I am continuing the hijack, and I am completely unrepentant!
Just in case ftg hadn’t heard: Sony to end Betamax production
But so this isn’t a total hijack: I second that not all DVDs have Macrovision protection, so it won’t necessarily be apparent when playing a single DVD, and the “rolling colors / fade-bright-fade” behavior takes more than a few seconds to be plainly apparent.
One disc that I know is Macrovision protected is Stir Of Echoes, because I tried to play that once on my laptop running it into a TV-VCR combo unit that a friend of mine had (just so we could watch it on a big screen, not because we wanted to copy it); you could give that one a rent and see if your setup still functions. Or, you could find another one that you know is protected. The symbol for Macrovision, as I recall, is a lowercase “cp” inside an equilateral triangle; perhaps the symbol appears on the back of one of your DVDs, and you can use that to see if your setup still works?