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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.
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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
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).