I am not a video-phile, as this post will make painfully clear. I have my DVD player and VCR both hooked up to an old TV, made in the late '80s. This TV also has a cable box. To make the wiring more complicated, the TV is too old to have the necessary A-V connectors in the back to hook up the DVD player (the red/white/yellow cables), so I had to buy an intermediate unit–a small black box called the RF adapter, I believe. When we watch TV or videotapes, we keep the switch on the black box set to “TV,” but if we put on the DVD player, we flip the switch to “Game,” since the box was made for video game systems as well as DVD players.
Now the TV reception is fine due to the cable, and the VCR works fine. But every time we watch DVDs, the picture is distorted by wavy lines–sometimes moving diagonally through the picture, sometimes horizontally, and sometimes swirling around so bad that it makes the movie hard to make out. I can’t really explain them much better than that, but it is really frustrating. Does anyone know how I could solve this problem? Is it too many units wired together? Bad/old coaxial cables? An older TV that you can’t hook the DVD player directly into?
Just as an aside, when I disconnect the cable box from the sequence, the DVD picture clears up, but it is a pain to do this every time, and my parents refuse to mess with wires in the back every time they want to watch TV or a movie. Does anyone have any advice on how to wire this arrangement better, or how to clear up the picture?
Is the DVD signal passing through the VCR? What you describe sounds like Macrovision copy protection, which is designed to screw with VCRs and is present on many DVDs.
I believe we have it wired with cable in from the wall -> cable box -> RF adapter (with DVD player) -> VCR -> TV, so yes. But having the VCR there was never a problem at my old apartment, where I had a slightly newer TV and no cable box.
And the swirling and moving lines start even on the blue Toshiba screen, when we first turn the DVD player on but it doesn’t even have a disc inside yet.
Sounds like the signal coming out of the cable box is on channel 3, and the DVD is also coming out on 3 - the signal out of the cable box is apparently strong enough to interfere with the DVD’s signal. See if you can change either the cable box / VCR or the DVD player to channel 4. Or, just remembering to turn off the cable box might be enough - you say the picture clears up if it’s disconnected.
My setup, on two TVs (that have nothing but coax connections) is:
wall (coax) -> cable box (coax) -> vcr AND dvd (rca) -> vcr (coax) -> tv
Anyway, with the mess of cables back there and frequent moving around for various reasons, I have “reception” problems all the time. It’s always just a matter of wiggling/tightening the coax that goes between the DVD and VCR to get things back to crisp.
So you connect the VCR to the DVD player using RCA cables? Hmmm, I oughtta try that! My DVD player doesn’t have a coaxial connection, though. (I added the emphasis to yours.) Did you mean the RCA cables between those, or the coax between the VCR and something else?
Wiggling and tightening the coaxial cables never seems to help, and gotpasswords, we always turn the cable box off when the DVD player is on (or the interference is even worse).
Connecting a DVD player through your VCR is a bad idea: the Macrovision copy protection built into DVD players is designed to mess up the picture when you connect the player to a VCR (though the problem may be less noticable with some VCRs, and some discs don’t turn on MV).
But the problem you describe doesn’t sound like MV. Macrovision just makes the picture brighter and darker every few seconds, and it won’t start happening until you put a disc in the DVD player.
Wavy, moving lines suggest there’s analog interference. Since the problem goes away when you disconnect the cable box, assume that’s where the interference is coming from. Your RF switch also sounds like part of the problem, because it should entirely block the cable box’s signal when you have it set to “Game”. I suggest getting a better RF switch; it’ll be cheaper than replacing the cable box.
Before you get too drastic with rewiring, I would just remove the vcr from the chain first and see if that fixes it… My dad and I were in the same situation: DVD player and no way to hook it up to the TV except to run it thru the VCR. And along comes Mr. Macrovision to screw up every single movie. So we bought an RF box and ran the DVD player through that. We have to switch a cable around if we want to use the VCR though. However, that’s only because we don’t have a splitter. The moral of the story is that as long as your DVD player isn’t running thru a VCR, the picture should be just fine.
I have a similar situation to you on one of my TVs.
Go to a radio shack or similar vendor and get an RCA input/output Switch with at least two RCA inputs and one RCA output. Analog switches are around $15, if you get one with a remote it will be more expensive. Hook up the system like this:
DVD RCA cables to Switch input 1.
Cable box RCA outputs to VCR RCA inputs. Set VCR to record and use the RCA input instead of channel 3/ANT. The VCR will need to stay on to pass the cable signal.
VCR RCA outputs to Switch input 2.
Switch output to RF RCA inputs.
RF ANT output to TV ANT input.
When the switch is in position 1, the DVD player shows on the TV. In position 2 the VCR or cable shows on the TV.
If you do this your Macrovision image problems should go away. Let me know if you have any questions.