This weekend, I bought a DVD player. I don’t know much about them. I bought the Shrek DVD and it’s doing something weird. It gets really bright, then really dark, like someone is playing with the controls. I thought it was the DVD, so I exchanged it, but the new one is doing the same thing. It also freezes up quite a bit. It does this during the whole movie.
I have two other DVDs that freeze on occasion, but they don’t go light and dark.
Can I fix it ?
Thanks.
The light/dark cycling usually indicates the disc has Macrovision anti-copying encoding. Are you trying to run the DVD player’s output through a VCR or VCR/TV combo?
The alternating bright/dark problem sounds a lot like the effect Macrovision, a copy-protection system, has on VCRs. Not all DVD discs use Macrovision, although most big-budget releases do. So it’s possible you’d only see that with some discs. How did you connect the player to the TV? You didn’t plug it in through a VCR, did you? If your TV doesn’t have the composite video and audio connectors necessary, you have to get a seprate RF modulator to connect the DVD and TV.
Freezing up on multiple discs, with multiple player units is stranger. Freeze-ups, skips, and pixelation can happen if the DVDs are badly scratched or dirtied; are these pre-owned DVDs?
Yes, I do have it hooked up through the VCR. Is that also the reason I can’t get a TV show through the VCR either ?
The DVDs are brand new.
Thanks again.
The light/dark cycles are definitely because of Macrovision. You can either run the video directly to the TV or go get a little thing from Radio Shack that sits between the DVD player and the VCR and strips out the signal. I think it’s called an RF modulator, but tell them your problem and they’ll be able to help you.
As for the freezing, it could be either, but it sounds like it’s the player: My DVD player used to freeze or skip on just a few movies, and I assumed that the discs were bad. It turns out that the laser in my player was out of alignment. Somehow it only showed up when watching a few discs, though.
No. The “little thing” is indeed called an RF modulator, but it does not remove the Macrovision signal. What it does is modulate an RF signal on channel 3 or 4 with the baseband audio/video signal so that you can connect a DVD player or video game console to a TV that doesn’t have baseband A/V inputs. However, if you record the output from it, you’ll still get the Macrovision.
Just popped in to offer what has already been offered. I had the same problem on my Aunt’s dvd player and her tv. I read the manual and had the same answer.
I had to find out how to put the TV in “video” mode from the tv and not the remote.
Once you have the RF adapter thou, you can connect that to your VCR, and it will work fine, you don’t have to connect the RF adapter directly to your TV. <-- that’s the impression I got from the previous posts.
Sorry, but as QED said earlier, the RF Modulator does not remove Macrovision copy protection. It doesn’t matter whether you hook it up with composite, S-video, or coaxial cable through an RF Modulator. If you run your DVD player’s signal through your VCR, you may have problems with the Macrovision. The brightness fluctation is the classic symptom.
There are bound to be a few people who pop in here (or in real life) saying, ‘But it works fine for me!’ There are a few DVD players out there that ignore Macrovision, and there are lots of DVDs that don’t have Macrovision encoding. If it happens to work without problems for you, great! But the majority of people will not be able to get away with running the signal through the VCR without problems.
You can in fact get devices that do compensate for Macrovision, but they aren’t especially inexpensive last time I checked. If you have a TV that has composite (red, white and yellow plugs) or S-Video (looks kinda like a computer mouse connector), hook the DVD player to one of those. If you have an older TV that only has one coaxial connection, you can get an RF modulator and a switch to hook up both the VCR and DVD.
It’s the Macrovision copy protection.
If you hook the DVD player directly up to the TV, you won’t get that flashing.
this is probably what you need to get from radio-shack :
you would be able to switch between DVD and VCR as the input for your TV. that is ASSUMING your tv does not have more than one set of inputs, and most good TVs do. so if yours does you could just run DVD and VCR to their own input without buying anything.
you would not be able to record your dvds to vcr in this configuration though.