[geeks] iPad - NOT a 'Miss' for me I'm afraid

[Jonathan Groll]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 09:28:36PM -0500, Nate wrote:
>Commercial VHS tapes have Macrovision copy protection that scrambles/degrades
>the video when trying to make a copy.  Most commercial DVDs have the same
>Macrovision enabled, through a per-disc royalty payment to the Macrovision
>corporation that allows them to flip a bit on the disc that enables the
>Macrovision chip in the DVD player, which causes the DVD composite outputs to
>be crippled to prevent analog copies as well.

Either I'm an excessive hoarder, but this being the Geeks list, I
guess it'll be okay to share. So here's a confession, I still have
many (~15-20) old VHS tapes (mostly commercial kiddie ones, with
macrovision) that I can't bear to lose (and the kids don't mind the
poor quality because they have high sentimental value for them), and
many of these items never made it to DVD as far as I can tell.

So what to do with them? My Philips DVDR3570H recorder, bless it's
soul, refuses to record macrovision protected content, and also makes
it painful to watch such content by flashing a big bar at the top of
the screen every 15 seconds to let me know that the item is copy
protected, but the kids still like to watch even with that in place. I
assume I could order a macrovision break-out box from China, but would
that be worthwhile? Is there an easier alternative? I also assume that
this would be quasi-illegal, but then again this is strictly a case of
making personal backup copies.

Cheers,
Jonathan