VHS to DVD

I have recently been looking into this macrovision problem, and came across an interesting article by a guy that tried everything. http://www.biline.ca/ati_macrovision.htm

He wanted to put his VHS movie collection onto DVD, and didn't have any luck with ATI cards and third party drivers that were supposed to work. He also tried some Macrovision removal devices, and these didn't work. He eventually came across the Hauppauge line of cards, and settled on the WinTV-PVR-250. It's one of those PCI cards that lets you watch TV on the desktop, or else record a TV program. While Haupauge does not advertise that it removes Macrovision, he claimed that it did.

The card will record up to 12 MB/Sec, which seems to indicate that some fairly good quality is possible. It also appears that there aren't the typical audio-video synch problems.

If anyone has or gets one of these cards, let us know what you think?

 

Thanks for all the replies.. I pretty much figured the worst.. I dont usually do this type of conversion. If I want it on DVD I buy it instead of doing a time consuming transfer. In this case the tape is not made on DVD and is pretty old so I have no choice. I'm going to the good will/thrift store to find a old old old VCR. It's cheaper than a new capture card (which I already have) and I can bring stuff back if it doesn't work.. Thanks again everyone that replied to help out.

 

The Hauppauge PVR 250/350/500 all ignore macrovision.
BTW, it's undocumented, but they will also do up to 15MB/sec, not just 12.

Are you kidding? Commercial DVD's are about 8500kbps. 1200kbps is 1/3 more bitrate!
Here's a screenshot at 8500kbps, uncompressed .bmp, so it will take a while to load (sorry dial-up users).
This is from a Hauppauge PVR-250 cable TV capture. Notice slight artifacting around the shoulders. This is an I frame, during movement. A higher bitrate would eliminate this completely.


There is one thing you might want to try.
Hook up the VCR using the TV cable (the normal OUT from VCR to TV, not component or S-vid). Tune your capture card to channel 3 (the same as the VCR out channel) and see if you can cap.

 

jim...thanks for the info and the screen shot. I'm wondering, if the player was captured at 15MB/sec, and then the file was run through an encoder like CCE or ProCoder to reduce the file size, would the artifacts come back? (For instance, let's say the player was in a movie that was 8.4 GB total, and it was run through the RB-CCE process to get a 4.2 GB file.)

Also, does anyone know if the Canopus ADVC-100 will also remove Macrovision?

 

No, if you use a good encoder, such as you mention Canopus, Mainconcept, or CCE (don't use tmpgenc for this!), but why waste all that time?
Capture at the bitrate you need, to fit the amount of time you want, on one dvdr. For VHS and TV captures, 4500kbps is lots, because the initial quality of the source isn't better than that. If you have digital cable, it's a different story
I use 4500 for VHS caps, (about 1 movie length, except for those saga's that run 3 hours or more), and 8500 for TV episodes, then cut out commercials/credits, and you can just squeeze two on a disk.
This is approximate of course, depending on the actual running time, how much editing you do, etc.
If my finished product doesn't quite fit, I use DVDShrink on it.

Absolutely!

 

I'm right at the start of this, so this is some really useful info. I recently got the Canopus ADVC-100 so I could convert a lot of family VHS-C tapes. I now see that there are some older VHS movies that will never make it to DVD, and so I thought I would use it for that also.

The Canopus manual leaves a lot to be desired. I am now wondering what to do with the DV output? There doesn't seem to be any way to set the bitrate of the output signal. Is this done through the authoring software as the signal is input to the HDD?
And, since it is DV, do I need to convert to AVI or MPEG2 before editing/authoring?

On a related topic, I am wondering if anyone knows how the QUALITY of a PDR's output (such as the Liteon 5005 which records a VHS/TV program directly to DVD-R) compares to the "longer" way of doing things such as we are discussing here?

 

The PVR recorders do only 2 things. 1 hour per dvdr in high quality, or 2 hours at lower quality.
Some do extended, supposedly 4 hours per.

Canopus only tells you (in the manual) how to get the stuff onto the computer. You have almost NO choice in this. It's in extremely high quality DV Type 2 avi.
It must then be encoded to mpeg-2, and then authored, and THEN burned.
Don't worry about the DV bitrate. Because it's avi, it really doesn't matter in this case, because you're going to convert to mpeg-2 to fit on dvdr.
Use the bitrate calculator to figure out how much video you can get on one dvdr. I'm sure you found a few of my other postst on this

 

The Liteon 5005 has a hack that disables macrovision, and also allows for 3 hours of recording...for those movies that go over the 120 minutes. I have looked all over to find what bitrate they use for different settings, but no success. People claim they like the quality...but comparted to what?

Yes, plenty of posts with some very good bitrate info that I can use to get started. Thanks.

 

Exactly!
I would think that they use (given a standard NTSC framerate of 29.97fps) about 9500 for 1 hour, and about 4750 for 2 hours, given an audio rate of 224kbps. Video bitrate would be a bit less, if audio is a bit more.
The reason they look as good as they do, is because of the hardware filtering abilities. The same way a hardware capture card does.

 

I tried to download virtual Dub but it gives me an open with window. What do you open it with? It wont install. Just a newbie here. just bought a capture card. I read you used the virtual dub to capture videos, so I treid to download it.I have nero; copy to dvd. DvD Shrink (I like the best). How do I download virtual on to my computer???

 

If you don't have XP, get Winzip, which you need to decompress the file, and install it.
http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net
Select which one you want. Click it.
Click on the little download icon.

 

I do have winzip but it would not come yesterday. All it showed was open with program. Today the winzip came up. Everything is okay. Thanks
tinner45

 

Just wanted to let you guys know.. I found a way around my "grey rectangle" in the middle of my recorded movies.. I found a set of NVIDIA drivers that dont support macrovision.. loaded them and everything records perfect now.. Thanks again..

 

what kind of nvidia drivers like grafhic type iam still looking at the goodwill for old vcrs.

 

My NVIDIA graphics card has a SVIDEO input/out/composite in/out..


Simply replace your Nvidia Capture driver "NVCAP.SYS" in Windows/System32/Drivers with version 1.08. That's it!

Seems NVidia disabled Macrovision in that release to cure some issue or other. Leave the rest of your drivers at the installed release.

Find a 1.08 copy of the WDM Drivers. It'll be an EXE file, but you can open it in WinZip.

Extract "nvcap.sys". Backup original. Replace with extracted version. Can always restore the original should you need to.

If you can't find version 1.08 from Nvidia, you can get the download from here:

http://www.xfxgraphics.com/pineutilities/WDM_1.08.exe

Remember to only extract and replace "nvcap.sys".

Matt

 

How did you get that to work - the 108 version won't start for me - I get a Code 10 device will not start message?

Thanks

 

I have the same problem when I have replaced the NVCAP.SYS - error 10 device cannot start.