Slashdot Mirror
A Brief FAQ on CableCards
TechNit writes "Just when I thought my Comcast DVR box was not going to change here comes the CableCard. Fascinating concept but I don't see these being used without the added features of Pay-Per-View, Video on Demand etc. that many consumers (me) have become used to. I see these being used more for authentication/theft prevention devices as apposed to stand-alone service providing devices. What do others know about this?" An earlier CNet column points out the shortcomings of current CableCard implementations.
That being this (Anandtech.com).
why are ir blasters so bad? mine's working great, and i'm not even pointing it at the cable box. i got a writeup on my blog:
http://mythtvbox.blogspot.com
I agree with CNET's "Five reasons to not buy a CableCard".
t ml for an NGNA primer). The cable video industry is a bit peculiar to the computer and networking crowd because there is basically only proprietary systems. There are standards-based components and approaches, but by the time a whole system is built, Set Top Boxes are not interoperable across multiple systems. The the kicker: with mostly analog video on cable systems, usually almost all the bandwidth was tied up with programming. That left no available spectrum to introduce a different, competitive system. Once a vendor got into a city, the operator never changed over to a differerent vendor in that city, because the switching cost was too great.
There's a long and sordid history in the Cable Industry behind the CableCard. From the outside it seems like a fine idea, but none of the insiders wanted it, so it happened slowly. Now that it's here, it's obsolete as the version available now only supports 'one-way' video services, i.e., traditional broadcast TV. EPG, VOD, built-in PVR, and more interactive services, all require two-way communication, which is not in this version.
There are specs in CableLabs for the two-way version, but it's not clear if they're finished or even workable. And more likely the existing specs would be trumped by the industry's NGNA -- Next Generation Network Architecture effort (see http://www.cabledigitalnews.com/ngna/ngnaprimer.h
There's a chance this will change, due mostly to digital TV requiring less bandwidth, pent-up demand for new technology (VOD & PVR primarily), and the great success cable has had with DOCSIS-based Internet Access (they make a ton of money on it!) leading to some appreciation for open standards and interoperability. We'll see.
Many of these interfaces use DRM-- both the sender and the receiver may have IEEE1394 jacks, but the sender may choose to encrypt its data-- and key exchange is often dependent on whether the devices trust each other.
If the creators of MythTV have not signed the requisite contracts promising, basically, that "users will have no rights", your MythTV will have no easy way of decrypting the data.
ANSISCTE282004.pdf
I guess it's open after all. Although I hope there's no proprietary software initialization that you still need to actually make it work.
FCC mandates that cable companies need to make firewire control possible as of early 2004: Link
If you live in the US you should be able to do something about this.