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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
This page on DVD Reviewer has a list of DVD players, and how to multi-region hack them! :-)
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.
Actually you cannot BUY a player in Hong Kong which is not hacked. The Asian region selection is pretty crap and given that most of the US movies do not make it to the theaters here.. US DVD's sell like hotcakes here.
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.
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.
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!