Modern Meida Copy Protection

[Arcanine]

Okay. Let me start off with, I've known about copy protection for years. My grandfather used to copy rented VHS tapes for me as a kid, and he found a way around it and always gave me kids movies he'd duplicated.

Fast forward to 2015. My grandpa is long gone, and I have found my self getting more and more in to vintage television collecting and watching then ever before.

Old televisions don't have the ability to ignore or reject the copy protection and display it. It's kind of annoying. Some sets get a horrible buzzing sound from it, most of the time, it's just several little lines that bounce and wobble neat the top left of the screen and come about 4 inches down the screen, and fade in and out.

I can see these lines though my Blonder Tongue modulator, as well. Is there any way I can reject it? Like something I could make and install on the line of the BT, or something I can install on the A/V lines that can filter it out?

[Chip Chester]

Copy and paste into GoogleBox:

site:videokarma.org tbc macrovision copy protection

Chip

[Arcanine]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-Vide...3D190862752528

Would one of these gizmos cut it? They seem chincy.

[Dave A]

I had...and lost...one of the ebay stabilizers. It worked great. 9v battery and it goes forever.

[colorfixer]

The issue revolves around the macrovision placing white boxes in the vertical blanking interval. Modern TVs of the time fully blanked the raster during the vertical retrace period (aka vertical blanking interval or VBI) to ignore captions and other signals there, vintage ones assumed a video signal that conformed to the standard of the time (nothing in these lines), so didn't blank the raster. The "stabilizer" simply blanked the video during the VBI.

The idea behind macrovision was a vcr would set the video recording level off the VBI so anything there would drive the vcr's recording level nuts. Old early VCRs did not have an automatic video recording level control (it was preset), so they were "immune".