But Does It Copy Macrovision, I Mean, Run Linux?

[silicon_toad2000]

Two decades ago, old VCRs were in disproportionately high demand. Newer ones were unable to copy movies as they were distorted by a special signal. Hollywood is fighting for this war on equipment owners to carry over to general-purpose computers. Will they succeed?...
Enter so-called “trusted computing”, which is Orwellspeak for “untrustable computer owners”. There has been a gradual push for motherboards that refuse to bootstrap any operating system other than pre-approved ones, creating a chain of locking out the owner of the equipment from the ability to run any code they like. So far, this has always been hogwash and its “security” as brittle as nail clippings in an industrial shredder, showing the incompetence of Hollywood in a world alien to them – but still, the movement is there.
The most worrying push to date is that Microsoft requires computer motherboards to have that kind of lockdown to get the certification for Windows 8. They go even further on boards with ARM-based architecture: on such devices, Microsoft requires that you can’t even change what operating systems are allowed to run.
Let me say that once again: hardware is now being sold that doesn’t allow the owner to run any code they like on it. We’ve had software trying that kind of trick for a long time (and it’s ridiculously easy to circumvent in most cases), but hardware disallowing that is a new trick from the copyright industry.

http://torrentfreak.com/but-does-it-copy-macrovision-i-mean-run-linux-121119/

[White Stripes]

there are little black boxes that defeat macrovision.... there will be little bios update file hacks that fix secureboot...


a bit of electronic fun?; use an old apple2 composite monitor to view a vhs or dvd and you'll see the very bright funky lines that macrovision adds to the signal (the video signal from an apple 2 is quite a bit non standard... the monitor circuitry had to follow to work cleanly)

[GhostShip]

Macrovision is one of the simpler systems to defeat as its simply placing alternating blocks of black and white in what should be the black level check part of the video frame, adding a timer that blanks off any spurious white blocks and thus restores a correct black blanking level triggered by the videos own synchronisation signals allows for anyone to copy such video as it comes out of the macrovision enabled device.