Strange DVD Behavior When Used w/ TV Tuner Cards?

Flying_Donut asks: "Greetings! This is related to a question that popped up on Arstechnica. I, and several others are having this problem with our DVD consoles, connecting through either Hauppage TV Tuner cards, or ATI All-In-Wonder Pro cards. The problem is, that on some DVDs, we see annoying scan lines in the movies. For myself, I use BeOS Pro 5.0.3 and the All-In-Wonder Pro card, connected to an external DVD console (a Toshiba SD-2109) and the only time I see these scan lines are on Widescreen DVDS (which copmprise about 99.999% of the DVDs out there). I assumed it was some form of copy protection that the combination of BeOS and the All-In-Wonder Pro card, were seeing (sort of like old Betamax players and copy protection), but the other gentleman with the problem is using Windows (ack!) and sees the problem on some of his DVDs. Others have suggested switching from SVideo to Composite cabling, but it didn't seem to help. In any case, I wanted to tap into the Slashdot community and see what they have experienced and/or had to offer to fix this issue."

Comments

Re:Get a friggin Clue!

[synaptik]

Since you decided to berate the questioner in a most anti-social manner, (rather than simply answering their question helpfully,) I thought I'd point out that your statement:

Your DVD player *does not allow* you to play your Macrovision-protected purchased discs on anything but a TV set, which are engineered loosely enough (as opposed to VCRs/TV tuners etc.) to 'ignore' the Macrovision signal. (emphasis mine.)

is wrong. TV's are not engineered 'looser' to "'ignore' the Macrovision signal." The various TV standards existed before VCRs and Macrovision. Macrovision takes advantage of the fact that TVs are more forgiving creatures than VCRs are, when it comes to interpretting analog video signals. Analog TVs were never explicitly designed to 'ignore' Macrovision. VCRs originally weren't either, but today they are.

The questioner's TV card, on the other hand, was engineered from the get-go to be affected by Macrovision. The Macrovision shysters^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H lawyers enforce this, because otherwise TV cards could be used as Macrovision filters. (Whether you would actually want to do this is an entirely different question.)

Finally, as an example of a useful response, I submit the following suggestion to the questioner: If you have a DVD drive, and your PC is fast enough, you might want to invest in a software DVD player. This method will not suffer from the visible Macrovision artifacts, and will look better anyway. The method you are currently using takes a digital source, converts it to analog, and then back to digital. With DVD software, you stay digital until the video leaves your graphics card's DAC. Thus, the image will be much cleaner.

could be "beat lines"

[scotpurl]

The DVD is, what, 30 frames per second, and your screen is rendering 70, 72, 75, or something like that. Could just be the difference in one frequency going against another, which results in some interference.

Try changing the refresh rate of your display.

If that ain't it, then I'll buy the Macrovision reason given above. On my Matrox G200-TV, I've never seen anything like this under Win98 or Win2000, even when watching Matrix. (Last time I looked, the card, but not the tuner was supported under SuSE, my Linux of choice, that's why.)