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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 ?
evilbit?
I'm assuming that your comparison of TV and cigarettes would in turn imply the comparison of internet and crack.
Sure anyone can go without TV, but NO INTERNET?!?!?! ARE YOU FREAKING CRAZY MAN!??!? I GOTTA HAVE MY INTERNET!
3 years for me, but it's not as difficult as quitting smoking. The rewards are probably as great or greater than quitting smoking. The time freed up for living is the most mind blowing thing, not to mention being able to keep up with the core science stuff and getting back to being playfully curious rather than a spoon fed couch potato.
ideopath @ play
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).
Meh... it's not that bad. I haven't been on the internet now for months, and I don't miss it one bit. :p
I'm assuming that your comparison of TV and cigarettes would in turn imply the comparison of internet and crack. Sure anyone can go without TV, but NO INTERNET?!?!?! ARE YOU FREAKING CRAZY MAN!??!? I GOTTA HAVE MY INTERNET!
I know that can seem tough too, but after awhile you don't even realize it's there. I've been free of the 'net for about 3 days now, and.... oh CRAP!
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
It's nice how you admit that checking slashdot and keeping up with news are separate things.
Wait until the kids that grew up with broadband are old enough to approach venture capitalists, to lobby congress, to go to court. Then we'll see some change.
Probably not (although I hope I'm wrong.) We're being trained to accept this bullshit as the price we have to pay to receive our entertainment. Personally, I like to keep things in an open format so I can transcode them to, say, my G1 and watch them when I want to, wherever I want to. I guess I'm one of those people that hasn't been adequately monetized yet.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Translation: they canceled my favorite show so I swore to never watch TV again.
My webcomic
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.