DVD playback used to work... now I get the macrovision error message

[deruberhanyok]

I previously was using SageTV 6.2 with nvidia's purevideo decoder. Older system had a Radeon X1600 Pro and it was connected to my HDTV (DLP, 720p native) via VGA with the resolution set to 1280x720. I could play back DVDs without any problems, no error messages, no funky colors, no distortion, etc. I didn't use it very often, though I know for sure it worked.

A few months ago I upgraded and wanted to watch a DVD. Now for some reason I'm getting the commonly-seen Macrovision error message.

My newer system is running Sage 6.4, same purevideo decoder version and the onboard video of an AMD 780G board. I'm still connected to my TV via VGA.

To test the playback I also tried playing the movie in Windows Media Player... which now also gives me an error about copy protection!

Is something in the newer video adapter / updated catalyst drivers / updated SageTV no longer allowing playback over VGA? I thought, given my previous capability (and the fact that you can watch DVDs on a computer monitor with a VGA connection) (and the Xbox 360's functioning DVD playback over VGA), that a VGA connection was acceptable.

What changed?

[deruberhanyok]

Well this is interesting. After reading some more posts I dug through my CDs and found an old copy of Power DVD that came with one of my DVD drives. I installed that and selected that decoder for DVD playback in Sage and it works fine.

What is different about purevideo that is preventing it from working with my newer hardware? If it's just some kind of strange upscaling thing... well, the cyberlink decoder I'm using isn't upscaling, so is there a way to set purevideo to also not upscale?

Also, if anyone is wondering: when I first put the system together I got almost constant flickering after installing the video drivers when using an HDMI connection. So I went back to using the VGA output. I haven't tried HDMI again since Catalyst 8.7, dunno what the problem was as the cables and HDMI output from the 780G worked fine on another (LCD) TV. It seemed to be something with the combination of my DLP and HDMI output from the onboard video.