Hi All, I'm having an issue attempting to back-up a rare item and am hoping someone can help. About 3 months ago i bought a very expensive piece of vintage erotica from a consignment shop. The material is not anything illicit, but it is extremely rare - it had only one commercial release, on VHS, in 1980, and sells on Ebay for between $200-$500. Naturally I want to avoid repeatedly watching the tape and wearing it out. I'd ideally like to back up to DVD-R but it has a very primitive, very crude form of copy protection on it called 'Stop Copy.' Macrovision wasn't patented until '83 or '84, so this would be several years pre-Macrovision. It's described on the cassette as "an electronic signal to prevent unauthorized duplication." Naturally, i tried my video stabilizer, but was dumbfounded when that didn't work! Then i tried a straight run to my dvd recorder with rca cables. This had slightly better results but only transmitted in b&w. Obviously one possibility would just be to point a camera at the TV screen but outside of that, can someone think of an alternate option that would avoid a/v interference from the room? If so I would be grateful Nate
The early stop copy used a weak vertical sync signal. That would cause the picture to roll, and at times color shift. Early Macrovision occupied the sub title section of the VBI and caused havoc, until corrected. The Macrovision exploit worked on VHS but not on beta, due to beta applying AGC on the video out. In all probability, any digitizer will cure the reduced sync, and do away with Macrovision -a SIMA CT-2 is my favorite- but Macrovision stopped that item by court order.
Oh boy, nostalgia, I still have an Archer (Radio Shack) Stereo Audio/Video Processor and a Variable Gain Video Amplifier that I used to defeat the copy protection on VHS tapes.. Those were the days
