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Is The Public Stuck With The Broadcast Flag?
peeping_Thomist writes "The only company that sells HDTV tuner cards for Linux has run out of cards to sell, and they are now missing deadlines for new getting new cards. Linux users who want to view and record HDTV face an uphill battle. Meanwhile, the dreaded July 1, 2005 deadline for manufacturing DRM-free HDTV tuners is fast approaching. MythTV supports HDTV tuner cards, but so far no one has made a move to, as the EFF puts it, "buy, build, and sell fully-capable, non-flag-compliant HDTV receivers" prior to the July 1 deadline. The current combination of MythTV and pcHDTV (assuming pcHDTV cards become available again) may, as the EFF says, be "great for geeks," but it is a far cry from the TIVO-esque simplicity a mass market demands. Unless someone can get bring a DRM-free hdtv recorder to market before the deadline, it seems the general public will have no chance to avoid the broadcast flag."
Yes. Get 'em while you can.
Sure, ATI's HDTV wonder... which is OTA DTV only um.. the fusion III HDTV card which supports unencrypted QAM and OTA DTV.
... as you'd ask your cable company for the card (leased?) and only get the channels you are authorized...
*Shrug* What I really want is a PCI card that works with CableCard, to decode digital cable right into my pc and presumably HDTV (without the need for an external digital cable box... like some HDTV's are shipping with CableCard "slots"...)
Of course a DRM'less solution would be preferred... A cablecard enabled PCI card would allow for LEGITIMATE digital cable viewing on a PC
blah... i'm not too optimistic.
The FCC takes a step forward (requiring firewire on digital cable tuner/boxes on consumer demand)
and two steps back... (in)decency brouhaha, broadcast flag BS. etc
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
check out dvico's fusion hdtv
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i have a fusion hdtv 3 gold
I works fine for me, but if you have a radeon card the harware assist will put less load on your cpu for decoding
Europe doesn't have the broadcast flag (as of yet), right?
They barely even have HDTV, just one channel called Euro1080.
And HDTV is HDTV, right? A common standard, unlike NTSC and PAL, right?
Nope, the USA uses 8-VSB for the frequency encoding which is generally better suited to the wide-open spaces of rural America while Europe uses COFDM which is generally better suited for the tightly-packed urban centers of Europe.
Plus, because of historical reasons (aka PAL), they tend to use 25FPS frame rate which I'm pretty sure is not part of the ATSC standard.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You mean I have to wait til then to hack it?
I work for a company that builds systems for use with digital television and when I 1st read of the proposed broadcast flag and it's implementation I had a very easy to do bypass method devised in a matter of minutes. In fact, beating this broadcast flag will be child's play and will not even require 'hacking' a receiver or any modifications to it.
The OTA digital tv signals you receive in your home contain an ATSC Transport Stream, based on an MPEG-2 Transport Stream, as part of the ATSC standard, (A/53 I think) where the broadcast flag was mandated.
Within the transport stream, there are packets each of 188 bytes long; the broadcast flag carries a packet PID of 0xA0, (again I could be wrong but it has been a few months since I looked into the specific pid values).
In order to beat the broadcast flag, one would need a simple box with a pair of 8VSB tuners with a Xilinx (or other FPGA) in the middle. The 1st tuner would demodulate the signal and pass it into the Xilinx whose sole job would be restamping pids, should it come across a packet with the pid denoting that it is carrying a broadcast flag, it could simply change the pid of this packet to 0x1FFF (a null packet). On the other end, the 2nd tuner would modulate the signal back into 8VSB and to what ever you might have receiving. The beauty of this solution is that null packets carry no payload in a transport stream, thus would be ignored by anything down stream.
All in all, a device like this would cost about $100 (even in mass production) as tuners and FPGA's are generally not cheap.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Provided INDUCE doesn't pass... such a device could be sold legally, hell, we already sell systems which can do this and much, much, much more, but at 30-50k a pop, it's overkill for a consumer (albite everything we manufacture and sell is overkill for a consumer.)
The trick of selling this device would be labeling it as a packet restamper, allow a user to specify what pids to restamp and to what. Yes, you could use it to remove the broadcast flag from OTA transmissions, but that would be illegal.
Hence, you could argue substantial non infringing use, however for such an argument you'd need to show some reason as to why you'd want to restamp pids in a transport stream and nothing else.
Broadcasters do pid restamping all of the time, however they also modify the pat and pmt's accordingly as well... the solution mentioned above would be incapable of that as described, however a little extra Veralog code could do it.
As I do not know electrical design at all, I've been meaning to plug a couple of PCI card solutions we sell (cheapest of the 2 runs 2k) and have someone build me a new Xilinx load (~1 hour of their time), this will get me by provided I can find some old prototype boards.
I should mention another drawback of this device... it would only work on one channel at a time, and every time you change the channel on your receiver, you'd have to do so on this device in order to see programming.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Because of concerns over concentration of media power (particularly because of Berlusconni's near-monopoly on both state and private broadcasting), pirate TV has become a popular political action in Italy. Many stations have been set up as community resources, sometimes broadcasting to as small an area as a couple of streets (and thereby resisting the homogenising effects of the mass media). Check out Telestreet for more information (in Italian).
The broadcast flag rule says that you can't sell an 8VSB demodulator that doesn't obey the broadcast flag. So you can't sell your device.
However, people could legally build their own 8VSB demodulator, and not break any laws as long as they did not try to sell it. Such a project would be expensive and difficult for a hobbyist, to say the least.
Heh... easy to get around. The MPEG stream that comes over the air has a LOT (almost 50%) repetitive data to keep the data clean even in not-so-great reception. You sell these devices as "stream cleaners" that clean up the repetitive data before it reaches your receiver hence making it easier on the receiver CPU.
Now this is just a small thing... that people could logically buy the unit for. Let it leak though that changing one byte in it's firmware before upload not only makes it clean up the packet stream but also throw away a "trash" packet that just happens to contain the broadcast flag.
If you havn't noticed it almost all of the DVD players now have some quick hack to go region and macrovision free... You think that is just coincidence?
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.