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Hidden-Feature DVD Players Again
FModnar writes: "As described in this review on DVDfile.com, another DVD player has been found that exhibits the same menus as the Apex DVD player did a few months ago. Some of the 'hidden' features include the ability to turn off region coding and Macrovision." Sounds like this is a higher-quality player, too. Since both of the Apexes I bought failed within weeks and had to be returned, I certainly hope so. If enough players are region friendly, "chipping" may never catch on much in America.
Well no we should'nt. And you know why? Because the DVD region control system is anticompetitive, hampers competition and the free market, and could certainly be considered illegal in several jurisdiction.
If the makers played fair and made the disks for Region 1 and Region 2 more alike, we wouldn't need to crack our players to play Region 1 /. attitude on DVDs reminds me of people who drive Suburbans with Greenpeace bumper stickers. Maybe you should fly to Norway and rough up Jon Johansen just to make the extent of your support of the DVD CCA clear.
And if you didn't buy them at all, the makers would have an incentive to play fair.
The whole
--Shoeboy
... why is the US market trying to get region-free players? I can understand why in Europe, Asia, etc. there is an interest in region-free DVD players - cheap DVDs!
:-)
All of the people I have spoken to in Europe and South Africa all claim the reason they want region-free is so that they can buy cheap DVDs early from the US market. So why is the US market interested in this?
Is this just a matter of personal freedoms, or do US DVD-fans get cheap imports too from somewhere?
Sorry, I'm just confused....
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I understand the excitement about getting rid of the region coding on the DVD system. But I wouldn't get too enthused about getting rid of Macrovision; you can do that yourself with a soldering iron and about $20 in Radio Shack parts. And no, I don't have a schematic to share, but if you're interested, I'll tell you how it works.
Unlike most of the discussions here which revolve around digital systems and digital technology, Macrovision is analog.
VCRs, just like cassette decks, have to have a recording level set, so that the tape is neither under-recorded or oversaturated. The appropriate recording level varies by scene and by source; all video signals should in theory have a specific level, but in practice, they don't. Therefore, there must be some compensating mechanism.
VHS VCRs (but not Beta, 3/4" or other professional formats) set their recording level using the black level in the "vertical interval", which is the black bar that you see when your vertical hold control is set wrong. There are scan lines there, and they contain a sub-black pulse that is sent to the vertical oscillator in the TV set to reset it to the top of the frame. But, a lot of the vertical interval is just video black, and is there because early TV sets needed a couple of lines to recover from the vertical reset.
As TV sets became more advanced and the need arose to hide more stuff into a TV picture, the vertical blanking interval has been used for lots of extra things: most notably, closed captioning, pay TV decoder controls, and setting record levels on home VCRs.
Try rolling your picture sometime and see if you can get it to stay on the vertical interval. You'll see a couple of bars flashing around for closed-captioning, and a couple of other bars flashing around that would provide digital signals to turn on and off older addressable analog pay-TV decoders (if your cable company uses them). (Usually, this stuff is in lines 19 and 21, odd fields only, but this depends on the cable company.)
VHS VCRs use black lines to set the record level. I can't remember the line numbers specifically, but it's line numbers in the teens.
If you want to prevent a VHS VCR from recording properly, therefore, all you need to do is screw with the blackness that should be present. If you replace it with white bars and stripes, the VCR will set its recording level low, and the rest of the frame of video will appear dark when you play it back. If you flash it on and off, the VCR will compensate during recording and flash the image bright (normal) and dim. Macrovision also screws with the recorded color indirectly; because the chrominance information's record level is generally set by the amplitude of the colorburst pulse at the start of each scan line, it will appear that the colors get to be too intense (saturated) for the given brightness (luminance) of the picture.
Okay, that's how it works. And, only VHS VCRs are vulnerable (and older/cheaper TV sets that don't properly deal with having crap in the vertical interval). So, how do we kill it?
Simple. What you need to do is detect the Horizontal and Vertical sync pulses, and make sure they always get through to the TV set. That's easy, they're the only things that should be between 0 and 0.3V (out of 1 volt of video). So, selectively filter out anything above 0.3V.
Set up a PLL or something to watch for the 60Hz pulse in that sync stream you've just found. A good chip to do this is the National Semiconductors LM1881 Sync Separator chip. Pin 3 will give you an output that you can use to reset a counter. Throw together a counter circuit using TTL or CMOS logic that will count 23 horizontal sync pulses (pin 1) after the vertical pulse from Pin 3. Once the counter has counted that many lines, you need to make it pass the video. You've now made a 23-line-long vertical pulse - your TV might or might not cope with it, your VHS VCR definately won't (but it won't hurt anything).
Now, all you need to do is, in the time that the counter is counting those 23 lines after reset, you hold the video output to your VCR to 0.3V. Congratulations, you've just scrubbed Macrovision from your video.
I figure about four commonly-available chips and a small power supply. I tried it myself a few years ago using just the LM1881, a counter, and about 6 transistors. I built my Macrovision scrubber not to make VHS copies of movies, but because I collect 1950s and 1960s TV sets, and many of them don't play well with Macrovision, and I still want to be able to watch rented movies on them.
Another trick that works sometimes is to just run the video into the video in jacks on a Beta VCR, and run the recovered video out. Most VCRs, while they're just idling, rebuild the sync pulses and intervals (this is why a lot of older VCRs don't pass closed captioning info to your TV). Since Beta VCRs set their recording level a different way, they're immune to Macrovision.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The weasels are then brought the rest of the way to the center of the earth, beneath the molton "core", which everyone knows was constructed in 1856 to draw attention away from the Masters Of The Earth. Oddly enough, the Masters Of The Earth care little for what actually goes on topside, so they'll work for pretty much anyone. The igniting of weasel warriors is only one of their many services. You might want to call for a catalogue.
After 14 weeks of re-programming, not dissimilar to many of the world's major religions, the weasel will no longer be able to speak anything other than your name (or your dog's name, if you wish your dog to be in control of the weasel. This is advisable for high profile Evil Overlords). An additional three weeks of combat training follow, where the weasel learns a variety of techniques and strategies to become more effective in the field. All this time, they have been bathing them in rubbing alcohol and feeding them charcoal briquettes. At the end of combat training, they are given a cigarette and a pack of matches, and after the first attept to smoke them, they become flaming weasels. The fire will last for approximately 4 years, after which, you might want to consider a new weasel anyway. During that time you will find your weasel is an infallable assasin, and nearly as good in open combat.
I hope this was helpful.
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
Upon searching the VDDV website www.vddv.com (They make the Apex DVD 600 A players for dist. in the US) I discovered that these players are for sale on the VDDV website. You can buy them from China at a price of $180 US. This does not include shipping. They say that these are for SAMPLE USE ONLY and are not to be used as retail DVD players. It may be that these do not have the regional lock-out, and VDDV is trying to cash in on the demand for this player. I might look into getting one. Anyone know if this is the revised model, or the one with the "Secret Loophole" menu. Check out www.vddv.com and select "Buy Sample." Also check out thier other stuff. Some of thier products look kinda interesting. I am curious as to who dist. some of them in the US. 13Echo
Here's another site with DVD hacks for loads of players.
Think of it like a contract. I own a piece of art. It's displayed in my private gallery (i.e. not on a street corner or other public place). You want to photograph it. I can decide whether or not to allow this, as you have to come onto my turf to do so, even if it's a work on which the copyright has expired. I can even tell you that you may photograph it for your own use, but that you may not reproduce your photographs of the work for commercial (or any other) purpose. You don't have to agree to those terms, but you don't have to see the work, either.
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I read a very in-depth article on the VHS/Betamax thing recently. I learned something surprising: Sony's licensing policy didn't just affect price. They wanted to, I guess, protect the good name of Betamax and to that end engaged in censorship. They denied porn manufacturers the right to publish porn on Betamax tapes. I guess that would qualify as a contributor to Betamax's demise. (Well, not really demise, but relegation to the professional market)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I worked (interned, actually) for a very large DVD player producer, under the software division.
Among the other interesting things I learned while there was that such decisions are often made out in the open by project managers and higher level group leaders.
It also seemed that the suits were privy to the info, but the word was mum on it between the number crunchers and the code spitters.
Obviously the regionless aspect of a DVD player is a lucrative enough feature that even the large companies choose to ignore it.
Of course, with so much $$$$ to gain, they would.
According to that fact I should have been able to have access to it as it's been in the public domain for the last nine years.
wrighty.
Since when? Certainly in the UK, they're fairly common. Virtually all of the Samsung players, for example, can have region coding and macrovision disabled with a programmable remote. I just wish the Extiva 2000 was available over here (it's their Nuon-enabled DVD player).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Of course they're one step ahead of their Commonwealth Cousins in the UK who don't even HAVE a constitution or a bill of rights, but that's getting ahead of the fact that "rights" aren't a concept considered valid in the UK, but we settled that matter with them at Yorktown a couple hundred years ago.
Look, I appreciate the fact that the US doesn't do a lot of things right, but those most often complaining need to take a cold, hard look at their own political situation before they start blaming us. If after that they don't like the US, then fine, DONT use US products or services. DONT come here. Simple solution.
If you don't want to play the DVDA's rules, don't. Make your format that isn't DVD. If it's better than DVD, and offers more features, then it will catch on, and it'll beat DVD -- remember VHS versus Betamax? VHS was more popular. It won.
A better solution would be for all the companies and organizations with a grudge against the DVDA (like Apex) to band together and create their own, region-free format. That's the Open Source way.
The DVDA made its rules for making DVDs -- and nobody's forcing anybody to get in line and make DVDs. As Yoda says, "Do. Or do not. Or do not try. There is no 'try.'"
Quality at its finest, huh?
You know, these days, with the manufacturing and sales margins on consumer electronics (especially cheap off-brand stuff), there's no attention to quality. Save $0.05 per unit by not putting a heat sink on a transistor. If you're making 100,000 units, that adds up on the bottom line. Especially an off-brand like an Apex, which everyone is going to buy anyway just for the hidden features...
Once the 90-day warranty is up (and even before, if you feel brave), flip off the lid and feel for anything that gets hot (be careful not to get killed; if you don't know what's live, don't do it). If you've got access to any kind of thermal imaging equipment, use it. (I use an military AMIRIS system at work to find hot spots.)
Stuff to look for is output transistors for the spindle, since they'll be running the whole time the DVD player is on, and they're going to be running between off and full saturation, so they're dissipating electricity as heat in resistive mode. Look also for regulator ICs and switching transistors in the power supply, stuff like that. Pretend you're an overclocker, wanting to get the heat off a CPU chip - don't go so far as water cooling, I'm sure it's unnecessary - but it's exactly the same thing. Lots of black anodized aluminum heatsinks, lots of surface area, lots of non-conductive thermal transfer grease.
Every 10c drop in temperature can double the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of a semiconductor.
Look also for under-rated capacitors, both thermally and voltage-wise. Electrolytic and tantalum capacitors are expensive power supply components; to save money, the manufacturers often skimp on the voltage rating. ie. 6V capacitor on the 5V bus. Not much of a tolerance. Go to Radio Shack, and replace the capacitor with one with at least double the voltage rating (but the same capacitance value). Remember to get the polarity right, and I hope your multilayer board and surface-mount soldering skills are good.
My worst one was at work: we made the mistake of buying a Daytek (Daewoo) monitor. Three warranty replacements later, the current one came in. I'd have bought an NEC myself, but we couldn't return the Daytek by this point. First thing I did was take off the back cover, toss it in front of the AMIRIS, and find the horizontal output transistor was lit up like the sun. Pulled it out, put a huge heatsink under it ($3.95 at a local electronics parts shop), and dropped the temperature of it by 40c.
The monitor has been fine now for 2 years. However, it did have a sibling that was bought at the same time, and lasted three weeks out of the warranty period before the Horizontal Output blew up and took the flyback transformer with it. Sadly, I never got to get into that one and retrofit it with the heatsink that it should have had.
My replacement doesnt seem to have macrovision, Ive been able to record to tape and video in on my computer flawlessly.Yeah. I'm not sure how different video cards set "record levels", basically the automatic gain control for the input stage of the Analog to Digital converter.
If I were designing one, I'd probably use one of the AGC chips readily available for VHS VCRs - they're cheap, easy to use and easy to find. However, not only are they the reason that Macrovision works only against VHS VCRs, but since computer hardware makes consumer electronics pale in its pursuit for the elusive and almighty buck, I'm sure that I'd have the software gurus do it.
If you're using a 16 bit A/D converter to sample the incoming stream, no one would ever notice if the A/D luminance resolution was a little low: the software can easily be made to pad the data if it determines that the sync pulses or whatever are too high or too low. So, some video cards may be immune to Macrovision, and some may not. It might even be possible for drivers to be written to scrub Macrovision from the incoming video signal on those cards that leave the video level setting up to a software number-crunch.
Keep in mind that Macrovision is entirely an analog "feature" of the outgoing signal from the DVD deck. If the vertical blanking interval is recorded on the DVD (unlikely, but I don't know, since I don't yet have a DVD player and therefore haven't played with them much), then your DVD player will send it out unless it specifically scrubs it. But it's more likely it's not in the movie, but a concession by the electronics industry to the MPAA, and the disc simply turns on or off the Macrovision circuits in the DVD player. So, it fails to turn on the Macrovision circuits sometimes....
Has anyone ever tried running a DVD player on a computer with an ATI Xpert@Play98 or similar card equipped with a video output jack? Does Macrovision exist on those? I'm sure the video converter chip on those doesn't actually get Macrovision commands from the video card driver.
And it plays mp3 cds.Yeah, someone at Apex really likes to ruffle feathers with intellectual property owners. :)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Back in '94, I had my laptop when I was visiting a friend. When I let her know that I could get onto the net with it, she was like "so, can you show me some dirty pictures off the net?"
news:alt.binaries.pictures.nude
Even way back when (before it was fully commercialized) it was one of the biggest volume newsgroups (both in terms of MB of data and numbers of subscribers) on the net. But the signal to noise ratio was MUCH higher.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Timothy says:
/. editor can't even bother to read before posting. Online journalism at its best!
Sounds like this is a higher-quality player, too.
The article says:
If there's an area where the unit falls extremely short, it's in its build quality. The unit is a fairly flimsy creation that I don't expect to last for terribly long. That's a problem if you're going to be using the Infinity as your one and only player. If you're using it only for multi-region stuff, it should have a longer shelf life. After all, less play means less wear and tear. For those intents, I think the Infinity is a good idea.
Nice to know that the
(and remember this next time you bitch about traditional journalists not taking you guys seriously).
One thing I've not seen addressed in the whole copyright debate - what rights does a DVD owner have when the copyright on a DVD they own expires?
For example, 50 years or so from now when The Matrix enters the public domain, will Macrovision magically turn itself off? Will the DVD decss itself? Will it magically become region free?
If you take the long view, there is a real legitimate reason for technology (and hidden menus) that get around technological copy protection.
chris
There are many DVD's that are encoded for other regions (especially the UK and Japan) that take years to reach the US - if ever.
Don't think there are many? Try the enormous amount of anime available in Japan - anime's too much of a niche market in the US for many videos to be "profitable enough" to re-encode and sell abroad.
Also, there have been several shows from the BBC that I've wanted, but have never been released in the US. Once again, the studios/etc. involved don't want to risk the investment in another video distribution for another country.
Another very good reason is that there have been several movies released with different versions in different countries - scenes added or deleted according to the movie censors in each locale. For some examples, go to the IMDB and check some of the movies' running times - they will often be 2-10 minutes longer in some countries than others.
If there were no regions, then I could order those Japanese DVD's, or those UK DVD's. Or maybe I could get those foreign copies that have the extra 15 minutes of footage that the US censors cut out.
Home projectors.
gif/jpg
mpeg
fast home dialup
VHS
Any more?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
1. The contract that DVD player manufacturers have with the Big DVD Guys, which I understand explicitly states that their players must not play DVDs from the wrong regions.
2. The laws which there may be in the US, which theoretically may prevent one from chipping one's own DVD player, on the grounds that doing so would circumvent the copyright protection. I would be interested in what would happen if this ever went to court, since in no way does a region-defeating chip help you copy the DVD (although if the chip got rid of macrovision also, there might be a point).
Surely the first item applies equally to DVD players sold in any country?
I have seen lots of UK stores selling chipped players (we have one, it came with a year's guarantee from the shop for both the player and the chip), but not selling players that come with multiple regions out of the box.
I'm also interested to know if people in the US put up with region-1-only DVD players when nobody else does, just because of this curious piece of legislation. Or is it just because nearly all films that US people might want to watch are out in Region 1 anyway?
Actually, *any* old TBC is great to have around the house, period.
Some TV stations have been known to sell old equipment from their "graveyards" to staff. I once picked up a complete old RCA Image-Orthicon color studio camera. (Circa 1963? 1964?) I was in high school at the time, working on the side as a cameraman for a local TV station. I used to hop onto my bike after school and head right over to the TV station down the road and do the dinnertime newscast. So, one day when one of the older techs there dropped me off after work, with my bike, schoolbag and a 400-lb studio camera in the back of his van, my mother flipped. <sigh> I wish I'd been allowed to keep that thing. It was so cool.
Anyway, I did get to keep a couple of early digital TBCs. They were free-standing, 19" wide rack-mount, occupying three units on the rack. Made by Grass Valley, about 7 or 8 years old when they were retired off one of the mobile trucks in 1991. No computer required, but they were full of 1Kx4 static RAMs. Plug in the video, bring the level up until the SAT light flashes during bright scenes, then crank it back a bit. Run the output video to whatever you want.
Once you have a TBC, you can run a VCR through the TBC, run the TBC's sync output into a good camera (most security cameras have sync in jacks, so that you can run dozens of them on the same display), and then do dissolves and stuff back and forth from the camera to the VCR. To say nothing of dubbing rental movies (but it's easier if you have any non-VHS VCRs kicking around).
And TBCs are great if you like to freeze-frame video: most of them will hold a picture in static RAM if the signal is lost. (Notice sometimes on live news coverage, if the satellite feed is flaky, the announcer will appear to freeze momentarily? That's a TBC freeze, hiding a screen full of static.)
Nowadays, of course, you can do all this on your home computer. But having a few 3/4" VTRs, an old Amiga 500, a couple of TBCs and a home-built genlock gave me a tiny little TV studio a full decade before the iMac.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Look for Afreey LD-2020 instead. It's the same player.
According to this page, the firmware on the latest versions of this player are no longer hackable. Caveat Emptor.
If you recall Apex stated they didn't intend to disable the coding. It just happened to be part of the off the shelf menu system chip they used. In fact Apex stated that many other companies used that same chipset and that they have the same loopholes as well.
This shouldn't be a suprise.
Both this player and the Apex will do automatic conversion form PAL to NTSC. I have an Apex, and it nicely plays the 3 or 4 UK DVDs I've purchased. If you're not into anime, foreign films, or finding special, uncut editions not available here in the US due to censorship or laziness-- there's probably no reason for you to care. On the other hand, i just like knowing that I can play whatever the heck I want, should I ever want to.
This player might do PAL->NTSC conversion but does it go the other way round too? (It's not a major concern to me since my TV will do it anyway but not everyone has a nice glitzy 16:9 tv)
I've been considering getting a Scan SC-2000 which does appar to have a very similar feature list to this player, except that it's build quality is rated as very good in any review I've found. It's meant to have very good audio sync and good picture quality - has anyone actually used one?
The only downside to the scan player is that it cant disable macrovision (only region coding) but that doesn't really concern me since i cant think of any reason why i'd want to copy a dvd to vhs <cringe>.
At 160 quid or thereabouts + vat it's quite a good price. ($230 + tax)
DVD is a purely digital format. The discs are not "PAL" or "NTSC", nor do they contain sync pulses or any other analog-isms. When you decode the video, you get 720x480 24 bit raw frames.
Macrovision is "added on" by the player, according to some bits on the disc (discs can switch Macrovision on and off individually - it's not global to the player). All DVD-CCA licensed players *must* have Macrovision encoding on any composite/S-Video/component outputs. This includes PC-based decoder cards, which is why the makers of those cards refuse to give specs out to free/open source software developers. Once you have specs it would be trivial to defeat the added Macrovision even in Windows, and we can't have that.
Good question! I have no idea.
I suspect that if a previous owner has allowed unfettered distribution of reproductions that any future owner wouldn't have the right to restrict them, but I'm not sure of the specifics.
The law is a fuzzy thing, especially civil law. Terms like "legal" and "illegal" don't really apply to situations like this. If the owner advised you to cease distributing reproductions, AND he chose to sue you AND you lost in court AND no further appeals were granted AND a judge ordered you cease such distributions AND you didn't comply, then you could fairly call your continued actions "illegal", but that's only one way the process might unfold.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
There is one major drawback to the chip- it nearly always requires much more than a simple chip replacement, usually soldering at several points in the player, which means that your warranty is certainly voided.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
If someone were to come out with another unregioned standard then the publishers would simply refuse to publish to it and it would die. Remember until the death of DIVX a lot of companies (such as Disney) were not going to publish a lot of their material on DVD at all.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
"It's only because the American public willing surrender their rights little by little, that you're prepared to live with this."
And just think, if there wasn't that silly assault weapon ban, we could OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. Damn, I'm joining the NRA!
(for those sarcasm-impaired, that was sarcasm)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
This argument might be legitimate if region coding were time-limited (and not applied at all to DVD releases of past movies); however, this is obviously not the case.
It's a market-cartelization scheme; nothing else.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I don't see the point in buying DVD while the regonal codes are still in effect. (I did't buy one yet and is is very unlikely I will in near future) If no consumer ever bothered buying a DVD-player it would die of a quick death. Considering the huge amount of money put into the development of the DVD technology, I guess that the first thing they would kick out, would be the regional codes...just to save on the $$$ they spent and eventually make it popular. ;-)
As mentioned in a previous post, it would be easy by encoding region code 0 on all DVD's: no harware changes are hardware needed
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
This page on DVD Reviewer has a list of DVD players, and how to multi-region hack them! :-)
I'd definitely agree with you on that. some things just don't translate either -- think Cyrano de Bergerac. I have never seen an acceptable translation of it, nor a decent movie besides the Gerald Depardeu (sp) version. which (guess what!) is Region 2 encoded. I'm now looking for a set-top player that will play it as well as my Region 1 DVD's, and Japanese anime. it's entirely insane.
Lea
Now I'm confused as to what the significance of this is? Nearly all DVD players I've looked at have hidden menu's where you can disable region encoding. And not just on stange name models but on nearly all such as the Sony players, etc...
Oh well... I just fail to see the point of this article...
You could just buy a hacked DVD player from a place like code free DVD There are a LOT of places openly selling multi region players.
Actually, the reason VHS vs. Beta turned out the way it did wasn't because of any technical superiority on the part of the VHS format. It was purely price.
In fact, Betamax is a direct descendant of the popular (though old) broadcast format, U-Matic (3/4"). It's the same thing; as video tape head technology moved along and the head gaps could be made smaller, the whole thing could be scaled down in size.
To this day, Beta mechanisms, exactly the same as any old Beta VCR, are the foundation of the Betacam format, which is used in TV stations worldwide, especially for ENG work.
Beta tape is threaded out of the cassette through a much simpler "U"-load system than VHS's "M"-loading system, which basically looks like a Rube Goldberg invention. Instead of a cumbersom system of posts and hacked-up bicycle chain, U-Load systems use a loading ring, which just powers the tape around the head drum with less than half the moving parts of VHS's M-load. The design of the ring-based U-load system is centered around leaving the tape loaded during rewind and fast forward. That way, while you're fast forwarding or rewinding a Beta or 3/4" cassette, you can just hit the REW/FF button and have the picture come up on the screen so that you can see where you are in the tape. With VHS machines, the closest you can come to this is to hit FF/REW while you're playing, and the machine will scan ahead/behind faster. You miss out on the full rewind/fast forward speed.
Beta HiFi isn't a kludge the way VHS's high fidelity sound system is: rather than needing the separate "depth multiplex" hi-fi heads that VHS uses, the Betamax recording spectrum allocated space to FM modulate the sound and record it in between the luminance (brightness) and chrominance (color phase) parts of the signal. This means lower cost and better reliability.
Further, Beta allocates more space on the recording spectrum to allow better encoding of chrominance information. That's why, if you compare a similar vintage VHS machine with a similar vintage Beta, the colors will appear to be more real and usually with less chroma shift (tint change).
Beta's electronic design is such that the HQ system added to VHS playback circuits isn't required: VHS HQ doesn't have a Beta counterpart; Beta is HQ from the drawing board up.
Beta's head drum is a clamshell design, similar to most of the better 3/4" VTRs. The top and bottom of the head drum is stationary, with a small slot that allows the heads to poke through for tape contact. VHS (and cheaper 3/4" VTRs) use a spinning upper head drum. The idea is that the tape will ride on a cushion of air above the spinning head drum, and it reduces tape wear a little bit. But the spinning head drum causes stability issues that reduce the picture quality.
Beta was also designed so that at all recording speeds, the VCR uses the same head azimuth. VHS doesn't do that; for good picture quality (especially in EP mode), you need a four-head VCR, since a two-head VCR is optimized for SP playback/recording. When you hit pause or slow-mo, the VHS VCR turns on its tracking adjustment circuitry and inches the capstan to a complete frame, then it switches to its EP heads, which usually have a better azimuth angle for static display. This is why a 4-head VHS machine is required for a clean pause. Beta VCRs only need two heads to do it, but will only do it if they're equipped to fine-adjust the capstan position.
Want a neat piece of trivia? VHS stands for "Video Home System", and it was designed by JVC (Japanese Victor Company) as their entry into the home VCR market. The Beta format was originally designed as a compact 3/4" professional machine, with the word "Beta" being a Japanese word for "close" - because the Beta video tracks were closer together than 3/4". Beta cassettes, initially, weren't very long: as a professional format, most videocassettes were 20 minutes to 1/2 hour.
VHS is just a knock-off format that does the same thing as Beta, but without infringing on any of Sony's patents for helical video recording, automatic tape (as opposed to cassette) loading, signal processing, etc.
It saddens me that VHS won. Unfortunately, it's gotten to be pretty damned hard to rent a Beta video at Blockbuster, so I run VHS at home, too.
Actually, I've got a bunch of early VTRs, including a Sony 3600 open-reel 1/2" VTR, several of the very eariest Beta and VHS machines, and several 3/4" professional decks. Oh, and a 1967 Ampex Cross-Track open reel deck. Lemme tell you, compare the impotent little plastic noises that today's VCR's make with one of my old 3/4" editing decks, it's just incredible. Hit the play button, and there's a sound of a big motor starting up as the head drum is brought up to speed, and the a good succession of solenoids being turned on and off... "snap... snap... CLUNK!" as the machine engages the play mode.
It's like the difference in sound between a Honda Civic's 1.5L engine, and a Chevy 454 V8.
And man, a 1975 Sony 3/4" professional deck will produce an image that will blow the doors off the best of today's home video equipment.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Unless there is a way to defeat it within the VCR (they may be, but I don't know it), hooking a DVD player up to the aux video input on my family's (old, cheap) VCR results in activation of the Macrovision system -- the VCR detects a Macrovision-encoded video signal and says "uh, uh" -- the picture that leaks through is Macrovisioned splotchy / wavy / dark.
:) The fuzzy logic of fighting unauthorized copying has led to some pretty silly micromanagement of home electronics when I can't take advantage of a single video input on a TV to watch more than one source without buying a distribution amp!
... OK, so that doesn't interest you. To some others, it may be a big deal. We all have different tastes and priorities. Perhaps movies in their language aren't widely available in the U.S. Perhaps (and I know people with this complaint) they bought a number of movies before moving to the U.S. and some of those may never be made into Region 1 disks. Or maybe you move frequently from one country to another for work. The point to me is that it's needlessly restrictive.
When I turn(ed*) off Macrovision, the picture was great.
That's why, for me anyhow
And as far as movies from India (or elsewhere), well
The movie industry is free to engage in the petty tyranny of region coding as far as I'm concerned, but they're breeding the same kind of "respect" that scrambled cable did -- region-coded releases I think demonstrate a fairly crass indifference to the customer who purchases a film. And so many people have no compunction about breaking their system with hardware hacks like this.
timothy
*before I brought back the two separate P.O.S. Apex players, that is.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Why can't people leave the Slashdot editors alone? Are you just jealous that they can make a living at this, where you can't?
If I release movies for it, I will be breaking copyright law. I will go to jail and probably become the love slave of some 400 pound guy named "Sunflower".
If, however, I make a regionless DVD player, I have broken no laws and, were I to be taken to court over it, I could probably prove collusion in the movie industry, could probably countersue for damages, and would probably win both suits.
(VHS, by the way, won for a reason, and its popularity was artificial at first. There was a time in which there were as many Beta movies on video store shelves as there were VHS movies. Then the MPAA decided which format it liked best, not consumers.)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Flaming Weasels
Yeah. You read that right. Flaming weasels. Now, you might just dismiss this as some sort of delusion, but I ask you, have you ever been attacked by flaming weasels? If you have, you realize this is no joke. There is no hiding from flaming weasels. No escaping. Once the weasels have been sent, there is no turning back, and you may as well just disclose your proprietary closed-source sock drawer, because the weasels must be appeassed.
And here we are talking about new players which are going to break down in a couple months, but tell me, does that make the threat of weasels any less real? And who do you think the armies of flaming weasels are going to be sent to first, Joe Compliant who buys his standards-compliant dvd player, shops at wal-mart and votes democratic? Of course not, he's part of the Master Plan(tm). The weasels are going to be sent to "take care" of the deviants, the people who watch foreign films, the people who disable life saving features in their dvd player, the people who want to remake the world in their own way, not the time-warner-dvdcca-ms-mcdisney way. And the weasels will continue to attack until you or I or SOMEONE does something about it.
There is one hope. There is one possible salvation, one glimmer of light in the dark night of the weasel, though not too dark, as that they're on fire, and fire does make a little bit of light yanno. The weasels aren't exactly subtle. You're going to know they're coming, which in a way, is much worse. We only have one chance to defeat this scourge and take back the rights that we have so willingly sacrificed.
It is time for RoboMow(tm)
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
Within a few years it will probably be hard to find any players that only support a single region code.
Does the dvdfile site have any integrity? The review ends saying "the Infinity is a great deal." Directly below that is a link that says "click here to purchase the Infinity DVD player."
Any site that posts a positive "review" followed by a link to a dealer's site has no integrity - and should not be trusted!
I think Slashdot should not be posting any such stories. I go to Slashdot looking for quality information. This reeks of marketing.
Maybe there should be a story on paid DVD player reviews!
I guess it's been so long since a work has entered the public domain that people have forgotten what public domain means. You'd have to work hard to be more wrong. Public domain means anyone can use/modify/publish the work in any way and for any reason. You don't have to ask Thomas Nast or James Montgomery Flagg's permission (or rather the permission of their estates, since they're both long dead) to use the image of "Uncle Sam" in your art, or even to republish them unmodified.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Nevermind the fact that no-one knows if the discs will even be readable anymore at that point. Could be that the media will become unreadable. Could be that it won't be affordable to buy a player on the antiques market.
Could always happen that civilization will come crumbling down (a somewhat less likely proposition (are we really all that civilized anyhow tho???))
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Are you really a brit?
American of Danish descent actually, but thanks for caring.
--Shoeboy
I've seen some posts here saying that 'The DMCA said so, and you have to live by that.'
Yes. If you're an American. This is not just an American forum though. There are actually countries where region locking is considered anti-competitive and hence illegal. Look at New Zealand. It's only because the American public willing surrender their rights little by little, that you're prepared to live with this.
In other places, there is nothing remarkable about this player. In South Africa, most shops will show you the region beating features before you take the player out the door. I had three different sales people explain the region-defeating features of three different players, in one afternoon.
/* Wayne Pascoe
I run a website which was originally dedicated to the Apex player, but have just put up a message forum for discussion of this newly-discovered player.
:^)
You can find the forums at http://www.nerd-out.com/forum/list.php?f= 13, and can find general region-free/loophole news and information at the main Nerd-out.com Apex site
--Alowishus
(yeah yeah, shameless plug, but the site is there for the community, not my benefit... so take advantage of me while you can!