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Watching My Neighbors Watch On-Demand TV
Josh Levin, Slate Magazine writes "I have a magical box that allows me to watch other people watch TV — their movies, their sports, their cartoons, and their hour-long procedural dramas. And sometimes, usually around 11:30 on Friday nights, their soft-core pornography... I solved the mystery by consulting online message boards. At techie sites like AVS Forum, other voyeurs described their adventures in freeloading. I was intercepting video-on-demand channels through the power of my Samsung's QAM tuner."
Watching what other people watch can be fun.
I use stumble video and will often check out what my friends have watched recently, but the real interesting videos are to be found within the logs of random users.
People find and like the strangest things.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
I have the same thing going on with my TV. At first you think, "Wow! Free VOD!" but then you realize you have no clue when a show starts, no way to unpause if the real viewer gets a phone call or goes to the bathroom, and well... it's pointless. You end up flipping through a good 50 channels for hours having literally no clue what shows are on and no clue if that person will finish them.
It sounds neat but it's rather boring and partially stinks since you have to manually program those channels out. I mentioned this happening when the cable guy stopped buy and he seemed pretty "meh" about it.
No, the people who write articles for Playboy are serious, big-name writers. (Having "real" journalism, essays, and fiction takes the sting out of being a softcore porn mag.) Whereas the dialog in porn movies is always excruciatingly bad, and the plot — well, the truth is, I've never had the patience to find out if a porn film actually had one.
I guess your neighbor gets off on bad dialog, or he's seriously disturbed. Or maybe he's scripting a porn movie himself and sees no problem in stealing the dialog from an existing porn movie, since nobody listens to it anyway!
Why does it need to be encrypted? he has no control over the show, the fast forwarding, the changing of channels. Pretty difficult way to watch TV.
Plus it's not like you know WHO is watching it.
Encrypting it costs them money, and doesn't give anybody any gain.
He is not circumventing a protection, and I would be very interested to read the opinion of any lawyer who feels this is a violation of the DMCA.
Yesh, there are a lot of stupid clients the tell their lawyers to send out notices, but they never seem to go anywhere.
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HDHomeRun
Nothing else really comes close. Yeah, you can get HD tuner cards for a little less money, but they're a pain in the ass to work with and generally are less functional. An HDHomeRun is not just a tuner (actually, it's two tuners), but it's networked, so you can do everything with it that you can with a PCI tuner, but you can do it from any computer in the house.
It's a pretty brilliant little box.
Oh, and it works well with Linux, MythTV in particular. Once you start using that, you'll never go back to watching realtime TV.
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