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TiVo OS Update Adds Content Protection
generic-man writes "According to PVRBlog, TiVo's new operating system update enables content protection flags on a per-show basis. On some programs, notably syndicated shows, a red flag appears to indicate that the copyright holder has requested that TiVo devices not save a program past a certain date and that the program may not be copied to a PC using TiVo to Go. TiVo users were told to expect this style of flag only on pay-per-view and video on demand programming, and as such are upset that TiVo has restricted the capabilities of the receivers they bought and subscribed to use. The TiVo Community boards have some screen shots and firsthand accounts."
Just one more good reason to bite the bullet, sit down, and build yourself a MythTV box.
There's a good walkthrough on building a MythTV box over on O'Reilly Digital Media, and another on the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Is there someplace I can buy a MythTv box, so I don't have to muddle through it myself? I don't mind learning, but I'd rather have a working box while I do so.
There are advantages to living in the cracks sometimes. Harry Harrison once wrote that every society has rats, and even an incredibly advanced one would have the equivalent, even if it's a 'stainless steel' rat. By owning a ReplayTV instead of a Tivo, I feel like I'm living in that crawlspace, away from all the media attention that a company like Tivo gets.
Replay got sued for the automatic commercial skip, but once that PVR had been thoroughly surpassed in numbers by Tivo, attention shifted elsewhere and now the only people who know about Replay are the owners.
1. I can pull my shows off my Replay over the network, no broadcast flag.
2. My 5060 (w/ the requisite hard drive upgrade, of course) still automatically skips commercials. They aren't taking away features I bought, and I appreciate it.
3. There's no pop-up advertisements like Tivo has. There just isn't the money in doing stuff like that because the user base is so small (but the development effort doesn't get cheaper as a result).
You can see some of the same stuff happening with Apple. The Macintosh has, lately, demonstrated less enthusiasm about adopting the various DRM flavor of the month technologies that the Windows PC has. This is in part because there isn't the same level of scrutiny, and also because the development effort of adding that stuff doesn't amortize across the user base as well. I'm sure there are other 'do no evil' type considerations and whatnot, but money is the real motive power to be reckoned with.
I sometimes wonder what the implications are for the rest of society. Do I, the middle class anonymous guy have more freedom than the popular, rich people? Probably. There's no media scrutiny of my every move, if I had a T-mobile Sidekick, nobody would bother trying to break into it, I can post diatribes to slashdot without apologizing via a press release, and so on.
Just a thought on the trade offs between being comfortable and caged in the living room above versus being a bit cramped, but living the freedom that only the unknown can claim...
What makes TiVo a great product isn't its PVR functionality, it's the thoughtfully designed interface. This is something I don't think people who havn't used TiVo really understand. From the way it rewinds a little after you stop fast forwarding to the schedule tables, TiVo constantly does things that make me happy. It's like TiVo is my friend. This, I think, is the reason that so many people (myself included) are fanaticaly devoted to their TiVo.
I'm not saying MythTV doesn't have its benefits, but it certainly isn't a replacement for my TiVo.
Well, I have been a longtime Tivo user. I hacked my series 1 box to add more space, and I bought a series 2 box pre hacked.
This initial incident seems to have been caused by a big that has highlighted a legitimate feature, but the cat is out of the bag now.
Here is my problem with this.
Tivo changed the way I watch TV, but perhaps it changed it more than they thought it would. I have no problem recording a show and not watching it for a few weeks, then sitting down on night and catching up on a months worth of new episodes. If the show gets dumped after 5 days, well, then I'm not going to see it.
So now, depending on the network's whims, my Tivo box may have just become much less usefull. I can tell you 2 things that I will NOT be doing.
1) Changing my TV viewing habits back to where I work around the shows schedule. There are precious few shows that I;m now going to rearrange my schedule around.
2) Buy another Tivo. I was considering replacing my lifetime service series 1 with a lifetime service hacked series 2 (waiting for HDTV), however, it looks like this will be much less useful than what I am used to having.
Sorry Tivo. It was a good run, but the other options are looking better and better all the time.
Eschew Obfuscation
Recently, however, I've taken another fstab at it using Gentoo. I've come to learn much more about Linux that I've ever understood, thanks to the crisp documentation and hands-on aspect of Gentoo.
Thus far, my experiences with building MythTV on Gentoo, with all sorts of crazy features (gaming, VFD text displays, universal remote support, PS2 gamepads, HDTV capture and TV output, etc) has been extremely positive.
My problem now? Spending absurd amounts of money modding the hell out of my MythTV box. I bought one of those dedicated Media PC cases, and am going crazy installing lighted pushbutton switches, rewiring my PSU to be like an XConnect, running neon lights all over the place, soundproofing the heck out of the machine. I've spent almost $2k on this box! But, it has Dual layer DVD-R, half terabyte of hard drive space, can record two HD channels, and looks more A/V than my A/V receiver! Buying a similar box from Sony costs about $1,200, which doesn't let you play games, run Windows apps via Wine, or have file sharing and version control services.
I'll take that over Tivo any day of the week for $2000, Alex! And now I don't have to worry about some product manufacturer farking around with my rights after I've bought a lifetime subscription to their service.
For example, this summer I found out that my BIOS had an optional setting to automatically cut power if it thought the MB temperature was too high. The machine had been crunching on shows for months, but once the warm season arrived, it would mysteriously power down with no warning during long transcoding jobs. It took me a little while to figure out what was going on and turn off that option (the MB really wasn't getting all that hot; the threshold was just set way too low).
I've had video card driver I/O errors lock up the machine more than once.
Once an error at the Zap2it server caused the entire program guide database to empty out, so recording stopped until I reloaded it.
The latest screwup was somebody left the CD tray slightly open and then closed the front access door so the tray was stuck between open and closed. The kernel started logging millions of messages about not being able to access the CD drive. After a couple of days, it filled up the OS partition and MythTV stopped working.
MythTV has a lot of compelling features that make it worth it for me to maintain it, but I would never consider taking on the hassle of doing it for someone else. People tend to think that the shows they record are a high priority, so of course any problems have to be fixed NOW. It's bad enough answering to members of my own household when the thing starts messing up, much less handling the crisis for someone else on a phone help line.
Not only did they force you to purchase monthly service, they also spy on you aswell. When your tivo makes its daily call, its sends your remote control click log back to tivo. So they actually know you rewind on every racy scene. They say its anonymous, but on the same call it sends your credentials back so it can get the guide the data.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?