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Old 27-11-2010, 04:31 PM
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MikeyB (Michael)
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Perth, WA
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Copying commercial VHS tapes

Quote:
Originally Posted by erick View Post
My son and I have been struggling with something similar for weeks, so, I will unashamedly hijack your thread, Paul . But my questions may draw out useful answers for many people trying to do this.

I have a commercial tape that I want converted to DVD.

(OK, it's the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert - only the VHS edition has the full footage of the concert - not the commercially available DVDs.)

It's in NTSC format which my VHS player is playing fine. I have the EasyCap USB video grabber. I can preview on the computer screen in a variety of programs - good picture, good stereo sound. BUT any attempt to capture and it all falls apart. We have twiddled as many options as we can identify but we get nothing, or a captured picture that breaks up and good sound or whatever. We've tried it on a laptop and on a gaming machine with buckets of grunt so it is not a machine speed/memory problem. We've captured as MPEG and as AVI.

So far, all the searching for hints on the net hasn't helped. We are guessing it is a matter of choosing the correct number of lines (NTSC versus PAL) and a few other settings.

Anyone want to suggest which parameters may be the problem here?
Sounds like your commercial tape has Macrovision copy protection, Eric. More info here: Macrovision is an abomination
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