pt's "How-To" Tuesday (a day late): How to record movies onto portable video players
This week's how-to is a little late and it's not exactly how-to at all, more of a roundabout rumination on the highly charged subject of copying DVDs to portable video players for personal use.
A little background
When you go to the store and buy a CD, you can plug that CD audio in to just about any device and record, usually referred to as an analog recording. This has been true since the good old days of cassettes up until today. Eventually computers came along and people took those CDs and made digital audio files (MP3s, etc..) and sparked an entire music revolution of how we all listen and store our music. It's quite common now for folks to have thousands of songs with them. As devices evolve and storage gets bigger and bigger, the natural evolution to movies seems obvious, right? Why should we have to store movies on pieces of plastic if we don't store our
music that way? Well, not so fast. If you pop in a DVD and try to record it by running S-Video or a cable out the back of the DVD player (or VCR) in to something which can record, you'll see the signal is blocked. This is blockage is called Macrovision.
What is Macrovision?
Macrovision is the name of the US based company which makes copy protection software, hardware, etc for audio and video, the actual product is called "Macrovision Video Copy Protection". They're best known for their copy protection on VHS and DVDs. How popular is it? Every single DVD player in the USA has Macrovision and any VCR sold in the last 10+ years or so does too. Even Pay-Per-View systems have Macrovision now (so you can't record that movie).
What does Macrovision actually do?
Macrovision isn't anything more than "noise" which your TV ignores, but devices which record choke on. A lot of people say that Macrovision's noise makes the picture quality poor, we've seen movies with and without Macrovision and there is a difference, but we're not sure most people would notice. It's a bit of a bummer to realize that even the best quality DVD and system has interference and noise. This noise is meant to basically disable AGC (automatic gain circuit) and chroma processing circuitry used in NTSC video recorders.
When companies make DVDs and VHS, they can add this copy-protection in two ways, most use one or the other, some use both.
The first is called "vertical blanking signal". This is where PSPs (Pseudo-Sync Pulses) are inserted into the vertical blanking signal. As mentioned before, this disables the automatic gain control (AGC) circuitry used by any thing records video. If you've tried this you usually get: picture tearing, video noise, loss of brightness and color.
The second is Colorstripe. This method inserts a rapidly modulated color burst signal. This disables the chroma processing circuitry used in NTSC video recorders. As before, the attempted recordings will have horizontal stripes or other just a bunch of useless stuff.
Oddly enough the audio still makes it through. That said, Macrovision is working diligently on Macrovision for CD
audio and we suspect that will be part of DVD Audio as well.
Recording movies to portable video devices?
So basically you can't record a DVD or VHS to something else. This is a bit troubling, why? Because as any gadget fanatic knows, there are a ton of hard drive based video recorders coming out right now.
We have an Archos 20GB personal video player and a Panasonic eWear SV-AV30, both of which can record video in...as long as the source isn't a DVD. Try recording a DVD you bought to these devices and Macrovision will block it. So what's the point of these devices? Well, you can record TV – sorta like a TiVo but that of course raises an interesting observation. So we can record the Matrix from the TV and copy it onto our player, but not a DVD which we bought and paid for.
There isn't a movie service yet that allows you to download movies to devices. There's
Movielink, but that's only for Windows and there is a limit on the amount of time you have to watch the movie and the number of times you can watch it. [Editor's note ??? we've heard that personal video players running on Microsoft's Portable Media Center will be able to use online movie download services.]
People keep talking about a video player iPod and watching movies on the Sony PlayStation portable, we've got news for ya'll ??? someone needs to figure this out or these devices are all going to be really lame if you can't watch movies you've bought and paid for on them.
Macrovision blockers?
There is at least one company we know of that sells a Macrovision blocker, Facet Video. They make the
"The Clarifier???", which you guessed it, clarifies video signals and removes the noise. From the site:
The Clarifier??? and all other "Video Stablizers" remove copy protection signals that can confuse a VCR and make the VCR unstable. For example, the signal coming out of a DVD player is rock solid. If you try to record it on a VCR, you will get an unwatchable "unstable" picture. By removing the copy protection from the video, the VCR can properly lock on to the signal.
Does it work? A lot of people on the web have purchased it, seems so, read
here and
here. And it even looks like people can make their own.
The "The Clarifier???" will in fact work on any of your portable video players as well. However it is not clear whether doing so is entirely legal, so we are not explicitly advocating this.
Backups, fair use?
You might be telling yourself, "wait, I can make backups of anything under fair use', right?" Well, no, not really. A
few companies have released software to make backup copies of DVDs, but Macrovision and the movie studios have done a good job at stopping those folks. The most recent one was 321 Studios, with DVD X copy. You were to be able to buy a simple program, pop in a DVD and make a back up. But now that ability is no longer in the product. Here's
the latest on this. Let's just say that it's not looking good
So what happens? Well, another company popped up called 123 Copy DVD and they make essential the same software, but link to a site which has a
"Third-Party-Plugin" which then does allow you to make a backup. According to
Miami Herald, the plug-in site is actually owned by owned by the same company, Bling Software.
We're actually not sure why Macrovision went to court against 321 Studios since the method that 321 uses decrypts the DVD using DeCSS. We're not going to go into all that but basically, Macrovision is signal noise, CSS is actual encryption and DeCSS which is available
all over the web gets rid of that so you can make a backup. The motion picture association tried to stop this as well, went to court in 1999, in 2001 it became pretty much a free speech issue as people started to paint pictures and make Haikus with the DeCSS code.
This is not a good how to, but it's not our fault
So there it is, not a very good how-to, we're sorry about that. We would have liked to do a step-by-step on how to record your own movies for personal use on your spiffy new portable video player, but we also aren't in the mood to get sued.