ATI Radeon VIVO - macrovision workaround - W2K

[wszebork]

I've found the way to switch off the macrovsion for ATI Radeon VIVO. It can also work for other ATI cards.
I tested it only with W2K Pro, SP1 and ATI drivers 5.13.01.3102.
What you need:
1. Windows XP Pro RC1,
2. WinZip or other program, which can decompress *.CAB file.
3. You have to install ATI drivers for W2K first.



How to do that:
1. Find a file drivers.cab on Windows XP Pro RC1 CD - it is in i386 directory.
2. Extract from drivers.cab file atirtcap.sys.
3. Copy atirtcap.sys to system32\drivers directory.
4. Rename atinrvxx.sys to something else - atinrvxx.bak
5. Rename atirtcap.sys to atinrvxx.sys
6. Reboot.
7. It should work fine now.

atirtcap.sys and atinrvxx.sys are device drivers for W2K/XP for ATI Rage Theater.
Take a look at file properties of both files and compare version/internal name

I don't know if macrovision implemented in ATI drivers protect copying of comercial movies. I don't have a movie with macrovision protection, so I could not test it.
I tested this solution with movie recorded with my video camera - the brightnes of movie chnages frequently and I could not record it on my computer becouse of macrovision protection.

Now I can.

[homerpez]

Do not expect this to disable Macrovision for VHS tapes, nor DVD input. It might work, like you said, for your application (to turn off the frame-repeat "feature" when there is brightness flicker)...

There was a patch floating around that does basically the same thing (plus some registry hacks), but it works on probably only 25% of Macrovision signals. Basically useless for that purpose.

For me, I got a Sima Copymaster at Circuit City, and even that is only as good as the VHS source quality, and the VCR you are using to play with, and it's not perfect...

BTW: How the !@#$% are you doing ATi capturing in Windows XP? I know MMC doesn't work...

[wszebork]

This workaround only disables macrovision in ATI driver.
It does not remove macrovision signal. So you still have those changes in brightnes etc.

The only thing you get is just possibilty to record macrovision protected tapes and home videos with changes of brightnes.

I do not record using MMC and Windows XP - MMC 7.x is not compatible with XP - no sound in recorded movies and still no new version of MMC.

I just used the part of driver from XP and I record in W2K.
I would prefer to do that in XP - it is much faster.

[homerpez]

...I do know that MMC doesn't work in XP, but I was able to get other programs to work in some of the BETA versions(such as PowerVCR 2, Virtualdub) so long as they just access the driver itself, not MMC!

Of course, for me this is useless, since I only capture in MPEG-2. V-Dub is AVI only, and PowerVCR2 produces a very "ghosty" picture, no matter how I capture!

Them's the breaks I guess...

[VideoGuy]

If you own most *any* video that you *bought*, chances are 99% that it has Macrovision analog protection. Just FYI...