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Shaw Cable Again Blocks Firewire On Canadian Set-Top Boxes
WestCoastSuccess writes with this excerpt: "A year and a half ago, Canada's Shaw Cable began encrypting channels with the '0x02' flag. This flag has the effect of making the IEEE1394 (Firewire) output useless to customers who use third-party PVRs (such as the excellent MythTV, for example). After complaints to the CRTC and Industry Canada about this practice, the encryption flag was dropped on most channels and the Firewire connection again functioned. Until last night, that is."
I am Canadien and I really want to be able to record my HD cable with my PVR. Where do I sign ? Right now Canadian cable company are working with these rules : 1. Block way's to record with third party PVR 2. Sell their really crippled and overpriced PRV 3. $$$ Seriously, what can we do ?
I battled with my cable company to get them to enable the firewire on my cable box. After a long battle, they did. However only the over-the-air channels were not encrypted. The rest, including the HD channels, were 5C encrypted.
Instead of playing their little game, I purchased a HD PVR from Hauppauge. It's a component (Y,Pb,Pr) input recorder. Now there is no way to block me, except by disabling the component output on the cable box.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_HD-PVR
You *are* aware that the internet isn't just for facebook and youtube, right? In fact many people (heck, most people on Slashdot) use it as a *tool* to get work done. I just ssh'ed into the server at my lab so that I could check on a bioinformatics project that I have going on. For me, the internet is a tool that I use to be more productive, check Slashdot and to keep up on news without my TV
TV is pretty much only about entertainment and wasting time.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
In Canada there is no cable card system, we are stuck with the providers boxes and they all suck. I'm with Rogers and their PVR forgets shows and refuses to play at times, I had a Tivo but when you move to HD you are SOL. The providers want you to stay with their system so you keep buying / renting their box... Firewire lets people break that link - thus they shut it down. Similar behavior can be seen on Rogers where they enable to do not record flag so that Windows Media center refuses to record some prime-time TV (even though the broadcast flag should not really exist in Canada).