Whether I can burn it to DVD is secondary. It has belatedly occurred to me that the real question is simply whether I can get the signal into the computer. As in every other arena, digital signal processing of analog videotape signals is an amazing thing official resolution figures aside, the image quality of a commercial VHS tape, played back on a D-VHS deck, only looks a little worse than a DVD on my standard-resolution TV.Īnyway, I'll be interested in finding out what your tests turned up. It's a shame that technology came along too late. You'd be surprised at the quality that a D-VHS deck produces.
Compared to transferring my vinyl LPs, this was a piece of cake. But a simple transfer? Just a matter of popping a tape and disk into the respective machines, making sure everything is running properly, and come back two hours later. Not unless one is going to do a re-edit or play other fun and games. Otherwise, I'm just spending too much time on it versus the money.įor what it's worth, simply transferring tapes to DVD is not a lot of work. If I can do this for under $100 without a big investment of fiddling on my part, it's worth doing. There are various and sundry ways to hack around the anti-copy stuff, but they all involve more babysitting and more work than I'm interested in. Similarly, I'm not willing to invest a lot of effort. So I'm not willing to invest a lot of money in this. While it would only cost me about $300 to replace the tapes with DVDs (I've looked into it), I really don't know how many of those I will watch again. If you do make the copies I bet you never get around to watching any of them.
Personally I find the time required to copy the movie and make the DVD just isn't worthwhile when a much better-quality version is available for purchase for just a few dollars. They have been sticklers about not enabling copying or owner-protected media in the past. So I don't know if the Roxio unit is sensitive to Macrovision or not. The thing is, who cares any more if someone copies for themselves a commercial VHS tape? The quality is far less than a replacement store-bought DVD and the prices of those DVDs for old movies is darn cheap (especially used).
So the manufacturers of DVD recorders include a circuit that will recognize if a Macrovision signal is present and prevent the copying. I may be wrong in my legal interpretation but my understanding is it is lawful to make a copy for yourself of a copy-protected video you own, but it is unlawful to defeat a copy protection scheme to do that. I know about lots of different things, but as you can tell video copy protection schemes isn't one of them (ignorant smile). I'm supposing it's buried in the interframe signal. But there's something in it that tells the DVD recorder not to allow record mode. Thanks! Is that what the anti-copy scheme is called?įWIW, the video output looks and plays just fine, no visible evidence that there's anything hinky in the signal.