Horizontal hold issue

[K. Forman]

I've got some issues with my NEC 2000 monitor, and my Phillips DVD player. Until recently, I had an Apex DVD player running s-vid into a video switcher box, and s-vid from there to the monitor. Everything was fine.

Now, I have the same setup, but using the Phillips causes the monitor to roll. With much fiddling to the horizontal hold knob, I get only a few seconds of hold at best. Any ideas why?

[Rob Lohman]

Yes, a couple of things:

1. are you sure your are not playing back PAL on an NTSC set for example?

2. macrovision. This is an analog protection to stop copying the movie to tape.

My guess would be #2. It messes up the signal to exactly get those kind of
events (for some reasons TV's don't care).

There are three solutions to that problem:

1. your player may have some hidden key combination / menu to set regions and/or disable macrovision. See sites like http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks (clickable).

2. your player may be modified to not display macrovision or give you the option

3. there are boxes on the market that can fix/remove a macrovision signal

[K. Forman]

Hey Rob. I have no PAL issues, as I don't have anything that isn't NTSC. Pretty vanilla of me I know, but that's just the way I am.

As far as it being Macrovision, I suppose that could be. I remember trying to record from this DVD once before, and had many problems. However, the movie played fine, it just wouldn't record. I'll try a couple other movies and see. Thanks!

[Rob Lohman]

You could easily identify that as a problem if it works okay with homemade
DVD movies. Since does do not include the macrovision flag the DVD player
**SHOULD** (!) not active the macrovision protection (in theory it still could,
of course).

All commercial discs I have seen have the flag enabled (of course).

Good luck!