cellio | random bits

The good news is that our DVD player now works. The bad news is that the repair guy says he didn't do anything to it. All I did was to disconnect it, drive it to the repair place, wait several days, and pick it up. (Prior to that, of course, I had disconnected the cable, tested it, cleaned it, reconnected it, and still gotten no sound.) I had forgotten that repair folks have an uncanny knack of looking at a device and causing it to work. I wonder how long the effect lasts.

He also pointed out a test to eliminate the TV: run the signal through a VCR. Yeah, it degrades the signal and that's not a permanent solution, but it's good enough for a test. Running a DVD signal to a VCR never occurred to me -- but then, bootlegging DVDs onto tape never occurred to me, either.

At Shabbat services we had both rabbis, for the first time in at least a month. We also had a large turnout, including some prospective new members. I guess that's one way to tell that summer is ending. :-)

This week, my rabbi said, pretty much all of the congregations in town (not just Jewish, everyone) started organizing efforts to relocate storm refugees to Pittsburgh. (Those that want to come here, that is. No one's insisting, but we do have space.) Apparently we've got hundreds of spots already and buses ready to go, just as soon as FEMA will let us talk to the refugees and drive those buses in to get the ones who want to come.

This map shows some of the bigger disaster risks in the US (funny). I forget who provided the link.

There have been lots of posts on some SCA lists trying to organize replacement SCA stuff for the folks hit by the hurricane -- new garb, scrolls, etc. Their hearts are in the right places, but most of this seems months premature to me. Let those people get housing before you start saddling them with stuff!

Why do so many people on mailing lists believe that a major event trumps the topic of the list? These people seem to think that somehow you won't find out about national news if you don't read it on the SCA kingdom list -- as if that was each subscriber's only source of information. Sheesh. The people on the lists I frequent are being better about this than they were for 9/11, but still... I've been deleting a lot of stuff from the moderation queue for one list.

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bootlegging DVDs onto tape never occurred to me, either

You can't. DVDs are recorded with this copy-protection signal called "Macrovision". It basically messes with the sync signals so that the picture is still displayable on a TV but if you try to record it, and play back that recording, you'll get grey-green fuzz.

Some DVD players include de-Macrovisioning in their (usually bootleg) chips if they do multi-zoning, and there is DVD copying software that will remove the Macrovision, but unless you do that you can't copy from DVD to VHS.

Does this mean a DVD signal sent through a VCR would also come out as gray-green fuzz? To the TV it's a VCR signal regardless of where it originated, after all. I guess what I'm really wondering is how this is implemented; I assume it requires the physical disc, but once you've got an output stream how can you enforce that? (What makes it gray-green fuzz?)

It's possible that our region-free DVD player is also Macrovision-free. Didn't ask; haven't tested. So long as it can play legal DVDs (from anywhere in the world) we're happy.

Does this mean a DVD signal sent through a VCR would also come out as gray-green fuzz?

Not normally, though some TVs may be affected.

I guess what I'm really wondering is how this is implemented

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrovision

Thanks for the pointer.

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