Well, there's good news and bad news. "The Mystery of Edward Sims" (see post from earlier today) dubbed to DVD fine.

But the first episode of America was another story; it still comes to a grinding halt.

In 1972, as an early celebration for the Bicentennial, Alistair Cooke, the BBC and Sir Denis Brogan produced a 13-part series called America: A Personal History of the United States. This was a splendid series, engagingly written and narrated by Cooke and supplemented with location footage, old documents and films, and even period music. It was sponsored by Xerox, who agreed not to interrupt the episodes with commercials (imagine that happening today!). I've been a history buff all my life and this then eleventh-grader fell in love with the show immediately. When VCRs came about and movies started being released to videotape, I would have given my eyeteeth for a copy of America.

In 1985, I began working at a place whose library had the series on videotape. At that time, the series was only for sale to public libraries and educational institutions. None were ever made to be sold to the public. I was wild to own it, so, one by one, I borrowed the tapes from the library and dubbed them off, not feeling guilty as I did so: had the series been for sale, I would have bought it!

Unfortunately, I was very, very stupid on the first tape: I didn't punch out the little tab that keeps a videotape from being recorded over. I was watching America one evening while James was working late, forgot to take the tape out, and scheduled something to record after we went to bed. Sometime after midnight I woke up out of a sound sleep, screaming about my tape. It wasn't soon enough. I lost the entire first episode, "The New-Found Land," and about ten or so minutes of the second, "Home from Home."

Luckily there were copies in the local library and I remade my copies. But these library copies were heavily copyguarded. And the copyguard signal transfers to the copying videotape and therefore signals the DVD recorder to shut off.

So I'm stuck. The original copies from the other library seem to be dubbing off fine (I just started with episode 3, "Making a Revolution"—dunno if it will keep going). But those two first episodes are a sticking point and I don't know what to do.

I'm thinking of two alternatives. I'm wondering if a friend (HI, ANN!!!!!!) could check that library, which she still has access to, and see if they still have "The New-Found Land" and "Home from Home." If she could borrow them just before the next time she and her husband come up this way, I could copy them and get them back to her to return.

My other alternative is to find someone who is dubbing off their videotapes to DVD via their computers. I think the DVD burners on computers can override the copyguards (Rodney? Is this so?). I could then send the tape to them and see if they could do me the DVD of those first two episodes.

It's a lot of work to go through for a TV series...but this series was worth it.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 5:05:00 PM

Comments:

Well, the way I do any transfer is to play the video through my digital camcorder which converts the stream to Digital Video format which I send to the computer. So if it's copy-protected, it's already messed up in the digital copy (the usual Macrovision hooey). Sorry. --Rodney

# posted by  Anonymous : 9:59:00 PM

 

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