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What Critics of the Critics of the FCC Rule Miss
Asprin writes "Businessweek has an editorial up which argues that the FCC's HDTV broadcast flag rule is a good thing, and that everyone is just overreacting. What the author is overlooking is that this rule gives exclusive control over production to the studios that are in "the club", essentially denying private citizens the right to make their own HDTV format video. To wit: "The problem comes when a program taped on an old VCR can't be replayed on a next-generation VCR. So consumers may experience some compatibility problems between machines as they upgrade." Awww, she almost gets it. (...and she was sooo close, too!) The problem is the word "consumers", which doesn't describe us anymore. There's nothing like being locked out of your own old family videos when your current VCR dies, eh?"
OT, I know, but this is an urban legend. Check here to verify.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
There's no encryption key. The broadcast flag is just that - a flag with instructions on what to allow recording of. GNU Radio, current pre-broadcast flag hardware, and future non-compliant tools (call it "Capture The Flag?") will happily ignore it. Just like the current no-copy bit on CDs, which is universally ignored.
sulli
RTFJ.
It's already this bad. My sister is in a high school marching band, and there is almost always an official event videographer who tapes the entire event.
The tape is (typically) a single camera shoot with a fixed camera at a point where the entire event can be seen with miced sound pumped in.
This tape is available for sale immediately following the event.
This all seems wonderful, but the tapes almost always contain macrovision.
Now, there are good reasons for this, so that one parent doesn't buy the tape and make copies for all the rest (although I question that there are parents with this much free time), but there is a significant detremental effect, compliation tapes.
Now I can't use short clips of the tape in compliation tapes because the macrovision interferes with copying.
Get a Timebase Corrector (TBC). A used DPS Personal TBC 1 should cost you about $100 on EBay. Many VideoToaster systems used to have them.
Another possibility is to run it through a consumer SEG which has framesynchronizers or TBCs onboard (ie, Panasonic WJ-MX series, Videonics MX-series)
Digitizing it into a PC via videocapture or editing card should also work.
The problem with your second point is addressed in the article. The writer explains that the new devices that take advantage of this HDTV flag will not play anything recorded on current-generation devices. It seems that, in the absense of the flag setting, the recorder simply does not play the content.
I wonder how far this goes - if it extends past home recordings and the like. Does this mean that i'm going to have to buy new HDTV enabled DVD's if I ever get one of these heinous devices? If this is true, it's not that far off than what the record labels did when CD's were released - force everybody to buy CD versions of casettes they already owned.
If you're going to criticize the critics of the critics of the Broadcast Flag, you have to be willing to accept some criticism yourself...
You say that the FCC order will put HDTV production in the hands of the studios. That's not true! There is nothing in the order that says anything about that.
All it says is that video equipment, if it sees a Broadcast Flag, must restrict how it outputs the data. Video without the BF can be handled any way it ways. It is expected that broadcasters will probably choose to make at least some content unprotected, like public affairs programs, so video equipment must be able to handle both BF and non-BF video.
Nothing in the FCC order says anything about who can and can't put a BF into their video. All it talks about is how the video players have to respond to the BF. The order has no effect whatsoever on the ability of consumers to create HDTV video.
I sent this to the reporter. I hope it make sense.
The problem with the copy protection flag is how it requires massive intrusion into all the video chain, not just recorders. You must look at how it fits in with the requirements forced upon you by the owners of the HDTV patents.
If you are familiar with DVDs, then you will know that no DVD player can be connected to a TV through a coax cable. That is because coax cannot handle the macrovision copy protection, so all DVD players must only have RCA jacks. Too bad if your TV doesn't have any. Even if it just has one, you cannot use both a VCR and DVD on that TV. The Hollywood Cartel dictates how you can use your own equipment and even which equipment you must buy.
Have you used a Digital camcorder? Have you noticed that you cannot make digital copies of your own videos? It only makes analog copies. The Hollywood Cartel dictates that so that if one digital copy of a movie is made without copy protection, noone can mass reproduce it.
The copy protection flag is simply one required step to total control of you video equipment. It is the only step that requires government approval, the rest can be forced upon the equipment manufactuerers just like they did for digital camcorders.
Go look at the interface specification for connecting a digital HDTV receiver to a HDTV display. The signal MUST be encrypted one-to-one communications. The connector is simple Firewire, so you should be able to hook one HDTV receiver and send the signal to all HDTV display in your house, just like you can do with TV now. You cannot do this with HDTV because the HDTV group dictated that any device licensed to decode the HDTV must keep encryption on until the display device.
It has to work this way because once decrypted, the signal can be hijacked and the copy flag turned off. Once the flag is turned off, then you can copy it forever. SO you only need ONE device on the planet (say in China) to break the copy proctection.
You must look at the entire chain of video equipment. See what the owners of the HDTV patents require of the equipment manufacterers. Hollywood is very accomplished in doing this. They got JVC (owners of the VHS patents) to require all VHS recorders to have and use macrovision. They got the DVD players to always down convert 96KHz sound to 48KHz before playing it, so the audio (both analog and digital) cannot be copied at the higher resolution. So you buy expensive DVD-audio disks because they say it has high-resolution sound, and yet you get no benefit because the DVD player is required to sabotage the sound. This is the real reason there are only commercial DVD players on computers.
Hollywood must gain control over computers as it is the only hole left. Since the HDTV signal is encrypted, it is illegal to for anyone to write a program that decodes or manipulates HDTV images (without Hollywood approval) because of the DCMA. If you want to lift an image from ET and replace elliot with your son, you must use a windows program that runs only on the Windows Longhorn version. Otherwise you could run a screen capture program and grab the digital image from the graphics card. See the Microsoft Palladium project for details on how far this must go for the scheme to work. There will never be a Tivo for HDTV since Tivo uses Linux and you can hack it. Tivo will have to switch to a proprietary OS and CPU, otherwise it will never get a license for HDTV decoding.
Welcome to the future even Orwell didn't predict.
Now we're looking at having to purchase large amounts of hardware to really keep up which, when we do so, will suddenly render us unable to watch old videotapes and whatnot. Not to mention the cost to the stations and studios, converting all of their old syndicated shows to work with the new format. How many shows will be effectively lost because they aren't worth the expense of moving to digital format?
Sounds to me like the government needs to figure out their frequency problems for themselves and quit bothering us about it. I'm just not seeing how this falls within the FCC's mandate to manage the airwaves for the collective good.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.