Greetings:

In our bedroom, we have a pretty basic Magnavox DVD player hooked up to an older Zenith 13-inch TV/VCR combo. When playing most (not all) DVDs, the brightness on the screen fluctuates up and down on about a 10-second period. Very annoying. It goes from "too dark" to "too bright" throughout the playing time. I said most DVDs because we have not noticed this effect on two DVDs we rented. Because of some hard-wiring issues elsewhere in Casa Diesel, Im not really able to hook this thing up to other TV sets in the house.

Has anyone else experienced this with a DVD player? Is it just some funky hookup issue? Poltergeists? Van Allen radiation?

Thanks for any advice.

A common problem, apparently caused by the copy protection present on some disks. It doesn't affect TVs, but drives VCRs (and some VCR/TV combos) bonkers. A similar copy protection scheme ("Macrovision") was encoded on most videotapes to discourage unauthorized copying.

At one time, there were some add-on video accessories on the market that defeated it. There may still be some variants around that will also work for videodisks.

IIRC, there was another thread just like this earlier this week. The easiest solution is to go to radio shack or walmart and get one of those RF converters and bypass the vcr, saving you the problems of working against the DVD copy protection system.

Thanks, boys. I think bastiat is onto it; the DVD player does not have a coax output, so I'm going into the TV/VCR through the RCA jacks. With the RF converter, I can go coax into the set.

Thanks.

Copy protection. Works great, just like gun control laws. I mean, there are no illegal copies of DVD movies, are there? Sheesh.

I got my converter at radio shack for $10, and it plugs into the wall. My TV was old school with nothing but a coax. Good luck.