I recently purchased a Panasonic DMR-E500H DVR/DVD recorder (400GB hard drive). I was hoping to be able to use my hacked macrovision free Apex DVD player to dump rental stuff off to its hard drive and then view at my convenience or to make backups of DVDs I have bought. I've dumped off stuff to VHS in the past this way, but for some reason the DMR-E500H isn't letting me do this and is telling me I can't copy this material. Almost as if it is still detecting that it is copyrighted material even though it is being played on a macrovision free player. Anybody have any suggestion on what I could do so that it will allow me to do so. Is there maybe a hack for this player/recorder that will allow this function?

Try some old stuff, you might be playing stuff that has Macrovision 2 on it?

OK, I didn't realize there was now Macrovision 2. My APEX player is about 4yrs old & I've never had problems dumping stuff of to VHS, but I guess it maybe different for DVD recorders.

I have one of those Apex's too, 1500 & do the same thing you do with a dvd recorder & it works fine. I use s-video input.