While @ salvation army yesterday I saw a DOUBLE VCR made for easy copying of tapes!!

I wonder how good they would copy movies with macrovision,etc???

It was only priced @ 14.99 i believe If I remember right......

GO VIDEO made a lot of different models of those. They look like a tough sell nowadays.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/VCRs-/15088/...mplete=1&rt=nc

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Yup thats who they were made by!! (I remember)

Im surprised they could sell these!!!!!!!!

I would guess they "obey" Macrovision encoding to some extent. I had one that came in thru a package deal. Never even plugged it in, and left it by the dumpster when I relocated offices...

Chip

You could own other copy devices like reel-to-reel tape recorders and cassette recorders that could also be used to violate copyrights. Now you can do it all digitally.

The laws regarding copyrights usually read the you could duplicate for your own use (to preserve your original copy) just not reproduce them for sale or for other distribution.

Basically, owning the equipment is legal. How you use it may not be. Equate that to anything else (cars, guns, etc.). You most likely can own them, but you are only supposed to use them for legally approved purposes.

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There is also a very good chance that the VCR dubbing function, copies the tape exactly as it is on the original, so the copy protect will be there, or you will get a bad copy if it has to go through the rf tuner and AGC, which is where the Macrovision did its damage while copying a tape..... It makes the AGC go through a wide swing and makes drop outs in the tape, or at least wild swings in brightness level.... There are macrovision devices to defeat it, basically flatens out the agc....

The VCR's that NAP (Magnavox, Sylvania, Philco, Crosley) sourced from Panasonic can be used to duplicate VHS tapes without Macrovision interference. A friend of mine who was an engineer in the VCR & Camera department @ NAP told me this way-back-when, and my own experience proves this to be true.

Macrovision was a delicate...and ingenious...balance of the proper +100 units of video and -40 units of sync in the AGC world. They would shove a bunch of 140 units of white bar video in to the vertical interval at their varying levels. The AGC would choke and try to adjust to bring the video back to 100 units but the underlying sync would shrink in proportion to the adjustment in AGCland. Bad sync equals bad copy.

Little black boxes are around to strip the sync and pass the AGC'd video. Or you can use any Betamax of the era. They put new sync on anything and you could copy that.

Not exactly correct. The electronics in Betamax decks were immune to Macrovision, but the copy protection remains. I have a few early 90s Disney VHS tapes that were dubbed to Beta and the protection is definitely still there.

Yea but then you lose quality... I AM QUITE ANTI DIGITAL!!

Those Go-Video double VCRs did have the ability to copy tapes with reduced quality loss compared to connecting the audio and video from one machine to another (or, Heaven forbid, using "Channel 3" :) ), but they definitely obeyed Macrovision and would not copy such tapes. That was a requirement to even keep the machines on the market; there was at least one big law suit as soon as they tried to sell their first model that they eventually settled or won.

Thats interesting knowing!!

Most of the Panasonic AG-series pro/industrial VHS machines will ignore Macrovision encoding, as well.

They must have slipped them thru w/o anyone knowing! (If that was the only model they made that did)

Earlier models would copy Macrovision and all, FM to FM, no intermediate process which is why the copies looked darn near as good as the original . Then Go Video got sued by Macrovision. lost, and had to implement Macrovision detect and a blue screen would pop up maybe 10 seconds into the copy mode. Made the older out of warranty units much more worthwhile to fix. We were a Go Video/Sensory Science authorized servicer.