Oddity Archive: Episode 253.2 - Magna-Guard (or, Copy Protection, Vol. 3)

[@OddityArchive]

Jump to the 10:35 mark to go straight to the tests.

[@larryhill1442]

Is it me,or did the guy on the first video look like a young Dick Cavett?

[@rareblues78daddy]

...and miss listening to you waffle on? Never!

[@TheMediaHoarder]

That’s Macrovision in the vertical interval. When the squares get white, the copied source gets dark and unstable. It was said this didn’t work on Beta but clearly does here. A long time ago I copied protected VHS movies onto Beta and saw a bit of darkening without the use of a stabilizer I got to eliminate those sort of problems, using it cleared that up.

[@tedfixed]

This channel saved me during the pandemic. Thank you.

[@herbcraven7146]

This tape is protected by both Magna-Guard and Yawn-O-Vision copy protection systems. No one would actually want a copy of this tape.

[@SmeddyTooBestChannel]

it's like KTC but it actually kind of does something!!

[@TeeVeeGames]

Is it just me or does the level of consequence a tape's patented, one-of-a-kind copy protection purports to dish-out directly correlate to it's level of "niche"? Like the more limited it's audience, the more (allegedly) catastrophic the results of illegal copying?

[@OddityArchive]

If my own copy-protection mythology is anything to go by (what little there is), I'd say you're onto something.

[@AlexSpalex1]

I was just thinking that, too.

[@Rando1975]

Very much so. I'm a mixed martial arts fan and have a sizable DVD collection, and before that VHS tapes. I had a couple of original tapes called Vale Tudo Japan Open '94 and '95. Now this would have been back in the mid to late 90's and a niche sport was VERY niche at the time. Both tapes were copy protected with Macrovision. AFAIK, the tapes were only ever sold through martial arts magazines.

[@plawson8577]

@@OddityArchive The “Stop Copy” Method that Fotomat used in the late 70s, is Still a mystery to this day. Didn’t the basics of Macrovision mean that anyone dubbing a Licensed Rented tape mean that the VBI and Pulse were thrown completely WAY off? My Stepdad found out the hard way when he tried unsuccessfully to Dub a Rented copy of Soul Food onto a blank Tape back In late ‘97 using a Cheap Symphonic Low Quality VCR and RCA VCR Plus. His brother was really into Video Piracy and even had a proper deck to do it. A Double Decker.

[@OddityArchive]

@plawson8577 As best I can gather, Stop-Copy was just recording with a deliberately weak signal to try and trip up your TV's vertical hold (back when that was still a thing), and, by turn, make dubs harder to make.

[@ScottGrammer]

I remember these. What they meant was that if you copied the tape, then switched the copied tape into the shell of the original before returning it, they would know and release the Kraken. It's true, the signal you saw in the vertical interval would not be transferred to a copy, and this could be easily detected. This was only ever used on rental tapes, as far as I know, and not for long, as it interfered with normal viewing.

[@OddityArchive]

They had an interesting way of putting it if that's the case. I can't picture someone going to the trouble of duplicating and/or transferring the label to the dubbed copy.

[@ScottGrammer]

@@OddityArchive In the mid-80's, it was a thing with rental tapes, because buying a new movie on tape back then could cost $60-$100.

[@OddityArchive]

Yeah, but those would've been sought-after titles, not ultra-niche special-interest stuff like this.

[@ScottGrammer]

@@OddityArchive True.

[@steveg5122]

@@ScottGrammer Could be also something that had a "license" due to the system being expensive. Like you had to pay a ton up front for this tape. they might have had a lot of returns and wanted to add a step to prevent people from just passing the tape around in a new shell

[@jessecoffey4737]

As we see here, Magna-Guard appears to be a rebranded version of Macrovision. The most interesting part about it was the set of bouncing rectangles that appear on the vertical blanking interval.

[@Aeduo]

It almost seems like a bootleg implementation of another method intended to prevent bootlegs. No honor among thieves. :p

[@nxx99]

I also know what macrovision is.

[@donnierussellii4659]

A bit of trivia about Hawaii: In Twain's day it was called the Sandwich Islands, after some rich guy.

[@MrRaulstrnad]

Lord Sandwich was such a passionate gambler that he did not have time to leave the card table so he had his roast beef served between two slices of bread and brought to the card table-hence the SANDWICH He was also member in good standing of the Hellfire Club-a semi satanic society- semi because they didnt sacrifice babies but instead ran a lot of orgies Now you know

[@ericariley1696]

I remember having a VHS copy of a Charlie Brown Christmas as a kid, which someone taped Sesame Street over. Not sure if it was the Hi Tops video release. I do remember seeing It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown on Hi Tops video at school before and the trick or trick scene was edited and redubbed.

[@Z3R0FiR3]

LOL my mom had the whole collection of Sweatin' To the Oldies on VHS. I remember hearing the version of "Loco Motion" that was on one of the videos alot when I was a kid.

[@RetroDakota]

For what it's worth, Babar is possibly one of the most dramatic animated cartoons ever made for kids. I won't spoil anything, but let's just say the extreme drama and violence from the first Babar kids book was not altered too much for the first episode of the TV cartoon, leading to some of the most saddest moments in cartoons aimed at preschoolers.... something today's cartoon producers wouldn't dare attempt. Nelvana (the same studio that produced everything from cult classics like Rock and Rule, to 80s cheese like Care Bears) was the company that adapted the Babar books into the cartoon series, and it would be the beginning of their long streak of adapting children's literature into animated cartoon form. While Nelvana has come down quite a bit in the quality department, their earlier productions still have a following to this day, and were frequently rerun on the now-defunct kids TV channel, Qubo. In regards to copy protection, I discovered my particular AV-to-HDMI box I use for converting VHS to digital completely ignores Macrovision, and given that Magna-Copy is similar in design, I'd imagine it would ignore that as well. This is wonderful for digitizing old Macrovision tapes that have yet to get a proper physical or digital re-release.

[@brianhebert6152]

Nelvana made up a lot of my childhood! I even like some Nelvana cartoons I didn't watch in my youth (especially Redwall)

[@jasonhaman4670]

To me, opened tapes with vintage off-air recordings are a bigger score than opened blank tapes. But still-sealed new-old-stock tapes are also interesting/collectible. From what I've read over the decades, conventional wisdom was that Beta (as the recording VCR) was immune to copy protection schemes. (I watched your other copy-protection videos, but it's been long enough ago I don't remember if Beta was affected by the systems you covered then. But I know a Video Concepts-branded VHS VCR in the mid-80s (linear stereo with dolby... another rarity) was unaffected, so it wasn't strictly a Beta thing. (Now that's a brand that seems to have quickly vanished into deep obscurity back in the 80s, a flash-in-the-pan brand. They had Video Concepts-branded tapes too.) Hmm... obscure A/V equipment brands might make for an interesting OA video/series... or info on them might be too rare to find enough of. But then, you've been very successful at digging up info on many incredibly obscure devices, so you'd be the most likely person to pull it off.

[@itogi]

So, Magna-Guard is just a slighty different Macrovision with a bit of fear mongering

[@sracine10]

13:03 - that warning on the front of the beta tape gives me “Cat Sitter” vibes. At least this warning makes some (emphasis on some) sense. Also- if you return the tape, how are people going to know it’s a copied tape?

[@OddityArchive]

They can't. It's a 100% bluff.

[@jasonhaman4670]

Yeah... it's the impossible claims that made me expect it to be 100% BS. Bizarrely, given the BS claim, I actually kind of respect them for having some level of actual copy protection technology. I feel conflicted and confused....

[@GatorGirl]

When it said "return the tape", I was thinking about a rental. I had this mental picture of a bored minimum-wage Blockbuster employee being asked to take a bunch of tapes in the back and do some weird scanning process on them to see if they were copied. They'd probably just glance at them, say "looks OK", and go take a nap or something.

[@Aeduo]

@@GatorGirl Haha as they should. They weren't paid enough that they should care that some blockbuster or movie executive isn't getting every last drop. :p

[@JL-sm6cg]

That dim/bright shit reminds me of when I bought my first DVD player, and because my TV at the time didn't have RCA outlets, I connected it through my VCR, which did. I was very bothered when a number of my DVDs started that slow dim/slow bright thing, and nobody could ever tell me what tf it was! When I finally found out, I had to go out and find a new TV with the outlets in them.

[@noneofyourbusiness4616]

That "Will to Change" tape has been sitting in my parents' house for 30 years or so.

[@nazznomad]

It kind of makes sense why these might be copy protected. They sold new for an ungodly price relatively speaking. A lot of these self help videos and the like were premium priced to fleece the desperate and therefore, the makers don't want a paying customer to make a dub for a friend in need so to speak. They want them to pay up !

[@tekvax01]

That just looks like Macrovision copy protection. FunFACT: Macrovision copy protection only worked with VHS machines. BetaMAX machines recorded it just fine.

[@video99couk]

I've never seen copy protection on any Beta tapes in the UK. We did see "CopiGard" on VHS with warnings saying the tape may somehow be rendered useless if copied.

[@Montgomerygolfgator]

Seems like a broken website for sybervision still exists, and poking around the directories (and by that, I mean the super hacker method of removing everything but the top level of the URL) it appears to be something the Mormon church cooked up. They also seem to still sell these... Maybe. The link that would take you to the store is broken. It's an oddity for sure.

[@bobsoldrecords1503]

The Beta to VHS dub of The Beatles Let It Be film I had in the eighties worked better, thankfully. "I'll play if you want me to play" applied to George getting pissed off at Paul as well as it did to the tape.

[@KylesDigitalLab]

I wonder if this affects older Beta decks. My oldest (working) Beta decks is my SL-2000 portable from late 1981. The SL-HF400 is a SuperBeta deck so it's at least as new as 1985-86.

[@nobodyyouknow1065]

Magna Guards are those droids that accompanied General Grevious. I’m not sure knowing this does me any good.

[@superbetahifi]

You mentioned that the sound was muddy on the betamax copy. I think maybe your Beta HiFi is turned off, either the HiFi monitor button on the front, or the main beta HiFi switch on the back. The beta HiFi indicator light on the front will tell you the status.

[@unklejohn8575]

Somehow, we figured out that if we played a rental on a camcorder and recorded the movie with the vcr (or was it the other way around,...) it would bypass copyright protections,

[@TV6NY]

SyberVision and Pimsleur was sold off to Simon and Schuster in 1997.

[@seanwieland9763]

I had that exact same head cleaner kit for my Betamax back in the day.

[@yanikkunitsin1466]

How could playing the video for duplication destroy this magic "track", but leave it intact in regular viewing? Makes zero sense.

[@dunebasher1971]

They were relying on the fact that most members of the general public didn't understand the technology well enough to know that it was nonsense.

[@battra92]

Youa obviously know this but for others, that copy of ACBC features the edited version which was standard on broadcast to allow for more commercials. This version not only cut out the Coca-Cola ads but the scene of the kids throwing snowballs at the can and some other trims here and there. This was the only version I saw until CBS commissioned "Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales" to fill out the hour with the mostly complete ACBC and the modern demands for commercials. The later VHS and DVD releases feature the mostly complete version (just missing a few seconds of Coca-Cola ads.)

[@AndrewsMagicandMore]

Minor nitpick: It was ABC that commissioned the later special, not CBS. ABC acquired the airing rights to some of the Peanuts specials in 2000, two years before "Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales" was set to air.

[@AndrewsMagicandMore]

Oh, and the Coca-Cola references can be seen online meaning they DO still exist - just not on any physical media releases, which were derived from the 1966 re-edit/re-run version.

[@battra92]

@@AndrewsMagicandMore thank you. I forgot that it switched to ABC.

[@jamesslick4790]

Based on the label, it implies that a track on the PLAYED (Source) tape will be erased (how "they" obtain "evidence" that it was copied). Ok, yeah sure, buddy. The erase heads are not employed on the playing (source) desk, But on the recording (target) deck. The source deck has no clue if it's pumping its signal to a TV or another VCR anyways! Only the TARGET can be affected by copy protection. Your COPY might suck, but the original tape is unaffected. Theyd NEVER know you copied the stupid thing. Anyone knowing how tape decks (audio or video) work, can see this is a fake (placebo) for the uninformed. All of the "protection" is contained in the stupid label!

[@Robdeltonie]

Here's my question: Since this is essentially Macrovision but on a Betamax tape, did Macrovision approve of this off-shoot, or is it infringing on their patented technology? AFAIK Macrovision requires a per-tape (or per-disc in today's world) royalty for using their copy protection technology. Is there copy protection for copy protection?

[@larrylaffer3246]

Sometimes it pays to buy a lot. Even if you only wanted like 1 thing from it.

[@wdavem]

It's interesting just how many flavors of analog copy protection there are. This one reminds me of what some consumer devices generate themselves on their own outputs. Can't remember if that was a dvd recorder or what but I caught one of many devices I was using in a live setup doing that all of a sudden. Swapped things around and it wasn't a problem.

[@GabrielleCenter2000]

Happy Oddity Thursday!

[@djhrecordhound4391]

Beta is an animal that I never got to know, but wanted to. When I first got into helping at record shows (when vinyl was scarce), VHS bootlegs of rare music/concert footage were king from dealers. Most of that material was taken from Beta tapes. Although I rarely touched one of the tapes, I'd recognize that "side-to-side wobble" characteristic anywhere. Canadian government shut down most of those video dealers, and within a month, all video boots disappeared.

[@stpworld]

I found a lost tape full of original Japanese anime when it first aired on the original network complete with commercials

[@PurpKing4377]

Happy New year BENNY BOY

[@ntsecrets]

making this comment without finishing the video - but I got the impression that *somehow* the original tape would be "affected" if you tried to make a copy of it so if you returned it after making a copy, THEY WOULD KNOW. How that could possibly work, who knows. Maybe, the pulsing intervals were unique to each tape, and if they found a copy out in the wild they could trace it back to who did it? So bizarre.

[@TombstoneChris]

4 years I have wondered and debated does this man have a mustache or not.

[@jerlg]

We had the Allsup head cleaner too.

[@christianottlein7293]

Happy New Year, Ben/Mr. Oddity Archive!

[@mervynstent1578]

I thought Beta couldn’t have copy protection!

[@beyondobscure]

oh boy more copy protection

[@Aeduo]

Hah neat. It would make a movie kinda unwatchable but a lame instructional video, it wouldn't matter that much. I'm guessing they're betting on it putting on a bit of a show of some funny voodoo going on to maybe spook people in to having though they'd done something and maybe the tape somehow was changed. A scammy self-help company wouldn't be above such behavior. I do remember as a kid having fears like that, simply due to not knowing better how things actually worked and some confusing propaganda that was out there.

[@bunnybismuth]

They really thought everyone was stupid.

[@dunebasher1971]

Many people would not have known that the claims made for Magna-Guard were nonsense and a technical impossibility. Most ordinary consumers had no idea about that sort of thing.

[@mightyfilm]

The fact a self-help tape has to pioneer a very specific type of anti-piracy speaks volumes of the quality of the help being given and the author of such help. Probably goes without saying these tapes had to be bought directly from the self help guru's company for several times the price of a regular weight loss tape.

[@SetTopGames]

That dude from the video looks like Linden Ashby.

[@jamesslick4790]

I absolutely HATE copy protection schemes, And NOT because I want to pirate movies: I had áfew VHS "Home Movies"(I.E. personal shit I "filmed" on a camcorder) that REFUSED to copy to my damned DVD recorder in the day. Some spurious signal would trip the copy protection, No DVD dubs for me. I wasn't trying to "steal" D****y movies, But friggin "Hollywood" would not let copy MY OWN SHIT! (Later solved with a video capture card and a DVD burner on my P.C.)

[@adrienfourniercom]

what the connection between Albert Schweitzer and Hawaï?

[@OddityArchive]

I think you meant Albert Einstein. I think that figure on that box is supposed to be Mark Twain.

[@adrienfourniercom]

@@OddityArchive Mark Twain was in Hawai for an article, maybe?

[@ntsecrets]

I think I have that exact same betamax deck... still works.

[@ntsecrets]

One question remains: did you lose any weight?

[@OddityArchive]

A bit, but not due to the tape.

[@bunnybismuth]

So no bursting into flames this time, either? Disappointing!

[@starfield1874]

Nice, I had that exact RCA VCR

[@halvolta8526]

Can you get through an entire video without ever saying the word "anyway"? Can you? lol

[@OddityArchive]

If it ain’t happened yet, it ain’t gonna.