Well I recently bought my Wife a DVD/VHS recorder that was to allow my wife to convert all her old VHS tapes to DVD so we can save a little storage space around here. It works fine on tapes that don't have Macrovision encoded on them, but we found that only about one out of 10 tapes don't use the Macrovision copy protection. I did some research via goggle and as best I can determine Macrovision is pretty standard on most all VHS AND DVD commerical media regardless if it is maked such or not. That means on DVD disks there is digital copy protection (which seems to be breakable on PCs with the 'right' ripping software) and Macrovision copy protection to prevent making analog copies of DVD disks. To be fair to the new recorder it was clearly marked on the box and the manual that it would not record Macrovision encoded tapes.
Anyway I've ordered but not received a video stabilizer that is suppose to clean up the blanking/retrace pulse in any Macrovision encoded signal. Then I should be able to copy VHS/DVD from a upstream player into the new recorder via it's RCA video/audio input. I'll post the results after I receive the device if any one is interested.
http://www.checkhere22.com/stabilizer.html
Lefty