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Nvidia Drivers Enforce Macrovision's Rules
Ant writes "According to 'Nvidia Macrovision DVD-TV rules forced on consumers', Nvidia drivers 41.09 and onwards include 'stringent checks' to comply with Macrovision requirements. That could mean if you have a TV encoder that does not support Macrovision, you may well get an error message depending on what DVD software player you are using, the company has said."
For those of us with older nvidia cards, this means we can't watch dvds anymore! thankfully you can use DVD Idle to get around this.
it's a good thing, older Nvidia drivers are so easily found.
...using 44.09 drivers under 2000.
Then again, I am using TVTool to get my Nvidia card to go TV-out in full-screen and without macrovision. Not that I need the last one, never interested in copying DVD to VHS anyway.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Somebody will keep hacking the reference drivers and put them online.
Right now I'm using a different tool to circumvent various dvd protections.
DVDIdle, no regions, no Macrovision, no nothing and it even lets me skip those annoying warnings "Thou shalt not reproduce this disc"
This is the sig that says NI (again)
The article is over an year old. (March 20, *2003*)
Current nVidia drivers are 56.xx series.
'News' indeed...
Recent versions of WinDVD choke frequently choke on my system with Macrovision errors. They don't seem to happen every time though. This also affects any product that ends up using WinDVD's DShow filters. A rather old Mediamatics DVMatics player works fine every time though. Their DShow filters still work really well after all these years too. Great little player. I have a GeForce DDR 256 in my system. I used TVTool 8 to toggle the TV out on and off, which got the WinDVD stuff working at one point.
Macrovision is a company that developed the a copy protection system to protect VHS tapes from bieng copied. EVERY "new" VCR has the Macrovision system designed into it.
This system messes with the video signal that leaves
the device in such a way as to confuse the AGC (automatic gain control) in he video signal receiver (TV), which in turn screws up the picture.
All new digital products that output an analog video signal will/should have this system designed into them, to prevent the analog signal bieng copied.
Thios includes cable, satellite boxes, video cards etc.
Don't make your problems my problems!
slysoft's AnyDVD.
runs in the background like a service and stealthily removes all region/macrovision bullshit, works like a charm on my Ti4400 GF4 + latest 56.72 drivers
The driver knows a DVD is being played because in most cases the DVD software will tell the driver to use macrovision. Note that only DVDs with macrovision enabled will be affected, as macrovision is an optional feature. If you use software such as xine or mplayer that does not tell the driver to enable macrovision, or you use something like AnyDVD that makes all DVDs look as if they have no CSS, no macrovision, and are for all regions, you will be fine. You could also hack the software player itself, but why bother when you can get something like the AnyDVD software does it transparently.
Why bother to record from a standalone DVD player when you can just rip the DVD using DVD Decrypter (and DVDShrink if necessary). It will be much better quality as there is no analog conversion.
EFF
PayPal accepted, amongst other methods.
How about the good old EFF? They claim to be "defending freedom in the digital world" which is exactly what you wished for. You can join or just donate and choose paypal as payment method.
I have heard, that ATI somehow "supports" opensource communities - or at least gives them more information, than NVidia team.
Used to support the open source communities would be more like it. I've been using ATI cards for as long as I can remember.
There was a time when ATI did things for us like funding Precision Insight to develop the open source Radeon driver in the first place. They used to be very good about providing specifications, although under an NDA which for some bizarre reason they require developers to sign, but allow them to publish drivers based on their contents. At the time they were the underdog in the 3D graphics market though.
Now a days though, they don't fund any OSS development, and provide a binary driver instead. They will not give you specifications for any cards until they are close to their end-of-life. DRI and Gatos have done great work despite this, but ATI shouldn't be congratulated on today's treatment of the open source community.
They still do have specs available from the developer relations page under NDA. But I doubt you'll get anything from them that would be considered current hardware.
http://www.eff.org/
It requires player support, so no. I highly doubt Xine/Ogle/MPlayer will implement Macrovision.
You can stick Macrovision on a composite video signal (maybe even on an S-Video signal) but when you come to modulate it onto RF, the extraneous signals just overload the modulator and end up not coming out of the receiver. Since many older tellies still have no SCART socket, only an RF input, VCRs and cable / satellite boxes will need an RF output for awhile yet. And if RF modulation defeats macrovision, there's no point including it in the first place.
NTL's pay-per-view movie service is Macrovision-crippled, but Macrovision strippers are readily obtainable from camcorder specialists {they're needed in order to watch macrovision-crippled cassettes/DVDs on most professional-grade monitors}.
As an aside, what happens if your device's internal macrovision-crippler goes faulty and stops generating the Macrovision spikes? If you never tried to do anything with it that the manufacturers didn't want you doing, then you might never find out it wasn't working!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"but when you come to modulate it onto RF, the extraneous signals just overload the modulator and end up not coming out of the receiver"
....
The RF output of a VCR recorder does have macrovision, RF modulation does not affect the operation of macrovision (macrovision is designed with this in mind). Macrivision's protection scheme works mainly by sending a
"Macrovision is a videotape copy protection for VHS video cassette recorders [24]. It is used on pre-recorded videotapes, and it seems to be more common in North America than in Europe. It is also used in the new Settop Boxes to protect the outcoming signals against copying (e.g. DSS and Digicipher). When dubbing a protected tape, or copying a protected analogue signal, the picture that has gone through the recording VCR will get dark and then normal again periodically. The picture may also become unstable when it is at its darkest. Some televisions do not like Macrovision either. The top of the picture might be unstable all the time and the colors may flicker."
from http://web.quick.cz/pejovideo/eng/how_work.htm
"Macrovision(TM) is a copy-protection scheme for analog
NTSC, PAL, YUV, and RGB video signals, commonly used
in the consumer market. Copy protection is implemented by
modifying the video signal so that an analog VCR cannot
track the video signal for recording, but a TV will still display
a normal image. DVD players, digital settop boxes for cable
and satellite systems, and VCRs all include Macrovision
copy protection."
from http://www.intersil.com/data/an/an9806.pdf
Don't make your problems my problems!
Just a small note, there are cases where dvd + mplayer + tvout will result in mactrovision being used. Read the mplayer documentation.
Listen,
We get beat up by everyone for "piracy" - when in fact all we want to do is to do the right thing.
This means that if you want to actually pay for a DVD, and watch it, even though you don't have a TV hooked up, the stupid Macrovision prevents you to do that, meaning, you HAVE to use hacking tools, just to enjoy something you paid for.
This is plain bullshit. If someone wants to make a VHS copy of their DVD, LET THEM! I thought that making analog copies of digital works was covered under fair use! Seriously, WTF? As a result of them blocking this potential use of technology, I can't watch the goddamn Back To The Future Box set I shelled out some bucks for.
So, the only option I am left with is to copy the DVDs, De-Macrovision them, and then give my Big "F U" to the studios, by selling the useless discs.
I am not going to buy a new video card to watch them, and I am not going to relegate watching the movie solely to my television, I use a computer as the primary watching apparatus.
Peace out.
Professional VCRs typically have a TBC built in; you can also get a standalone TBC. Either way, they're not particuarly cheap, but if you're going to be backing up a large VHS library, it's probably a good investment.
See the ArsTechnica Guide to Capturing, Cleaning, & Compressing Video and the sci.electronics.repair Macrovision FAQ for more info.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
p(L)=M(L)/M --> M(L)=M*p(L)
given: p(L)=const., M increasing.
result: M(L) also increasing.
Number of machines increased, percentage steady = Linux machines increased. qed.
ATI has Macrovision checks in too. Just check out what they say about their AIW line and DVD playback.
-]Phreak Out[-
I'm pretty sure that's what I said. What they don't do, is provide the specs for the current generation of hardware.
it was Weather Channel that funded development of 3d DRI driver for radeon 8500 and 9200 cards, not ATI
Let me refer you to an interview with Daryl Strauss of Precision Insight:
Daryl: The only companies that have announced anything publicly are 3dfx, ATI and Intel.
As well as the XFree86 documentation:
Precision Insight, Inc.
Cedar Park, TX
USA
I was mistaken in that it was the Rage128 driver that was funded by ATI, and then the Weather Channel funded that to be extended to the Radeon GPU.
Also ATI does provide sample cards to developers which is big help
That is true. I guess they do deserve some credit for that.
That's because your video card probably has a brooktree tv encoder whether or not it is actually hooked up to anything (sometimes OTHER models of your card have it, and the manufacture is copying a reference design). The drivers aren't probably smart enough to tell, thus you are screwed simply if you have the encoder, The problem with that is that virtually every nvidia card past riva tnt2 has this encoder. I wonder when these guys will get the idea that maybe some normal users are putting their computer in their living room with the tv and would simply like to output their digital media for their own use. Whoever figures this out probably will be the "next big thing" in video cards simply because modern cpu's are good enough to take over most of the video processing.
Poly pushing and texture speeds are nice, but mean nothing/little in regard to dvd/mpeg/whatever playback.
-mind
When I play DVDs on my PC with the nvidia card I sometimes have to walk away and I will lock the computer. When I come back and unlock it the DVD will no longer play until the next reboot because it says the TV out is active eventhough it's not. Even if it was, isn't that thee point of having a TV out so you can use it for multimedia applications?
I still respond to this the same way I always have about everything ATI.
About a year ago I bought an ATI 9500 Pro because of rave reviews, and friends who liked them. I've actually only ever been able to use the card for a month - as I'm on card #4 now. Because of a manufacturing flaw in the card itself it tends to overheat and damage the card permanently. Check out this article to see what I'm talking about.
Around card number 3 I bought a NVidia 5900 and I haven't looked back - its brutally fast, 100% reliable and it looks great. ATI will never get my business again. Card #4 btw I gave to my brother died less that 15 seconds after powering on the machine - didn't even get to install the drivers. Maybe card #5 will work - but I've basically written off the price of this worthless piece of junk.
This isn't the only ATI video card though I've had quality control problems with - I had an 8500 that between the worthless drivers, and poor QA on the actual card itself was mostly unusable.
I recently rebuilt the Linux kernel on my laptop, so I thought it would be worthwhile to get the latest Nvidia driver. Having done so, I found that their installer had deleted all copies of nvidea.o under /lib/modules, not just a previous copy for the kernel I was still testing. That means I lost the video driver for the stable kernel I wanted to use between tests. Ouch!
This has nothing to do with Macrovision, but it's another reason to dislike or distrust Nvidia.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
Video lan works on windows (and just about any other OS).