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Cable Boxes With DVD, MP3, Networking

Posted by simoniker on from the geek-toy-beckons dept.

Bruha writes "It appears that Charter Communications cable division is in the first phase of rolling out a new home media center-style cable box. The article on CNN describes the box with a 80 Gig hard drive, dual tuners (With HDTV), DVD, and WiFi networking capability to allow music to be transferred to the unit along with pictures from your PC. Copyright protection prevents recordings from being copied to the PC, and Charter has ordered 100,000 of these boxes." We covered a preliminary announcement of this box, which uses the Linux-based Moxi software, last year.

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. TiVO ++ from India already does all this.. by jkrise · · Score: 3, Informative

    It was covered at Slashdot as well.

    Nothing new here, is there??
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    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
  2. FreeVo by barcodez · · Score: 3, Informative

    Install FreeVo on a PC with a capture card and video out and you have the same thing without the copy protection.

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  3. Re:How long? by ultrapenguin · · Score: 5, Informative

    DTLA

    Basically a digital content licensing/protection sceme created by 5 companies (listed on that site).
    All HDTV tuners and HDTV-connecting equipment has to support this for copy-protected content.

  4. Re:How long? by ultrapenguin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Few months ago I grabbed and read their "informational version" of the standard (the real version wants you to sign a NDA and pay $$$), and in general, its about high encryption to the data traversing high-speed buses between HD equipment (1394, usb2, etc). It provides mechanisms for scrambling the signal if another device is attached to the bus (sniffing) and methods for "blacklisting" known hacked equipment.
    Pretty hardcore stuff, has been around for as long as I know HDTV tuners existed (in japan at least), and has NOT been cracked, hacked, bypassed or in any other way defeated. The encryption it uses (from reading the informational PDF) is pretty strong, there's a mechanism for refreshing keys every so often, etc.

    Pretty bad stuff, if anyone has any POSITIVE information on this, feel free to reply :)