ATI AIW with Sima Color Corrrector, Macrovision still present?
 

Is this a known issue? I've done macrovision copies from vcr to vcr with the sima color corrector years ago and it always removed the protection with no issues.

Current setup is vcr to sima color corrector to ati aiw 9800 pro. I've never tried before but figured it would work but obviously it doesn't.

Any ideas as to why I either get no picture or a single distorted line on output?

Under law (might have been the millennium copyright protection act) equipment is supposed to include features to prevent unauthorized copying of material. Macrovision originally worked with standards-compliant VHS VCR's by fooling the AGC to produce a unwatchable image. However, other devices, such as camcorders, Hi8 VCRs, and digitizers worked differently, and were required to incorporate other features to detect, and respect copy protection. For example, the Sony EV-S7000 Hi8 VCR included a separate circuit board for copy protection detection.

Your SIMA was likely "officially" sold as a stabilizer to allow viewing of protected video on TV sets that were hypersensitive to the Macrovision signal (not to "get around" copyright protection). The SIMA may have been designed to do what was needed to deal with the VHS VCR sensitivity at its time, but not fully eliminate the parts of the Macrovision signal that the ATI detects. Check to see if it still allows VCR-to-VCR copies, and whether or not you can clean it up further by using another device as a pass-thru after the SIMA.

While home VHS-to-VHS copies cut into profits they were not a huge worry to the major studios because second generation VHS copies were usually pretty bad (I doubt very many of the illegal home-made copies took the place of what otherwise would have been an actual retail sale). However, with the advent of digital in the home (e.g., DV and DVD) with 2x the bandwidth of VHS, and lossless copies possible, Disney, Sony, and the other large content owners acted to protect their interest and bought a change to the laws we have today.

It seems to be that I cannot capture any content with the scc into the capture card be it protected or non-protected content. The AIW 9800 Pro input path is extremely overprotective.

If you cannot capture unprotected content (e.g., a from a known good home video tape) with the SCC in the signal path, but you can without the SCC in the path, the SCC is likely malfunctioning.

It would seem storage has not been kind as I've got some leaking capacitors in there.

Leaking electrolytic capacitors are a chronic problem for gear manufactured starting in the mod 1990s well into the 21st century. It effects VCRs (including high quality commercial/professional gear), and computer parts such as graphics cards, motherboards, etc.

I was just looking back at this thread, saw I never responded. A similar topic was recently on VH.

Sima devices are simply not TBCs. They don't corrector anything. The device is honestly a glorified paperweight that does almost nothing. The best aspect of a Sima is that it can convert an image to true B&W. That can be done with proc amps, or even capture cards, so the B&W feature is mostly useful for use with DVD recorders. I used it in years past to remove tints/hues and crosstalk from B&W TV show VHS recordings that I was transferring

I mentioned this here years ago: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/vid...k-hardware.htm