Hello, Please forgive me if this is not a right place for my question (my first post here), but it looks like it might be the most appropriate forum. I have a Panasonic DMR-E500 stand-alone DVD Recorder with a great 400GB hard drive. I bougth this unit to make up for some missed TV shows due to my heavy work schedule. I also have one of the very first APEX DVD players. This Apex was purchesed at Circuit City (US) and there was only a handful of them they have sold before they were forced to use region coding, encryption, etc. So here is what I tried to do last week. I had a rented DVD movie which I started to watch when I was called to work for some emergency. In past, I was using my VCR to record the movie (since my Apex is encryption/microvision free) and then I would later watch the movie off the vcr tape. Not as good as watching it from the original DVD but still better than paying late fees. Last week, since I have my new Panasonic DVD Recorder/Harddrive hooked up, I quickly turned it on and tried to let the DVD movie record itself to the hard drive for later watching. Guess what, the Panasonic Hard Drive recorder says that it is a copyrighted material and it will not record! What puzzels me is this: The connection between the Apex and Panasonic is not digital (red/white/yellow audio/video plugs). So this is not a digital copy protection - right? It's not microvision analog, since my DVDs can be recorded to my VCR tapes. I tried few days later, with another DVD movie. I copied it to my VCR tape. Then when I tried to copy it (now just to kill my own curiousity) from the VCR tape to the Panasonic Hard Drive, same copy protection came up and the unit shots off! My question is, what type of new protections are we dealing with here? If even after it is copied to a VCR tape, it still cannot be recorded back to a Hard Drive??? And please, I did sign up for Netflix already and I am not trying to hack anyones copy rights, I'm very much against it. Simply, I'm just interested how a digital recording copied to an analog device, cannot be copied back to digital. It's just amazing. I don't think it is Microvision or it would not copy to my VCR, and I don't think it is CSS, because it is no longer a digital signal once recorded to my old fashioned VCR. I think I'm falling behind in all the new technology! Any educational guesses??? Thanks guys!
One simple little box will solve all your problems. It goes between the VCR and DVD, or between the two DVD's. There are other boxes out there, but I got the GoDVD box by Sima. Now I can copy my bought tapes to DVD. Raymond
