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Originally posted by: sweyland
You can't get rid of macrovision because it's built into the hardware.
Not true. Macrovision consists of a set of 5 white parallelograms that are inserted into the vertical blanking interval of a video signal (the black bar that appears when your vertical hold is misaligned). This mucks with the VCR's automatic gain control circuit when you try to copy a VHS tape, resulting in brightness and colour fluctuations in any attempted copy. Unfortunately, it also affected some older VCRs on playback because the AGC would kick in in playback, so a Macrovision encoded tape would exhibit the same effects during playback.
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You would need equipment to stabilize the signal or an older VHS recorder that predated macrovision and didn't have it built in. That's why laserdisc is so great, it's macro free!
In order to copy a Macrovision tape, you do need a stabiliser, but such equipment is illegal, since Macrovision patented all possible ways to defeat their copy protection @ the same time as they patented the copy-protection process. The reason LaserDisc is Macrovision-free is that LD applied its AGC circuits during playback; to encode such a product with Macrovision would have rendered the discs unwatchable, so the studios opted not to encode LDs.
Dirty little Macrovision secret: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is not copy-protected on DVD; neither Macrovision nor ColorStripe rears its ugly little head here.