PS2 + Upscan Converter = Easy DVD to VHS Copying

Lots of people submitted the news: An EETimes story from last week that tells how Japanese gamers are using a (Japanese model) Sony Playstation 2, an upscan converter like the Micomsoft model XRGB-2, and an easily-obtained adaptor cable to make VHS copies of DVD movies. As an unintentional byproduct of its other functions, an XRB2 or similar upscan converter installed between the RGB output of a PS2 and the RGB inputs on a VCR apparently disables the Macrovision encoding used to prevent DVD copying. This trick is almost certainly illegal, and the "problem" will surely be fixed before Sony starts exporting PS2s in quantity, so don't get your hopes up, okay?

Comments

Consequences of complexity

[troc]

I guess this is a consequence of the complexity within current computers/consoles/home AV equipment etc.

Here in the UK, a large number of DVD players are eitehr sold or are later modified to play Region 1 discs so we can buy movies from the States where they are much cheaper. A consequence of this mod is that macrovision is disabled (for better or worse etc) Most people aren't even aware of this aspect of the mod, or even care - we just want our movies :)

I would think that the harder Sony try to remove this 'feature' from the PSX 2, the more people will hack deeper into the hard/software and find alternate methods - after all the Sony DVD players are all easily modded to allow the same functions.

I would think an interesting debate would be on teh merits of copy protection and whether it's necessary at all. Specifically the macrovision and/or region coding that goes on - i.e. is macrovision ok to stop people copying dvd -> video and Region coding bad (mmmmkay) or vice versa or are we all against everything?

Personally I have no problems with macrovision as I don't plan to copy dvds but I HATE the Region coding with a vengence and that's why I had my DVD modded and will certainly have my PSX 2 modded when I buy it later this year (or whenever they are out in the UK)

Just some thoughts, I know some of the have been hashed out before but I fancied a quick typo :)

Troc

Not illegal: a bit of background

[Alan Shutko]

This isn't exactly new. You can go to Best Buy and purchase Macrovision scrubbers, and have been able to for some time. These have a number of completely legal uses, not the least of which being using a DVD player with a TV/VCR combo unit.
Or wanting to be able to use a DVD player and VCR with a TV with only one set of composite inputs. I got a composite AB-switch, but it still annoys me that I can't switch things with the remote.

Ooops! Let me rephrase that

[unitron]

I was confusing the Slashdot story with the one that just aged off of The Register. The convert RGB to NTSC part is still accurate and not that difficult.

Re:How is this trick illegal?

[Jeffrey Baker]

You are making an assumption that is not gauranteed to be true. The assumption is that every DVD is subject to restricted copy and distribution. Some DVDs may not come from a corporate mega-studio, and they may be freely distributable.

Macrovision, OTOH, enforces copy restriction even when that is against the copyright holder's wishes. So you can see that mandatory Macrovision is simply a tool used by the consumer media industry to ensure that no independent source of DVDs becomes popular.

BTW, if you think openly redistributable works of art are not a phenomenon, I present Ani Difranco as an example. Her CDs and tapes are very widely sold, and come with this rather loose copyright notice: "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing."

-jwb

Cool! Is there an equivalent for audio?

[CaseyB]

This is great, but is there an equivalent for audio?

I have a large collection of high-quality, digital audio recordings on CD. Is there a way that I can transfer these pristine recordings to a lossy, low-quality, non-random-access, fragile, progressively degrading magnetic medium? Something like audio cassettes would be ideal.

Oh, and if these stereo recordings can be converted to mono during the process, so much the better.

This is *SO* not newsworthy . . .

[alhaz]

This is so *Shockingly* mundane a thing to hear that I'm really, truly saddened to see it wasting bandwidth.

You know those little boxes you can buy to let you duplicate VHS tapes that they sell in the back of Popular Mechanics? They really work, and they still really work for DVD players. All of them. Not just PSX2. And they're essentially the same thing as the upscan converter refered to here.

Lemme 'splain the concept behind Macrovision.

One of the qualities of the VHS format is that the horizontal sync signal is weakly recorded. This wasn't due to some corporate conspiracy, It's just Not a Very Good Format. VHS doesn't record the whole video signal, including not recording the whole sync signal. This is why even non-copy-protected VHS tapes look like crap when you copy them. Let me reiterate, this is NOT because of the fiendish plans of Mr. Valenti. It's simply because VHS is crappy technology.

"Macrovision" is essentially the act of intentionally providing a weak sync signal. That's right. All they do is make it weaker.

This works brilliantly, because Mr. Valenti has made it illegal to fix a VCR so that it has it's own amplifier on the sync signal. You take a poor sync signal, record it badly, and you have a really crappy copy.

TV's don't suffer from this because they are designed to recieve the whole video signal and not just some of it. Thus, you can get good video plugging DVD directly into your tv, and you can get good video plugging VHS directly into your tv, but when you plug DVD into VHS there's too much loss between the two to end up with a good signal.

SO, insert something that makes up for the poor sync signal, or prevent the sync signal from being degraded, and everything is hunky-dory.

Any questions?

How is this trick illegal?

[Carl]

I don't see how or why this trick can be illegal. It might be that distributing the result of this trick to others may be illegal. But making a backup copy of the movie shouldn't be illegal. Or maybe someone wants to extract a small part of the movie to be used in a (critical) review about that movie. I think that should be fair use.

Sony will not *fix* this

[Breace]

because they can't/don't have to.

Macrovision is a copy protection method that takes advantaged of the AGC (Automatic Gain Control) in a VCR. They make the VCR think that the Gain need be adjusted all the time and hence a bad recording.

Devices like scan converters recreate the video signal (without Macrovision) and are not sensitive to the AGC themselves.

In other words, this is not a problem with the PS2. This trick works with any Macrovision encoded video (like from any DVD player). It's known and people have been doing this for years.

Actually, a better way to get DVD's to a VHS is to use a PC based DVD decoder and disable the Macrovision on there. For at least a few hardware decoders I've seen software and/or hardware patches that allow disabling the Macrovision encoding. That way you don't have to go throught the scan-converter which will undoubtly degrade the video quality a little.

Breace.

Once VCRs are outlawed, only outlaws will own VCRs

[whyde]

In order to control content access and delivery, the MPAA is working on (recently patented) secure digital tv/monitor interfaces which send data in encrypted form from a computer (or game console) to the monitor, which means the following:

• CSS is used on the physical recording (DVD)
• A second encryption is performed inside of the DVD player or computer's video adapter, to prevent copying (re-digitizing) the analog RGB
• Decryption is performed by the tv/monitor of the "secure" digital input before display on the LCD/tube

No matter how much you encrypt/decrypt this data, there are at least 2 points along the way where the raw RGB is available:

• After DeCSS and before encryption by the video card
• After decryption in the tv/monitor and before it hits the analog tube control.

This only makes coyping inconvenient, but will certainly make ordinary use more complicated and expensive.

Used to be, the government was concerned with providing access to technology (like TV) to the widest possible audience using the most straightforward, most easily implemented solutions to encourage proliferation of new technologies.

Nowadays, it really seems like the government is a puppet of anyone waving enough money in front of capitol hill.

That's progress for you.

@home, working on my manifesto...

Re:Has everyone forgotten Beta?

[Rahoule]

This (supposedly) only works with pre-1989 Betas. Around 1989, Hollywood finally confronted Sony and forced them to make Beta vulnerable to Macrovision, just like VHS. Of course, by then, it was a little late, as Beta was irreversibly going down.

I'm on a mailing list called the Beta Informer , and there has been quite a lot of discussion about Betamax's apparent invulnerability to Macrovision.

Here's a quote from issue #129, in a submission by Dan Petitpas:

The reason Macrovision doesn't work with Beta is because of the way the system was designed.

All VCRs have automatic gain controls (AGC) circuits that modulate the video signal, boosting weak video signals and clamping down on too strong signals.

But Sony [the inventor of Betamax] put the AGC circuit on Beta's inputs, as was done with previously with audio recorders, where the signal is modulated before it is recorded.

JVC put the AGC circuits into VHS's outputs to compensate for poorly recorded tapes. Sony, because it tightly controlled the quality of the format between only three other manufacturers, expected Beta tapes to be recorded as well as possible and used the circuit to make that possible. JVC, with alliances with over 80 other manufacturers, took the philosophy that the quality of the recorded tapes would vary so much by manufacturer that it had better modulate the signal output.

Macrovision took advantage of this. In the sync signal it puts a big, white, pulsating "block." As the "block" overmodulates periodically (every 30 seconds or so), the AGC tries to clamp the signal down, causing the rest of the sync signal to weaken. As Macrovision found, the trick is to allow the sync signal to lessen to the point where a VHS recorder couldn't lock in on the sync, but a TV had enough of a sync signal to lock in on and boost using its own built in AGC.

This was why different TVs reacted different ways to the different tapes. Each AGC would handle the signal somewhat differently. Also, some tape distributors turned down the Macro signal so that their tapes would play better. Other manufacturers were more worried about piracy and turned up the Macro signal. A couple of studios didn't sign up with Macro at first, and put out Macro-free tapes for a while.

[Some pre-1985 TVs would show a distorted picture when used to view a Macrovision-protected videotape.]

Beta decks worked the same way TVs did and basically helped fixed what it saw as a weak sync signal, which allowed you to make Beta copies of VHS Macro tapes.

For a while, most studios did not put Macro on Beta copies, but when they started using the same video tape master for both VHS and Beta copies, Beta tapes were sold with Macro on them. This caused more annoyance for Beta users than anything else. I have a copy of the darkly lighted film Aliens where the damned "flashing" of the sync signal is quite apparent because it turns black areas at the top of the screen to turn grayish when it does its "thing."

You could make VHS copies of Beta Macro movies with no problem because of where the ACG control was wired in, but I think you could make Beta copies of Beta pre-recorded movies because the sync signal was stronger to begin with and Sony may have had its AGC set not to be fooled by this.

From another contributor:

Macrovision uses a different format, I believe, and I've heard of some later Betas being affected by it as well.

From Mr. Petitpas:

I have heard this -- that Sony was sort of forced to wire in an AGC circuit to the outputs so Macro would function as it did with VHS.

Anyway, I've heard a lot of people talk about making perfect copies of DVDs and copy-protected VHS tapes on their Betamaxes. I tried that a few times with my SL-100 SuperBetamax (made in 1986), but I still got a mild lightening and darkening of the picture.

I still don't fully understand the relationship between Macrovision and Beta decks. If the AGC on Betas is wired to the inputs, wouldn't that cause the Beta deck to produce screwed-up recordings of copy-protected tapes? It would be clamping down the stronger video signal.

What I do know is that Macrovision (on videotapes) mainfests itself as a really bright white line just above the picture (in the out-of-band area) on your TV, and most VCR's AGCs take this into account when determining the picture's brightness (which is why videotape copies have that "flashing" effect). Also, if you're ever watching a commercial video and the screen appears bright or distorted at the top of the picture, that's Macrovision at work. The brightness at the top of the picture is especially noticeable at the beginning of the video, during the black screens between the trailers and the antipiracy notice.

Many Consumer DVD players can disable Macrovision

[jbridges]

For instance the first Sony high-end model the DVP-7000 from a few years ago had dip switches inside that let you disable the region blocking and Macrovision.

The APEX 600D mentioned here at Slashdot has the "hidden" menu that lets you disable Macrovision.

Here is a list of region/macrovision cracks for home dvd players (many done with a keysequence on remote control)

DVD Utils Home DVD Cracks

If that is already slashdot'd, try one of the mirrors through:

DVD Utils

So basicly, the PS2 hack is not news. You can go out today and a consumer DVD player with a known Macrovision disable feature, and copy movies to video tape to your hearts content, and avoid all the Macrovision glitches.