Need help with pesky macrovision in DV-AVIs

[xeen]

I have a bunch of DVDs in my collection. All of them are genuine DVDs that I bought with my own money (for a ripped off price by the way). So recently I've been working on a project which involves capturing some parts from various related DVDs and making a separate movie. This by law is defined as personal use since I'm doing this for myself only.

This is how I captured:
DVD Player output -> into DV Camcorder input -> PC firewire input.
Note that it's not possible to record the DVD video to the camcorder like this because it says "Copy Inhibit." However, if you do DVD -> Camcorder -> PC DIRECTLY, just using the camcorder as a firewire bypass it's fine because the PC doesn't care about macrovision. So this worked for me, and I now had myself all the sources I need for my movie in excellent quality DV-AVI format.

Next I edited the clips, put in effects, arranged them how I wanted, etc.., and exported to MPEG-2. However, I do not want to delete my sources because I will add some parts to it in the future. I'm not leaving this is on the hard drive because its too big and not safe in case the hard drive dies. I do not have a portable drive to put the 16GB of sources. So the best solution is to output the edited sources back to the camcorder and store them on DV tape for future use.

So I try this. I connect the camcorder to the PC via firewire, open the clips, they display on the camcorder LCD, and I hit record. BUT, 2 seconds later the camcorder stops recording and says "copy inhibit". I was shocked. Turns out the macrovision flag probably exists in every frame of the DV file. and it keeps screwing me up.

So far I've figured out one way to fix this - re-encode all the sources to regular uncompressed AVI files and then back to DV. This will kill the macrovision. However, this will require tons of disk space that I don't have, and tons of time that I dont have even if I was to do it in parts.

If anyone can help me here it will be greatly appreciated.

[DDogg]

I had to do something similar a few years back and I remember running into the same frustration as you have. BTW, and I am fuzzy on this, but I don't think it is macrovison. There is another type of protection called something to do with digital copy protection.

Later I found out some of the Cyberhome DVD players allowed this type of protection, as well as macrovision, to be turned off so that I could record directly to DV tape or PC and do something similar to what you are trying.

Before I figured that out, I ripped the sections of the DVD to HD that contained the segments I wanted to use. My memory is spotty, but IIRC, I then used dvd2avi to create d2v files of the VOBs that contained the segments I needed. Then mpeg2dec/mpeg2source to open the D2v's with Avisynth. Then I wrapped the AVS with VFAPI to serve to Vegas. Did my final edits and then rendered and output to DVCAM. I know Windows Movie Maker 2 will read the VFAFI false AVI files ok so maybe you could do it in it. You could also substitute the new version of MAKEAvis available in Sh0dan's sig instead of VFAPI. All of this is a lot of work, but there is some good learning opportunities in the process.

The method I used is a reversed process from what you are doing, and I realize this may not help you at all except to give you another way to think about it. Hope I did not waste your time.

[xeen]

Yea I know what you mean about ripping it first. I could easily just decrypt the dvds but that would require recapturing and redoing the movie all over again, which is not happening. So I'm looking for a way to get rid of the macrovision from the already existing files.