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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 ?
About a year ago, they started flagging broadcast channels on the box, even though they also transmitted unencrypted on a channel you can get with a regular QAM tuner. Then about six months ago, they unblocked almost everything on the Digital Starter plan. Someone with pull complained to the FCC, but as I understand, it was under the radar. I would personally like to see someone start making some noise about this, just to keep the cablecos honest, and discourage them from reflagging stuff. I mean, I understand encrypting the signal to the box, but if I legally have a box, I ought to be able to get at the data I pay for. This look-but-don't touch nonsense really ticks me off.
evilbit?
Give it a go. You'd be amazed at how quickly you stop worrying about what's on the TV anyway.
This. I gave up TV a while ago and I don't miss it at all. It'll be one of the most liberating things you'll do. After a while, you'll be wondering why you ever let that shit get into your brain for hours a day. Just like how a chain smoker quits and starts wondering to himself why he let himself breathe in a pack a day worth of smoke and carcinogens.
Every once in a while, I'll watch the Daily Show or 30 Rock, but I figure that's like having the occasional smoke or cigar with a drink.
People can go on and on with their righteous indignation over how they record their HDTV programming but when you walk away from it, you'll realize that getting your panties in a twist about a TV program is indicative of an addiction, not rationality.
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
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).
It's probably already been said before but just drop your cable all together. Anything you could want to watch is available online.
Just over a month and a half ago my tv broke. So I decided to just get rid of it rather than buy a new one. So I canceled my cable all together, and I just use my computer to watch whatever I want and it's bloody fantastic. You don't realize it till you don't have cable precisely how useless and overpriced it is. Most people have a set number of shows they want to watch and that's about it. Maybe some extra news, which you can just get off whatever news site you want. New episodes show up on bittorrent with a lot of seeders so it only takes an hour or so to get them, and you can watch them at your leisure. It's a lot like having a PVR except you pay a lot less.
It should also be noted that I watch a LOT less now. Since I don't have the outright waste of channel surfing just watching crap because there's nothing *good* on.
I also hooked up my 360 to my monitor and it works just as well as my tv. Maybe a little smaller but the quality is still there. Computer monitors and projectors are getting cheaper and cheaper, despite most ISP's efforts high speed internet is abundant, and cable's fast becoming an anachronism.
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.
My apt complex switched from crappy Millenium cable to the even worse Ygnition (a company that specializes in overpriced underserved cable for apt complexes). After 6 months and two rate hikes to $60/month for CNN, ESPN, TBS, and a half-dozen other of the bigger cable channels. I cut the cord and went with Netflix. I got a LG BD390 BlueRay with WiFi for $350 that will pay for itself in 9 months with the savings. The BD390 can wifi movies from either Netflix or my PC using Nero MediaHome 4. For roughly the same price, I could have got a playstation or xbox, but I did not want to waste even more time glued to the TV playing games...
It's a decade ago all over again, just with visual content this time instead of music.
Flashback: We get CDs that don't play (and copy) and radio broadcasts with DJs yabbering into the songs so you can't record them. Quickly, a thriving "market" in P2P sharing of music started, using the then-still-new medium internet. The, also still-new format MP3 made songs small enough to compress them into 3-5MB size, small enough that contemporary means of transport, even dialup, were fast enough to handle it in reasonable time. Users got their music without hassle and without troubles, it worked. You didn't have to deal with copy crippling that not only disabled copying but more often than not also playback, you didn't have to deal with half-assed quality, you didn't have to stay glued to the radio 24/7 to catch your tune and endure hours of inane chatter and mindless ads. It was sleek, easy, quick and people started to see it and like it, like it far better than trying to catch the song off the radio or trying to figure out how to play back the CD despite all efforts of its maker.
Fast forward to now. TV networks do their damndest to make recording of shows impossible, they want to sell you their own recorders which almost invariably suck and which don't offer the functionality you want. People start looking around and notice that TV shows consisting of half an hour entertainment are available as torrents, consist of roughly 100-150MB, small enough to be transfered by contemporary connections in reasonable times, aren't cluttered with ads every 5 minutes, aren't prone to random hicckups in the TVs bandwidth-minimizing artefact-creating compression schemes and can be played back on every box you plan to hook up to your TV set, including but not limited to any arbitrary computer able to play back the show...
While P2P has taken over the music market that is now slowly being reconquered by services like iTunes and the like, now that music makers noticed that they cannot simply force people into buying their crap by restricting it as they wish and the consumedrones should be happy they are allowed to buy anything, it's not the case with video content yet. Yes, of course the swapping and exchange of videos on P2P happens, but to a far, far lesser degree than with music. The average half-hour show consumer still watches his show on TV and buys the collection DVD once it gets available, he doesn't P2P it. Not yet at least.
It's been said here already, why have a TV? Now, of course this is /. and the average person here is anything but the average TV consumer, but is it so far fetched to assume that, if this trend continues and the restrictive nature of content crippling takes roots, that the average consumer will do what he did when it came to music in the late 90s, that he starts looking around and shopping for alternatives? Alternatives that give him the content he wants in an easy to use, transport- and transferable form that suits his needs?
We'd not have iPods today if it wasn't for the success of P2P and MP3 in the late 90s. We'd probably have some other players, maybe players that would only play some proprietary format because MP3 wouldn't have become so popular if it wasn't for the widespread use of P2P in its early days.
So maybe this is a good thing. More people annoyed means more people looking for alternatives. That in turn means that some de-facto standard will be established, probably long before any company starts trying to push into the market with their own product and a locked up format to accompany it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.