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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.
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.