming. Why these capture cards are able to defeat the Windows programming is mysterious. Linux is not programmed to block macrovision recording.

[usually_quiet]

To correct myself:
Windows IS programmed to block macrovision recording, but according to the biline.ca web site, a few video capture cards are able to defeat this Windows programming. Why these capture cards are able to defeat the Windows programming is mysterious. Linux is not programmed to block macrovision recording.

You still don't understand the two articles you linked to. In many cases, the capture hardware's AGC circuitry reacts to Macrovision and makes a mess of of the picture. In other cases the capture card's Windows device drivers and capture software may be written to detect Macrovision and block recording, but neither of these things are actually part of the Windows OS. Microsoft isn't responsible for what the device drivers do, nor what the capture software does, unless its one of their capture programs, like Windows Media Center.

[Brad]

Windows as an OS isn't aware that there is such a thing as Macrovision, because it isn't aware there is such a thing as analog video with vertical blanking intervals.

[budwzr]

Windows as an OS isn't aware that there is such a thing as Macrovision, because it isn't aware there is such a thing as analog video with vertical blanking intervals.

Yeah, exactly. It's like the Frenchman that doesn't understand Greek.

[artx2013]

Thank you to everyone for educating and correcting me. I don't want to give anyone misleading information. One of the 2 articles that I linked to says: "After some extensive research I found www.digitalfaq.com they had a collection of ATI Hacks that might disable the dreaded MVD codec (MacroVision Detect)." A codec rather than a driver? How does that fit into the scheme of things? Is it part of Windows?

[artx2013]

Does anyone know if there are capture cards which will always mess up macrovision recording no matter which operating system or drivers are being used? I don't want to tell people that Linux can always do a correct video capture, and then find out that I'm misinforming them.

[artx2013]

So, based on what you guys are saying, it seems that possibly the original poster in this thread (techspark) should not have to spend one cent of his precious money on a new video capture card. And he possibly does not need to use a different operating system either. Maybe he just needs to use a different driver for the capture card which he already has(?).

[Brad]

Double-posting and especially triple-posting is frowned upon on forums. In the future just edit your original post.

Macrovision detection is a feature of the analog-to-digital converter. If it doesn't detect and account for Macrovision, the AGC can be confused and no driver will help. If it does include the detection feature, the driver can decide whether to abide by the copy protection or not.

[Brad]

Finally got a good DVD trigger for Macrovision. Here is the original single-disc Titanic DVD release captured with the devices I have here.

ATI 600 USB
ATI 750 USB
Mygica EzGrabber2
Diamond VC500
Easycap STK1160
AV Grabber USB 28285


[Attachment 17834 - Click to enlarge]

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[Attachment 17831 - Click to enlarge]

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[Attachment 17835 - Click to enlarge]

Going to try out playing around with the drivers for the Conexant Polaris devices.

[vhelp]

i've been working with the conexant polaris (ezgrabber2) card. so far i like it. i was able to get the levels close to the 16..235 mark on this one. but not without tricking it somewhat. because this card only gives you overlay output, you can not update the brightness and contrast correctly. but i fould a way by opening a graphedit and forcing it in one of the renderers. then i map that output to my utility and adust the levels from there. usually, you can adjust the brightness and contrast directly during capturing with the utility when you switch the view in virtualdub to Preview. anyway. that's how i do it with all my capture cards. and of course, the settings stay, so you only need to do it once. but so far this card seems to give the best color and levels output. once i get this utility working with the features i want to add into it, (i want to include a histogram) i would like release it to all so that everyone can make better adjustments to their captures' color levels. well, that is my hope!

[Brad]

Hmm, what driver are you using? With the VC500's driver I can only access Brightness and Contrast in VirtualDub/Graphedit. The rest I adjust using their own utility (and I can open their utility after opening VirtualDub in order to see a realtime update with Overlay, like your method).

I wasn't able to do anything about the blown levels when playing Macrovsion with the Polaris by the way. Deleting those keys did nothing.

[vhelp]

when it comes to blown levels (agc related) any capture card will have problems, including the ezg2 card. soory if i gave you the impression it handles it correctly, it does not. i will try again to make sure, its vague to me at this point. all my tests so far were with the toshiba dr430, and that may have altered the results, but i'm not certain. i was busy yesterday with the haup hdpvr trying to get the levels correct without a viewing window. anyway, i will see about running new tests with the cap cards, i lost count of how many i have, and more to come..still waiting on an avermedia to arive. i think that agc issues are the toughest yet..to resolve, that is.

[boko]

I was thinking the other day: the "HDCP driver trick" for the AVerMedia C027 PCIe card actually applies to Macrovision and any copy protection (i.e. anything that can be viewed in AMC can be captured).

i'm into buying this card, how good is it in general, and does it actually bypass macrovision or pseudomacrovision errors?
(without ignoring what's been said just one post up, for subjective and objective opinions)

[sanlyn]

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/3308-aver-media-products.html#post16712

[boko]

seems like you can't have it all. Or more likely if you got the money you can actually have them all and play around with which ever suites your needs. I guess that's why they called them All-in-one.Wish i had known and bought one back in those days.