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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."
What would be a better time than now?
Since most of us on /. use Windows, are there any flag-free HDTV cards for it?
*Couldn't there be a startup project to get existing windows-compatible HDTV cards to work within Linux? I mean, there's a good sized community out there, and with the right motivation (recorded HD for all?) couldn't this be done?
As far as DRM-disabled tivos....I doubt it will happen....Even if someone rolled out one, no doubt it'd be stopped before it hit the shelves.....
*Disclaimer - I don't know much about HDTV cards..Know how they work and all, but I don't know what's available on the market.....
My MythTV HowTo
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
This from someone who has the second post on a /. story... :)
Europe doesn't have the broadcast flag (as of yet), right?
And HDTV is HDTV, right? A common standard, unlike NTSC and PAL, right?
So will we see Americans buying HDTV cards from Europe in the future?
Is there a chance this will go the same way as DVD region-protection?
These cards are going to same way as DVD's.
The market will demand DRM free cards to access media that is not copyrighted yet fails to play because of DRM restrictions.
We will see cards that can be reflashed, making us all criminals that do such, to be DRM free.
Go that market pressure.
Why act like this is the end of the world? Just stop 'consuming' the 'product' if you do not like the 'terms' the 'product' is offering.
In short - screw 'em. They make their money from advertisers and if the advertisers don't get eyeballs, they can't make money.
I'm not planning on buying any HDTV gear until I hear what way the broadcast flag useage is trending. And if PBS is using the broadcast flag, my donations will go away there also.
I felt some anxiety over that July 1, 2005 deadline, but then I realised that I don't even watch TV.
Mandate all you want about DRM or HDTV broadcasts, and while you're at it, mandate that pi=3, and that g=9, it's still not going to make much of a difference. The deadlines will be extended, and HDTV will continue to be reserved for a minority of channels of the cable and satellite broadcasters for at least the next half decade, simply because there's limited bandwidth.
Go ahead government, make our tv's stop working. We dare you. As for the DRM side, by the time that HDTV's actually do have a majority of the market the DRM will be cracked open, with the yellow encryption key yolk spilling out on the floor.
Relax mon!
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
Yeah, great, you are preaching to the choir and you are posting to Slashdot. Way to look like you are practicing what you preach...
People don't want to go outside. They don't want to be active. They certainly don't want to care about the broadcast flag.
People aren't going to know that the broadcast flag infringes on their rights because they don't know their rights and they don't care to know them. They want to sit down on their couch as soon as they come home and let the cable TV wash over them.
Thinking, being active, and life without TV is something that most people could not handle. Talking about religion? No way! That's no PC. Talking about politics? You mean talking about who is going to be voted off Survivor right? Because voting isn't important to people.
I try never to say me too! but the guy is so right: I stopped watching TV three years ago and I don't really miss it. I watch a few DVDs on my PC but instead of wasting 3 or 4 hours every day doing nothing, I learn, I read, I play (Go for example!) It won't bring you a GF or friends, but it's better than doing nothing in your life.
This is the wrong way to get around this problem. I say a boycott after the deadline would be far more effective. If nobody purchased a tv tuner after the deadline, that would speak volumes. It would have be a very organized protest, but with enough attention, it could work.
At first filesharing and music swapping was for geeks. No one outside of geekdom knew much about it. Look at it now, AOL users are doing it (HA!). The general public has gone from seeing it as a small group of p1r8t3s stealing music, to some sort of Robin Hood analogy fighting the RIAA.
I can't see HDTV DRM being much different. Tivo modifications are not uncommon, I even saw a few how-to books for it at B&N last week. Eventually consumers will clue in and WANT to record HDTV, legally, like they do now with NTSC and a VCR.
The only difference with HDTV is that it is almost being forced out to consumers where Mp3's, DVD's and CD's were slowly introduced and adapted. Even my friends who are usually early adopters haven't said a damned thing about getting an HDTV card, decoder, or HDTV-ready TV. There has been very little chatter about this from the tech media. Yet, the broadcasters, electronic makers,and the government have already started tossing around legislation for HDTV. The point is that DRM is being forced on consumers, so is HDTV.
You have to trick consumers into buying what you want them to buy and the current HDTV and DRM crowds are not being that subtle. Consumers will be revolting ('well mostly they're just rude') as soon as this crap starts to complicate what used to be a simple task.
How about that technologies like these let people spend less time watching TV and pick out those few shows that _are_ worth watching without being force to adapt their lives to the networks schedules?
PVR technology is a good thing for both people who watch a lot of TV and those who only watch a little.
"agreed. TV is just boring. the only good thing is news and bbc.co.uk has that covered. anything else that's decent can be bought on DVD and watched when you want.
the benefit/cost of TV has been plummeting sharply for some time now."
Ah, but you are missing the point... what if DVD's go away and you are only "allowed" to watch DRM'd discs or downloads on a "per viewing" fee structure... and you couldn't make backups of the content (ok the DMCA ships already sailed, but still why let another one sail)
Right now PVRs/DVRs etc give you the advantage of watchign what you want, when you want... furthermore the problem isn't there's nothing worth watching, is that there's sooo much crap, on sooo many channels is that you need a willing guide (PVR) to help you sort through it... so when YOU are done mounting climbing for the day you can kick back, fire up your PVR and see all sorts of stuff that will interest you (no doubt Outdoor life network rugged how to "climb better shows" )and oh by the way zoom pass the commercials to nearly halve your coma couch time.
But back to the point of the article... you lose some of core abilities to manage content how you'd like (in the US) once it's been DRMd...
Between the broadcast flag, and the INDUCE act (oh and toss the patriot act in for good measure) we will soon (in the US) have less freedoms and transfer all the control to the MPAA/RIAA/etc...
all our content are belong to them.
blah
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
No. The general public has gone from not seeing it to seeing the way they see any pervasive and widespread crime almost equivilant to speeding: They don't care.
There's also the option of not buying into HDTV. That has worked enormously well for most North Americans so far, to the point where deadlines for phasing in HDTV and phasing out analog have been pushed back, and people continue to not run out and buy overpriced new TVs that support it.
I watch a lot of TV, but ss nice as HDTV surely is, I can't say that I miss not having it.
" By 1:00AM on July 1st someone will have hacked it."
And between the DMCA and INDUCE act they'll/we'll be carted off to jail (or sued the pants off by RIAA/MPAA/etc)
plus isn't it much better to NOT have such a fool restriction in place (and stop it before it comes into play) than it is to have to circumvent it later?
Do we want to have to have a "broadcastflagJon"?
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Recent supreme court cases such as Morrison and Lopez stop federal regulation of activities that are "non-commercial." This means if nothing commercial is transpiring, the activity cannot be regulated under the commerce power (this is the same authority used to establish the flag in the first place.)
Open source software that is not sold, is freely available, and freely modifiable is very much non-commercial and therefore not subject to this regulation.
Thus, and IAAL (I get sworn in TOMOROW) but not a techie anymore, it seems that if there is any way to get a signal to your computer, a free, open source software program could render it - and no laws would be broken.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Don't be a victim to the broadcast flag -- be creative and make your own entertainment.
(Also beware of performing copyrighted scripts -- you're not even allowed to videotape such performances. Be creative in the script department as well.)
The public always has a choice. People can refuse to buy a sub-standard product. Industry greed drives this silliness, let them kill themselves.
So... when the FCC declares analog broadcast waves dead, and every digital receiver legally manufactured has a broadcast flag, where's the choice then?
Sure, *I'll* be exercising the choice not to watch, as I already do, and perhaps you will as well. But for the millions who can't do without the real opiate of the masses....
Tweet, tweet.
There was a suggestion in Linux Magazine a month or so ago that it might be a good idea to buy one of these Linux cards if you wanted to be able to watch HDTV without worrying about the broadcast flag. I got myself two, and I'm very glad I did.
However, I wonder how long it will be before some assHatch^H^H^H^H^Hhole attempts to make it illegal even to own one of these devices...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
How about keeping your opinions about what I do with my spare time to yourself? Or at least, don't be so superior about your decision not to watch it.
TV is a form of entertainment, no more or less a waste of time than watching movies, playing video games, reading or perusing the intraweb-- which all have their ratio of good-stuff-to-crap. If I want a way to record the Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Strangers with Candy, Larry Sanders, King of The Hill, The Office etc. so I can watch them when I feel like it, then please stay out of it. Believe it or not, I can watch a couple hours of TV a day and still have time to ride my bike and hang out with friends.
my password is private, but unchanged.
Of course they don't "support it". They were all made before the law was passed. You can bet tho' the windows drivers+software will at some point be "upgraded" to support the flag. The whole point is that with an open source driver, even if the manufacturer put BF support in there, you could take it out.
tcboo
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
I doubt that broadcast television will be around in 20 years as a mass market thing anyway.
:
My prediction is that it is going into a death spiral caused by the following
1) There are many other things to do that watch tv all evening unlike 20 years ago (dvd, internet, games for example)
2) The programs they are increasingly producing are aimed at the lowest common denominator to reduce costs and increase audience share for that program. But that's causing an increasing number of people to find *nothing* they want to watch at all.
3) It takes a few years of inertia for people who on't actually like any of the programs to realise this and turn off.
4) An older generation from 20-40 years ago who watched the peak of mass market tv are slowly being replaced by a younger audience who don't have that shared culture of watching tv every evening, instead gaming and the internet are important.
5) There are a lot more channels making it almost impossible to get huge audiences for any particular show.
6) As audiences drop the amount of money available to TV companies will drop. They'll panic and stop producing more fringe stuff and concentrate *even more* on the lowest common denominator stuff which is turning many people who don't like that stuff away.
7) As the audience drops more and increasing number of children who already have alternatives will not be "educated" in the culture of watching mass broadcast television.
I firmly belive that there is a death spiral here which is almost unavoidable. I predict that mass TV will have an audience reduced by at least 25% in 5-10 years time, and will have dropped to below 50% in 15 years time as todays children grow up without the culture of watching all that TV.
I can see television being a quaint old fashioned thing in 20 years time...
On the other hand I think that movies and DVDs and perhaps internet broadcast shows have a good future ahead of them. The demand for quality entertainment isn't going away and I believe that it won't be long before we start seeing produced for DVD shows happening that are never broadcast.
The first time people realise that now they arent gonna be able to tape survivor there's gonna be a big backlash. I just hope it doesnt come too late.
I can't. She's watching TV.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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
Would it not be possible to record the actual broadcast signal at the time of transmision, and then replay it in front of the HDTV equipement when you want? Would the DRM-enabled equipement have a way to know?
I realize that to sample the raw HDTV signal at double its frequency would require enormous amounts of storage available, but storage always becomes cheaper and bigger.
I may be completely wrong here, but I think if DRM enabled equipement becomes too ubiquitus (I am not talking only HDTV here) analog methods of aquiring the information could become rather usefull. The information could then be stored in non-DRM formats. How big would be the loss if I capture a song from a decent sound card using the built-in A-D converter? And if the degradation using a sound card is not acceptable, there must be better equipement available for a reasonal price.
I know I sometimes use IE to read Slashdot from work.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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).
Kind of like today how people have to go to Canada to buy decent toilets.
English is easier said than done.
The point is that with 90% of television, watching does nothing to improve you or the world. Think about the massive amount of time that is wasted by people watching that part of television.
I think it is rather odd, considering we all live just a short amount of time...
No, the grandparent didn't say watch less or watch quality TV. He stated it in black and white terms, as if you are either a zombie slave to the idiot box or you truly "live", talking politics with friends and taking nature strolls. Of course it's not healthy to watch TV seven hours a day, but it's equally unhealthy (and annoying) to do nothing but talk religion or politics with your friends or about hopes and fears with your spouse. But you can do all of those things and be a well-rounded person. I don't put down people who play games, watch sports or have a drink to unwind if that's what they like. It's all about moderation.
And yes, 90% of TV could be considered crap. But 90% of the web is crap. And music, and games, and movies, and plays and paintings and sculptures. There are a lot of crappy people out there, too. So what? Enjoy the good and enlightening and don't waste your time on the bad.
my password is private, but unchanged.
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.