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Cable Boxes With DVD, MP3, Networking
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.
How long will it be before the copy protection is broken and TV programs can be copied off? Two, maybe three days?
Imagine that, giving us what we've been asking for, with only enough restrictions to make it unobtrusive to the user while still protecting the content providers rights.
Seems like sanity wins out in the end.
If I could buy this directly and it were cheap and it worked with any cable provider, I'd be much more interested in it than in building my own... *even* if I can't copy the taped programming off of it. Why invent and make your own wheel if someone's not only done it already, but also done it potentially cheaper and better.
Have EVDO, will travel.
1. start watching live broadcast
2. pause live broadcast
3. resume watching broadcast
4. fast forward to catch up with live
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I have seen the future and it is this: set-top boxes that record everything coming in and send it back out onto a global P2P network that turns the RIAA/MPAA's hair a delicate shade of pure white.
"Select 'Share All' to share your TV programmes..."
Now, imagine this had the backing of a national government, TV companies, movie distributors, cable distributors and banks, and was tied into a simple payment system. Hold your breath, count to five, and you have instant pay-as-you-go TV and video and music on demand.
Prediction: this will not happen legally.
Shame for the media industry, it could make them so... much.... money.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
What a waste.
Remembering, of course, to include your de-macrovision-iser, in between the two. If it's HDTV it will output encrypted on the DVI and so it wont be as simple as that anyway.
Also, the files on the HDD must be readable, and the software to read them must be in the machine. {Think Spectrum fast cassette loaders. Not just fast, but copy-proof because it makes the whole process that bit more sensitive to fidelity - so an analogue copy is less likely to be successful. The first programme on the tape - often written in BASIC so you can just use LOAD "" - has to use the ROM-resident loading routines to load itself. It then implements the fast loader. All you need to do is to get this first programme to load but not run itself - the usual method was by making a fake header - and then modify the fast loader to read all the rest of the programme without executing it}. Now, 20 years on, the same principles apply. The computer has to be able to read the data from the disk in order to display it on the telly. Whatever can be read, can be copied. Light travels in straight lines. Energy is never created nor destroyed. Pressure in a fluid acts equally in all directions.
Why can't they just write something on the disk that the program [sic] can read, but the pirates can't? - reader's letter in an old Amiga magazine, offering the holy grail of copy protection.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
On Charter's bandwidth poor network...
While I applaud my cable company for this change, I have many cautions in mind when thinking about...the Charter network is already bandwidth poor...now we are going to be encouraging downloads of Music and such....Ouch!
They recently(March), dropped everyones upload speeds on the network to 128, where as many customers (me) used to get 512 or higher...this is not a good sign for a company planning to add aditional digital services....
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Macrovision will not affect your ability to capture video on your computer clearly.
It will if your capture card has AGC that is freaked out by macrovision.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Install FreeVo on a PC with a capture card and video out and you have the same thing without the copy protection.
Yes. But by the time I spent additional money on a quiet, fanless mobo/CPU and a sleek, esthetically-pleasing enclosure, would it still be cheaper?
Actually, I don't know, cause nobody seems to know how much these puppies run.
Have EVDO, will travel.
The point is it can be done quite easily. Not everyone has a computer. Not everyone has a video capture card. Still fewer have cards that get "freaked out" by macrovision because of automatic gain control. But the people who are into this sort of thing will have cards that can capture the content. Therefore, it is not copy proof.
Don't all of those channels just get streamed to the cable box all at the same time as a series of 1s and 0s? It seems like it would be possible to make a machine that recorded all of those streams at the same time.