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Record HDTV To A FireWire DV Deck
no_such_user writes: "This is a kit to modify your DTC-100 HDTV receiver, adding firewire ports to it, and letting you record to most firewire recording devices (including miniDV/D8 camcorders/decks, your computer, etc). Playback is through the DTC-100 only (until some crafty hacker-type decides to decode the stream for PC playback). Unfortunately, I see "patent pending" on their site. I hope they're referring to the hardware design used, and not the idea of protocol converter, 'cuz I think that's been done before. For reference, a broadcast HD stream is max 20mb/s, and miniDV records at 25mb/s. How long before we see HDminiDV?"
What about my right to time shift and reverse engineer? They cannot legally take these rights away so they invent this bullsh*t DMCA and put it in the hands of technology. Screw them. If I want to record the SuperBowl and then watch it later, I have that right. I'm not profitting from this. I'm not violating their copyright on their broadcast. I pray that they get hit by a virus and loose all their damn encryption keys. That will teach them to muck with my rights.
Same thing goes for those bastards who keep screwing with DVDs and CSS. Thanks to them, I have major problems getting XMen to work on my first generation RCA DVD player. Explain to me why a legal DVD played on a legal player should not work. It pisses me off that I have to keep ejecting and inserting the DVD until the player finally realizes that it is an acutal DVD and can play it. As soon as I get the chance, I'm going to rip all my DVDs and record them unencrypted. Violating their rights, hell no. I'm allowed to make backup copies.
Feel free to let big business and the government keep circumventing their own laws and your rights. When they come knocking on your door because of thought crimes, or better yet, crimes you haven't committed but may in the future, it is your own damn fault.
Remember, every little piece of rights they chip away makes it harder to regain all of our rights back.
Boy is this quite a troll. Still, it's dangerous to let these sorts of attitudes foster. Ignoring it isn't going to make it go away.
So...
Firstly, copyright does not exist in the US, unless Congress passes a law permitting it; such a law has to comply to the Copyright Clause of the Constitution and also exists in tension with the First Amendment. The Copyright Clause (CC) is a utilitarian power of Congress. Never in US history (even IIRC when we were British colonies and the Statute of Anne applied) has copyright been a natural law. That is, authors are not entitled to copyright by virtue of authorship. In other countries natural law systems do exist, and imply that even in a lawless environment authors still are entitled to control how others use their works. (though that's a good example of fuzzy thinking IMHO)
There are three provisions in the CC. First that copyright is only permitted to exist should it promote the progress of the arts and sciences. Second, that it should only be given to the author. (though it is accepted that the author can later transfer it to other parties) Third, that the copyright last for a limited time.
If anything blasts apart the misconception that the US has or could have, barring an amendment, a natural law copyright scheme the first and third do. Natural rights don't have to benefit society, and don't ever go away.
Anyway, among the wide body of people who consider the DMCA unconstitutional, one of the common opinions is this:
It still maintains the principle that it is ENTIRELY possible to use copyrighted works without the permission of the author, in ways that the author is vehemently against, make copies under certain circumstances w/o permission. This is explicit.
Yet at the same time, it makes it illegal to access the work (obviously a prerequisite to do any of those things) w/o permission.
Not only does access not involve the making of copies or other forms of wide dissemination of the work, thus placing outside of the scope of copyright, but it is in total conflict with the principles of property ownership (that you can do whatever you want with a legally purchased DVD other than, loosely, copy or publicly display it), contract law (implying that a contract was implicitly formed when this is pretty clearly not the case or the buyer's intention), fair use (which derives from the First Amendment and CC and cannot be created or destroyed by Congress, though they have chosen to recognize it), and even some of it's own language.
Phew! And I've probably forgotten one or two things from that laundry list, because it's pretty late here.
Freedom of speech and the freedom of the press necessarily imply a freedom to listen. Do you have free speech if the police force you to speak freely in a jail cell? Or arrest people for listening to what you have to say?
No. This is patently not the case. Furthermore, some forms of free speech require the usage of other content. Reviews. Parodies. Quotation. Education. These have higher social priorities than copyright, and the courts have said so (as if the requirement that it promote progress wasn't good enough) again and again. That's the facts, Jack.
Authors have the power not to sell works to people. And they have the power (loosely speaking again - there are exceptions a'plenty) to make copies. That's about it. And the latter only for a limited time.
They have no real control over what others may do with their work once it leaves their hands, save for public showings and the making of some copies, sometimes, maybe.
Personally, I don't mind SOME copyright. But I can't tolerate the copyright we're stuck with right now. It's oppressive, and pretty likely unconstitutional.
And in this great nation, the author only gets the privelege of copyright when it serves the social uses that the populace puts it to. And the people don't enjoy reading or watching or listening at the sufference of the government. If they bought it, they can read it.
Rebuttal?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Grass Valley Group, who manufacture lots of TV equipment, are in Grass Valley. They were bought up by Tektronics, then I think spun off again. Haven't kept track of them for several years; they were doing HDTV work last time I visited a friend who worked there. These could well be some engineers doing their own work, or a spin off, or ...
--
Infuriate left and right
Why must the Slashdot crowd constantly think of ways to get around protections put in place to allow content providers to exercise their rights to control their works?
If it's broadcast, and I can recieve it on my hardware, I'll do whatever the fuck I want with it - even if that means disabling consumer-hostile technologies.
I don't care about their synthetic, legislated 'rights', if they broadcast it, I have the natural right to recieve the signal and do with it what I like, whether that means capturing it, decoding it, or just watching it.
I did not ask for their signals to be broadcast to me, so they have no right to tell me what I can do
with that signal, provided I'm not distributing/profiting from the works modulated into it.
(Which would be violating pre-DMCA copyright laws)
It's almost like the Cue Cat crap; if you send me something I didn't request, nor pay for, what right do you have to get pissy about what I do with it?
Besides, time-shifting has been a right VCR owners have had for over a decade...
Why should new hardware suddenly nullify this right?
Oh, and to be honest, I don't care about the GPL.
I usually work under the BSD license, which basically just mandates I be credited for my work.
Mod me down, I've got gobs of karma.
--K
Just for reference a broadcast HDTV is not "max 20Mb/s". This is apparently referencing the 19.4Mb/s compressed HD signal that is the "max" supported decode that most consumer HDTV's currently handle. REAL HD is a 1.5Gb/s uncompressed, though there are many compression levels beneath that. Hell, standard definition (SMPTE270)is 270Mb/s uncompressed over a dedicated lambda on the fiber. If you don't want to give the signal it's own lambda, it gets even larger if you want to encapsulate the signal in IP. ResearchChannel did just that, from Stanford to UWashington, over a year ago. (http://www.researchchannel.com/special/HDtech_9_2 2.html).
Sorry for the rant, I just couldn't let such a blatantly untrue statement pass by...
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No pictures of the device. Damn, this is a cool idea. I really wish this were true... but it screams " HOAX!! " even harder than the Seti@Home accelerator we saw a while back.
I pity the person who's going to have to pay the ISP bill when their website over-runs their allowed transfers for the month...
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
So pathetically true. The worst thing to ever happen to Sony was their purchase of Columbia/CBS. The vital Disney/Universal vs. Sony "Betamax" trial would have never happened if Sony had been in the movie business before. They are comprimised now. Panasonic made their DVHS recorder with a copy protection system, but the MPAA and it's thug Jack Valente pressured Panasonic to pull it from the market with the threat that MPAA member companies (all the big studios) would no longer buy Panasonic broadcast equipment.
They keep claiming this is about "copyright", but that is a lie. The 5C system the Panasonic DVHS had covered that perfectly well. This is about their desire to control what programs you can tape, how many time you can watch the tape, preventing you from fast-forwarding through the commercials (like the compulsary crap on DVDs) and preventing your from making copies.
Also, this is probably why Lucas is not releasing the Star Wars films on DVD. He wants to release it on this new DVHS system with horrible limitations, and per-viewing charges. Screw him and his greed.
This is DIVX all over again. Hollywood will not be happy until the "play" button is a "pay" button.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
What would make this ideal is if there was some CD/DVD changer that had a FireWire connection.
I mean, I can buy a 400 CD/DVD Sony changer for around $600-$700 but any computer solutions will cost me thousands of dollars because they feel the need to have servers and Ethernet.
Does anyone know if there is a device that will let me choose a single CD/DVD media and then pump it out FireWire? Imagine the possibilities.
From HD-100 to a FireWire burner. Burn your favorite TV shows, each episode on its own CD. Rack them all up and then you would have gigabytes of HD-quality media available at your fingertips. Rotate out some CDs that you are tired off and replace with new ones. Your own 200GB TiVo?
So does such a beast exist, if not, how difficult would it be to adapt a consumer CD changer to output either SCSI/IDE or FireWire? I know there are several SCSI/IDE to FireWire convertors so either output would suffice. Are they the same drive mechanics in both consumer and computer versions?
-JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
There are some problems, like DV format is not error-free. I don't know how they would recover from dropping blocks of data because of the wrinkled tape
MPEG-2 can also tolerate lost data.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
>Why must the Slashdot crowd constantly think of ways to get around protections put in place
>to allow content providers to exercise their rights to control their works?
Perhaps it's because the content providers give up that right when the program is broadcast. At least that's what the Supreme Court told us when they made the Beta-max decision all those years ago.
The Beta-max decision was the proverbial genie in the bottle. The courts let that genie out, and ever since then people have been using VCRs to record their favorite shows at 8pm so that they can watch them when they get home from their daughter's dance recital at 10pm. But content providers want you to watch their programs when they want you to for various reasons, among them getting you to watch the commercials rather than fast-forward through them and also for demographic control. Different people watch television at different times, and content programmers use that information to sell commercials demographically.
But now with fundamentally new media technology beginning to come out, media groups such as the MPAA, RIAA, broadcasters and cable providers (sorry, I don't know their acronyms) have learned from their past mistakes about letting things get too far along, and are fighting tooth and nail to keep the VCR genie's big brother, Digital Video, from escaping his bottle. The tools they use are encryption, proprietary formats that require strict licensing agreements (DVD-CCA), and a very big stick called the DMCA.
Of course they don't want to lose control again! Controlling information can make you a lot of money, and big corporations have to make money or they won't be big corporations for very long. But just because they want absolute control over media (and have the tools to enforce it), doesn't mean that they have the right to absolute control.
So when someone figures out how at least some consumers (in this case the tech-savvy crowd) can get back those rights, it's reason enough for a small cheer. Do they have the right to make money with their products? Of course they do. Big studio movies and network television programs wouldn't be made if they couldn't make a profit at it. Do they have the right to control when and where that content gets viewed? Within limits. When you go to see a movie, you're not allowed to take a camcorder in so you can watch it later. But if they beam it into your house or sell it to you on a tape or a disc, they give up some of their control. They can't tell you when, where or how you can watch it; they gave up those rights when the program was broadcast over public airwaves.
So here's to the geeks. Thanks for giving me back my TV. Because it's still my TV, even if it's got an HD in front of it.
Stick a fork in me. I'm done.
- Stealth Dave
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