I recently purschased a vhs- dvd copier, I wanted to copy a bunch of my old favorite movies from vhs to dvd, for easier storage. but it won't let me copy them as they are write protected. I feel its my right to make a copy on a dvd. Is there anything I can do about this. thanks alot.
You would need to get a separate DVD recorder and/or VHS machine and use a Time Base Corrector (TBC) connected between them. "Combo" decks like yours are designed to prevent copying and will even think some old, non-copy-protected tapes are copy-protected. Search this site for info on this as there was a recent thread. Use the search term "TBC-1000". The best, reasonably-priced TBC is the DataVideo TBC-1000 which is about $250-$300, though if you look through the recent thread, some people say even some $30-$100 "stabilizers" and "clarifiers" work well. You have to know what to buy though as some suck.
You can also do this by adding a Video Capture card to your comp and then using Nero to burn files to DVD. I use a WinFast2000XP capture card, they are fairly cheap and very easy to install. So far I've not experienced any problems relating to CopyProtection.
I'm going to wrap this up with some technical and legal things to consider. Gwendolin's right that a capture card is another option, and a better one than mine if you plan to do some editing as well, but there are some things of which you need to be aware. There are two kinds of capture card - one with a built-in MPEG-2 encoder, one with out. The ones with built-in MPEG encoders are, like DVD recorders, required to honor VHS copy-protection (Macrovision) and, thus, also cannot be used to transfer commercial tapes without a TBC/stablizer/clarifier, but they produce better quality. The non-hardware-encoding cards are cheap and rely on software to do the DVD conversion - they simply capture the video and audio. They are also cheap at around $30 or less. So, this might be the most economical solution. The bad news is, they usually produce mediocre if not lousy results. Unfortunately, due to the way VHS works, you need a TBC/stabilizer/clarifier no matter what. VHS is an analog format and, without one, your finished product will have lots of color shifts, jitter, speed-ups/slow-downs, and other problems. Stabilizers aren't designed to defeat copy-protection; they are designed to improve the quality of the video signal coming out of your VCR. It just so happens by the nature of their operation that they also remove copy-protection. As for the legal issues, many countries permit "format-shifting" i.e. to allow you to convert from obsolete formats like VHS to modern ones like DVD. Whether this extends to allowing you to rent a DVD and copy it using something like AnyDVD/CloneDVD2 is another matter and may or may not be legal. You would have to look into this as there is no good, single, definitive guide that I'm aware of. However, if your country's laws do allow format-shifting, I recommend retaining any evidence i.e. partial boxes, receipts, etc. as proof that you legally owned the movie prior to any format-shifting. I agree completely that you should be allowed to protect your investment by format-shifting: after all, it's not our fault that old formats are no longer being produced, and it is highly unreasonable to expect consumers to re-buy the same content over and over again every time the entertainment/electronics industry decides to adopt a new format. However, the law isn't always just, and consumers need to turn this into a political issue as well.
