Disabling Copy Protection

[Reinpro]

I need to disable the Copyright Protection on Toast 7 Titanium. I do wedding videos for a living, and have someone that wants a copy of their wedding on VHS. I have a VHS/DVD deck that will copy one to the other, but I get a "Copy Protection" when trying to execute this. I didn't even realize that was a feature when burning DVDs in Toast 7. I have looked in all the dropdowns and can't find where it's an option box to check or uncheck. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

[Reinpro]

It looks like it's not so erroneous after all. The DVD is encoded with something called Macrovision which scrambles the signal to the VCR, thus creating a "The disc is copy protected" message. If I hadn't already dumped the footage a while back it wouldn't be a problem, so it looks like the only workaround is to try a old DVD and VCR that aren't programmed with a Macrovision signal detector.

[tsantee]

My understanding from your first post is that you burned a video DVD of a wedding using Toast. If so, there is no Macrovision or any other copy protection on the DVD.

 

Macrovision was used on video tapes to prevent duplication. The combo VHS/DVD recorders are very sensitive to this to prevent people from copying their commercial VHS tapes to DVD.

 

What Macrovision does is create an unstable video signal. So apparently your combo deck is sensing some lack of video stability when playing the DVD. I don't know why that would be happening, but it is not due to Macrovision encoding.

 

Since you are a videographer then you could just play the DVD into your camera and then play from your camera into the VHS deck.

[theoldarchiver]

It looks like the only workaround is to try a old DVD and VCR that aren't programmed with a Macrovision signal detector.

- Even the first commercial DVD player had a MV scrambler. Old models won't help you.

- The analog signal has the MV scrambling in it. All VCRs will receive a weird flashing picture because of it. That was the whole purpose of MV: that the copy in unwatchable.

- I don't think Toast adds the MV flag to DVDs it authors. Though it can be included if you use Toast to (re-)burn an already authored VIDEO_TS folder from some other source.

 

Pretty weird to put MV on a wedding DVD, though. Or any DVD-R for that matter.

With the decline of VCRs, I'm surprised MV is still in use today. It was never a strong protection.

[tsantee]

- Even the first commercial DVD player had a MV scrambler. Old models won't help you.

- The analog signal has the MV scrambling in it. All VCRs will receive a weird flashing picture because of it. That was the whole purpose of MV: that the copy in unwatchable.

- I don't think Toast adds the MV flag to DVDs it authors. Though it can be included if you use Toast to (re-)burn an already authored VIDEO_TS folder from some other source.

 

Pretty weird to put MV on a wedding DVD, though. Or any DVD-R for that matter.

With the decline of VCRs, I'm surprised MV is still in use today. It was never a strong protection.

A friend of mine ran into a similar problem when trying to copy some home VHS movies to DVD using a combo recorder. His VHS camcorder had become defective and was flashing between color and black and white. His combo recorder saw this as macrovision and wouldn't let him copy it. I have a "video stabilizer" and used it to copy his VHS tape to DVD. The OP's problem is the first I've heard of this being a problem when going from DVD to VHS, though.

[tsantee]

Toast cannot add any copy protection to a video DVD. So your DVD/VHS deck is erroneously reporting a copy protection problem. It may work for you to connect an external DVD player to the combo recorder and copy it that way.