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An End To Unencrypted Digital Cable TV and the HTPC
Talinom writes "AnandTech has a writeup on how ClearQAM appears to be headed for an early death. From the article — 'At this point there's no reason to believe that cable companies won't deploy Privacy Mode across their networks, so it's a matter of 'when,' not 'if' this will happen. It goes without saying that if you're currently enjoying the use of a ClearQAM tuner to receive EB tier channels, you'll want to enjoy what time you have left, and look in to other solutions for the long-haul. At this pace, it looks like cable TV and computers will soon be divorcing.'" Update: 08/27 23:59 GMT by T : "EB" here stands for "Expanded Basic (cable service)"; Wikipedia as usual has a time-sucking, digressive, fascinating explanation about the tiers of cable TV service in the US.
DVB-S cards can use smart cards to get premium (encrypted) channels as long as you have a subscription. They don't lock you out like cable does.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Exactly. Secondly can't a 56-bit DES cipher be broken quite easily these days?
you'll want to enjoy what time you have left, and look in to other solutions for the long-haul.
I highly recommend podcasts, vidcasts, and similar. I am in the process of transitioning away from all mass media and switching entirely to user generated content. I have to say, once you get over the initial withdrawal, it is better. The stuff being produced by the indies is grittier and more real.
It is somewhat lacking in the pure entertainment aspect -- the writing isn't as tight, and the production values are clearly less polished. But it makes up for that, at least for me, in the... texture? I don't know the right word -- somebody more versed in media would be able to say it better. As an added bonus, there are a ton of podcasts focused on hobbies and how-to. As a hacker, me likey a lot.
JM2C -- as one who is making the transition, I have to say -- it is not that hard to dump big media.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I told my wife years ago that I wanted to cancel extended-basic cable ("EB") but she balked at missing Stargate. So, the deal was, I'd get her any Stargate series on DVD rather than pay $60 a month for digital cable.
It turns out it was never necessary since I get EB over QAM with my analog basic cable. I'm sure they want to kill people like me off. But if it comes to pass, I simply will let it slide and buy the shows on DVD. I hate to be one of those "I don't have a TV" snobs, but I don't want to pay $60 per month, which goes up $10 every few years. And I most certainly do not want to rent any equipment.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Hauppauge's HDPVR 1212 uses component for its input and this is not encrypted.
Anybody else struck by the fact that a broadcast DRM system, used by the notoriously grasping and controlling cable cartels, is referred to as "privacy mode"?
But the key changes every 2 minutes or so. You can't watch tv if you can't break it in much less than that.
Make it too hard to view the garbage they put out these days and they will just lose more customers.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
yeah it probably won't be a technical problem for long but I'm guessing that someone will use the DMCA to try to stop it all.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Well mine was more just a question of whether it can be done as I wasn't sure. Last I heard a few years back was that someone could break it in 9 days. From what I've now found, apparently a brute force attack is still pretty slow.
At this pace, it looks like cable TV and computers will soon be divorcing.
As part of the divorce proceeding, I and my computer have been separated from cable for some time. We've been hanging out with a new mistress, Online Video. I can tell you that the divorce is only a formal proceeding and we will be much happier once it has taken place.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
You don't seem to understand the percentages, and how the big picture works.
Let me try to help: .0001% of your hardcore customers find a way around your DRM and you lose a few cents at most.. While the actual paying customers are locked in to their changes and continue to feed the beast that makes it harder to get around and buys more laws.
They really don't care if a few hardcore tech types get around it. Really they don't, since you end up viewing ads in the process anyway and STILL make them money..
In the end, they win. Hell they already have.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've got TimeWarner Cable in the Los Angeles area. As it stands I only get 3 EB channels and 2 Digital only channels in ClearQAM. And they keep moving analog EB channels to Digital only tiers and not offering them in ClearQAM either. Overall the number of channels you can get without their box has been reduced by at least 10 channels in the past 5 years.
I'm assuming this is something to do with ClearQAM from the cable box to the television/computer, because I do believe they're required to send ClearQAM signals of broadcast stations? I don't see anything over ClearQAM other than those, where I am, but we also don't have digital cable.
You can't watch live TV if you can't break it faster than that.
Unless I'm missing something, it should theoretically be possible to cache the stream and decrypt it on your own schedule. Would largely be invisible to anyone used to time-shifting the shows they watch anyways-- if I'm not planning to watch the new episode of [insert show here] until the next day after it airs, what do I care if it takes hours to decrypt?
I finally got tired of the $75/month, the cable box meltdowns every three months (Scientific Atlanta FTL), and the generally craptastic quality of over-compressed video from Brighthouse. Six months ago I told them where to shove it and never looked back. Now I get TV series on DVD from Netflix, occasionally catch a new show on Hulu, and use some good ol' rabbit ears to get my local channels (which look great in over-the-air digital, better than they ever did through the cable).
Screw cable. I'm done with paying for a raft of crap I don't need to subsidize their other businesses. And I'm certainly done with their obsessive consumer lock-in.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
These DTAs approved are only SD and are instead of CableCARD enabled boxes.
The fact is that the FCC doesn't allow operators to encrypt HD locals, which is not going to change.
So if you love SD, then I'm sad for you, but for the rest of us that have moved on to HD, there's nothing to see here, move along.
The game never started where I am. I have Charter and the only clear QAM channels they have are locals. If you want the Expanded Basic channels that have gone digital, rent a set top box.
There's not one single "cable" channel in clear QAM. Just 4:3 mirrors of all the locals and FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS in HD. That's it.
I gave up my satellite TV subscription about a year ago, and I gotta tell you guys, I don't miss it.
Sure, UFC is nice...but $10 at my local watering hole is a pittance.
I was pirating sat TV for years, but to tell the truth, it's just too much work!
So last year I transitioned to a DNS-323 with a custom BT client and scripted RSS feeds. Easy as pie. This setup, with a couple soft-modded Xbox's around the house, make for easy, cheap, and commercial-free TV on-demand.
Who needs cable TV ? There are other choices now.
I doubt it'll have much direct effect on the pirates of the world(as it looks like the gimped the hell out off the crypto to make it run on super-cheap devices, rather than using the actually fairly tricky stuff that ordinary higher-end cable boxes use); but it is still bad news.
With computer hardware, cost is overwhelmingly a function of production volume(there is a floor somewhere, of course, you can't make free stuff through infinite volume; but the difference between mass market and niche gear is considerable). If clearQAM gear is widely useful, out of the box, by nontechies and nonpirates, it'll be available in substantial quantity, from a variety of vendors, in a variety of configurations(PCI, PCIe, expresscard, usb, little network appliances, etc.). Same goes for supporting software. Larger market=lower cost per copy and/or greater developer effort per copy.
If clearQAM becomes effectively useless without h5x0r skills, hardware to suit will disappear from nonspecialist shelves soon enough, who would want the support headache? There'll still be new-old stock and chinese pirate hardware vendors and things; but it will be more expensive and not as good. If you are really unlucky, you'll even have to deal with DMCA flavored challenges that such tuners, sold outside of fully locked-down systems, no longer have any substantial non-infringing uses.
"Hauppauge's HD PVR that can redigitize the output of STBs for importing into a computer."
Widows7, sagetv, beyondtv and mythtv support HD-PVR. So either I will switch to HD-PVR, or install an antenna and pull the OTA signal. In anycase, I will not be paying compact for their crappy DVR
(right now, I use XP-MCE with HDHomerun)
I put together a Mac-Mini based HTPC using an EyeTV in February. The EB channels were broadcast in Clear QAM (I had already been able to receive them live with the QAM tuner in my TV for a couple of years). Three months later, shortly after turning off the analog feed for all EB channels, Comcast encrypted the digital EB channels. Now only the most basic of channels come over Clear QAM. Fortunately, Hulu picks up a lot of the slack. I think this move will simply erode cable market share in favor of distribution by the internet.
In fairness, the FCC requires the equivalent of the channels that you would receive over-the-air to be unencrypted (so-called "must-carry" channels). So in reality, you should expect pretty much everything other than those to be encrypted (so channels like TBS, TNT, USA, etc will be encrypted but channels like NBC, CBS, Fox will continue to be unencrypted).
It is called ANSI/SCTE 52.
http://www.scte.org/documents/pdf/Standards/ANSI_SCTE%2052%202008.pdf
All this means is that the same techniques that HTPC users currently use for satellite will need to be used for cable as well.
You clip an IR transmitter to the front of your cable-box, and it changes the channels for you. The analog out on the cable box goes into the mythbox, and the mythbox goes out to the TV.
This is a pain in the ass, but not THAT much of a pain in the ass.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I think this is great. Cable TV providers are so busy making themselves irrelevant that no one actually has to put them out of business. They will do it themselves. I got tired of the DVR that didn't record or wouldn't change channels. I got tired of being charged an extra fee for digital TV and then another extra fee for HD. I got tired of customer service that didn't care and didn't speak English. I got tired of tech support that was totally clueless and took anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 weeks to fix an outage. I got tired of cables laying on my lawn that they refused to bury. About a year ago, I called up Comcast and told them to turn it off, take their cable box/DVR and jam it. I haven't missed it once. Every single thing I want to see is either available online or over the air for free. I now have an extra $140 a month to do with as I please.
This story is about the ability to watch Expanded Basic channels with a simple digital tuner. Expanded Basic (EB) channels are the ones you get in analog channels above 20, such as TBS, TNT, ESPN, CNN, etc. Those are being moved slowly but surely to digital only, and one day your only option to watch EB channels will be through their digital cable box or a Tru2way compatible TV with a cable card (that you have to pay almost the same for per month as a box), with no options available to watch them on a HTPC. And for HD EB channels, you can just forget about them. There is no way you'll ever get any of them without paying the cable company to be able to decrypt them (the fact that for instance you can get ESPN in SD on analog, but to get ESPN in HD you have to have a box or cable card seems ridiculous to me)
Actually there is a way and it is supposed to be provided by your cable provider on request by law if you are a subscriber. Just get a tuner that takes a cable card. What's that you say, your cable provider doesn't have that? well now is the time to start screaming to the FCC. Make the Cable companies follow the existing law.
Why bother
Does that work with DirecTV? I can't seem to find info on some simple googling...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
When I read stuff like this it makes me feel reasonably glad that I live in the UK, pay a TV license and get all the channels I need on Freeview or Freesat. I've tended to find that I don't need any paid cable or Sky TV because it's generally full of adverts, full of repeats and all I watch on there is the sport.
I feel for you guys over the pond. TV seems to be dead.
I'm sure the cable company will be more than happy to provide you with a cable card if you need it. That'll just be an additional $9.95 per month rental fee for the additional outlet.
How does this effect the FCC requirement for 1394 ports to be made available?
http://www.1394ta.org/consumers/FCC_complaint.html
While I don't know how useful the 1394 port is for building home based DVRs, it's still a legal requirement (from what I understand, I'm not a lawyer) for the cable companies to provide. And you CAN complain to the FCC if they won't provide a box with a working port. And by all means, if they won't provide it, complain! The cable companies (and phone companies) really don't like people complaining to the FCC, and the FCC in my experience from days gone by where I worked for a cable company, takes complaints seriously. Assert your rights!
the end of clearQAM? bad news ladies, from now on it's always the stickier kind...
weinersmith
That's illegal in the US too. Believe it or not, the government CAN catch on.
Is this really a shock? Did people think that cable companies have any interest in user rights, hell if they could get away with just making you pay $50 to broadcast nothing but commercials they would do it in a heartbeat. People fell for the "oh look its shiny" HDMI push early on even though component was and is fully capable of 1080p. People fell for bluray even though it has much stricter content restrictions. Now we get to welcome our broadcast flag overlords. Hope everyone is happy...
On another note...Time Warner and Comcast announced plans to start trials of their TV Everywhere product which is basically an slingbox type service that will stream video on demand for a "nominal" fee. Of course some may see this as a way to get the sheep to accept bandwidth caps and show the govt they are "promoting" streaming video to cover their ass for the few brave enough to complain.
Most of us probably download most all our shows anyway, and with RSS it really doesn't take much effort to get everything you want. It'll help send a message to the cable companies, you'll save money, etc. The only catch is you're less likely to run across new shows by accident, but a little effort on the internet will give plenty of suggestions (e.g. look at number of seeds on a torrent). Cable is obsolete (sorta).
Comast at least doesn't charge for the first card (and their wording on fees for additional cards makes it sound like they are limited to charging $2.05/month/card).
http://www.comcast.com/customers/faq/FaqDetails.ashx?Id=2651
CableLABs, the guys that control cable card, refuse to allow pci/pci express cards to be sold to the public that accept cable cards. There is 1 model made by ati, but officially you can only buy it in a premade htpc from someone like Dell. The card even scans the dmi info of the bios to make sure it is an authorized system.
Also, the card only has Windows drivers.
DVB-S cards can use smart cards to get premium (encrypted) channels as long as you have a subscription. They don't lock you out like cable does.
Unfortunately for American viewers, there is no legal way to do this. Although DVB-S is an international standard and widely adopted, current laws within the US prohibit using off the shelf hardware to decrypt the video signal. Doing this is considered signal theft.
Dish Network uses Nagra 3 encryption, as do some other providers in Europe. There are no legal conditional access modules available for this crypto system, so any use of these smart cards in devices other than what the provider supplies is considered theft, as well as a violation of the DMCA.
DirectTV uses it's own proprietary system and can only be legally used with their hardware.
It really sucks paying to loose control.
Yes. You put the smart card that would normally go in the set top box into the pci express card instead.
Do you have any links about this? Everything I've read about has said this all works and is legal. I haven't seen anything to the contrary. I'm not doubting you, I just want to learn more about it.
So, someone sets up a distributed computing project that decrypts them, and broadcasts working results online, everyone grabs them and watches TV.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
I loved analog cable, because it worked. Plug it into any tuner, and you can watch, record, etc. As a result of this, they got my money, month after month, for 8 years.
Encrypted cable is the reason they don't have me as a customer anymore. If I could be assured that stuff would just work, I would sign up, plug the cable into a HDHomeRun, and that would be the end of it. Or rather, that would be the end of it, except for the money that I would be paying them every single goddamn month.
Instead of that monthly money that they choose to not collect, I'm bittorrenting over Qwest.
Brilliant business model, Comcast. It just goes to show American business ingenuity: if you really don't want customers and are willing to do what it takes to prevent yourself from collecting revenue, there's always a way. Losing money might not be easy and the the best way to lose the most money and really stick it to your damned stockholders might not be obvious, but if you persevere, it's possible to do. Encrypted cable is the best solution -- the solution -- to the problem of excess cable TV revenue. Good job, boys.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
It's called the internet. The rest I see over the air on bunny ears in crystal clarity (much better than the compressed stream from comcast). I just wait 1 hour to 1 day from original broadcast and I can get any tv show I want to watch from online. $7/mo extra to rent a box (that I can't buy like my modem) to do what my hdtv does natively, yeah good luck with that.
Cable companies are going to switch over to a card format that can be placed in any device--this is called "tru2way". You should be able to plug your cable card into your TV or even, I suppose, your computer.
I'm guessing this is a precursor, once they can put a card in an arbitrary DVR, TV or computer they have no reason to broadcast unencrypted signals.
This will also involve displaying extra applications, tools, and other "enhanced TV programs".
Until they can actually deliver with this, however, I assume they will continue to broadcast some unencrypted signals.
Classic DirecTV is not DVB compatible, although it looks like they are transitioning to DVB-S2. Also, the DirecTV smart cards are quite different than DVB CI cards.
Yep. That's exactly right. They're expensive, too, so in addition to the overpriced vendor-built and CableLab certified PC, you'll be paying an additional ~ $250 for the cable-card capable tuner. Don't forget you'll need 2 of them if you want to record one show while you watch another.
Which is why my home-built DVR only records HD from the local broadcast channels. SD still works out of the cable box, though.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"The fact is that the FCC doesn't allow operators to encrypt HD locals, which is not going to change."
Time-Warner cable operators regularly encrypt the stations that are local to their customers. If it were not allowed they would not be doing it because the FCC fines would be fairly large.
Right now, in some markets, Comcast is sending local stations 'in-the-clear' but that will change in the very near future. In some other Comcast markets, they're already encrypting the local stations.
Simply put, the FCC has very limited power of control in regards to the cable television providers. Cable providers could distribute hardcore pornography if they wanted to and the FCC could not do one thing about it, with the possible exception of issuing a Rule that requires some method of restricting access so that children can't stumble across it accidentally.
Congress has passed no law requiring cable providers to send local stations 'in-the-clear'. Such a law might actually be unconstitutional. The FCC may or may not have made a Rule about it. If they did make a Rule about it, enforcement of that Rule is obviously lax. If it were merely a Recommendation, then there is no enforcement.
Welcome to America.
Bend over, please.
Thank you.
In theory the solution for this is what is called the CableCard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD
Any device you want to use encrypted cable from needs to support this Card to decrypt the signal. As I understand it the cable company is required by law to provide these if requested. You may actually find this card in your current cable box if it is relatively new and your cable provider is already encrypting its signal.
1 - its OT here.
2 - It was designed to make people think about how relative all these labels are and how we judge people. If the south had won he'd be considered a war hero. He's no different then Washington was to the british during the war of independence. Or if you want a more modern angle, use Osama with the radical muslim. They lost, so he's a terrorist. If they won, he'd be herald as hero.
3 - you failed the test related to #2. Have a nice day.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This device doesn't need decryption, it exploits the analogue hole to record to your computer - Hauppauge HD PVR High Definition Personal Video Recorder 1212. I imagine more devices will be doing this in the long run.
CableCARD is dead. (You can tell because it was supposed to be integrated into TVs so that no set-top box would be required at all, but if you go to Best Buy or somewhere you'll find exactly zero TVs that actually have a CableCard slot.) Comcast and the other cablecos did everything in their power to sabotage it, and succeeded. Not only were there tons of "compatibility problems," but the cablecos constantly whined about how it didn't support bullshit like "On Demand." So now there's a "new" cable card standard called "Tru2Way" that's going to be available Real Soon Now (and if you believe it'll ever see the light of day, I've got a bridge to sell you...)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I canceled cable a couple of months ago because Comcast moved a bunch of basic channels to the scrambled digital lineup. Thanks to the digital tuner on my tv, I had previously received the expanded basic package with digital broadcasts and no cable box.
They offered me 6 months of discounted service when I called to cancel, but thereafter it would be $100+/month for the upgraded subscription and $14.95/month for the box to receive those previously very-very-basic cable channels. Comcast is offering free converter boxes in other markets so there may be more options for some people.
OTA digital is superb. It was a bit of a PITA to run an amplified antenna to my window for decent reception, but I'm getting almost 40 channels where OTA analog could barely pull in 2 before, so I'm feeling pretty good about it.
Hulu and various other sites are filling in the gap very nicely.
I wonder, tho, how those cable channels are dealing with the loss of viewers. I'm not going to kid myself and pretend that all of us who cancel cable because of this are more than a drop in the bucket, but there's got to be an impact from the channels disappearing from basic cable lineups. Cartoon Network, History Channel, etc. are now on a scrambled digital tier that fewer people can watch. What's their response to that? And how are advertisers reacting to the drop in viewers on those channels? 'Anybody know?
Hulu Stargate SG 1.
Hulu Stargate Atlantis.
You can also rent the Stargate DVDs and save money, unless you want to keep a copy you can watch over and over again. I discourage P2P episode downloading.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Can you provide a citation? I am aware of the requirement for a working firewire port (47 CFR 76.640(b)(4)), but not for them to provide a [anything else that accomodates cable/PC interaction].
I'd say it's a shame that corporations are doing the standard corporation thing here, but I'm not sure how making TV less accessible could possibly hurt this country in any way whatsoever. Do the ends justify the means?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
DMCA's passage (and so far, subsequent lack of repeal) shows the federal government's hostility to users (as well as the federal government's acceptance of content provider's suicide attempts). As long as there's a DMCA, you shouldn't expect the feds to be on anyone's side; their position is Fuck Everyone, we're too busy giving your money to Iraq war contractors, banks, and drafting the plans to give the rest to health insurance companies, and if that still doesn't crash the economy, we can always start another war.
Local government is the best place to regulate cable TV. If someone wants a cable TV franchise, all the easements to run the cables without having to negotiate with each property owner, etc, just make a simple condition: "no encryption. If the users can't watch the TV, then there's no point in giving special privileges for the wires. I know, you want to sell internet access, VoIP, etc. but if you're going to do it in the name of TV, then you have to supply TV. Encrypted TV isn't TV. Here, let me show you: [plug cable into QAM tuner] See? No TV."
If your local government -- you know, the government where your vote is actually statistically significant -- you know, the government where you can actually call an elected representative and talk to them and maybe meet them -- can't deal with this, then complaining to the FCC sure ain't gonna help.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Don't know, but I have Verizon FiOS and the FireWire port has NEVER worked. Always "reserved for a future update." And I think they only require SD, not HD, so it's almost useless with large screen TVs the norm these days.
I don't know, but it works for me.
I thought you only needed one m-card (which is apparently the follow on to the cable card but does multiple streams)? I'm new to this, but I thought I could take the m-card out of one of my comcast cable boxes once it was authorized and put it into another device like a TiVo? Now, I haven't tried it because I have an old TiVo and have to use the IR blaster - and there are all kinds of warnings plastered on the back of the comcast box about not removing the m-card, but it looked like it would work. I need to check into this a lot more before I get a newer TiVo box or pick up an HDTV.
The guy is somewhat confused.
The FCC mandates that if a cableco carries a channel that is broadcast over the air (OTA), then they can not encrypt their copy of it.
The waiver is for the deployment of a couple of models of ultra-simple cable boxes (which, by the way, can't tune the full-blown cablecard encrypted channels) that just happen to have this DES privacy mode. Other cablecos, like comcast have been deploying similar boxes that do not have "privacy mode." But as far as I can tell, the waiver does not permit anyone to start encrypting the copies of OTA channels.
Seems to me that the result may be the reverse of what he predicts - that non-premium channels which are currently encrypted with the full-blown cablecard encryption like the digital versions of CNN, MTV, etc may get reduced to "privacy mode" encryption so that they can be more easily sold to more customers without as big a capital investment.
Then, there is also the whole thing about exactly what privacy mode is for. Are these boxes simply just cable boxes or are they boxes that support switched video - where you only have one or two video streams coming into your home at any one time and the box is responsible for requesting what channel the head-end should send you. In that case, the "privacy" mode may be a way to keep your neighbors from seeing what you are watching - as they can do now with most on-demand shows which are transmitted totally in the clear via special semi-hidden channels that anyone can tune to if they know the channel number in use.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Although DVB-S is an international standard and widely adopted, current laws within the US prohibit using off the shelf hardware to decrypt the video signal. Doing this is considered signal theft.
Yeah, and smoking pot is also illegal, hence why absolutely nobody in the United States ever does it.......
How would they catch you engaged in "signal theft" unless you do something really stupid?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Then that someone gets directly to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison without passing go or collecting $200.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
>>>That'll just be an additional $9.95 per month rental fee
That pissed me off when Comcast did it to my TCM channel. For years I've had it "free" with my monthly service, and then suddenly they moved it to the digital tier (and without two months notice as required by law). I'm supposed to pay an extra $5/month (times three sets) to watch it. Bullshit.
This is what happens when you have a monopoly, and more importantly a government that is unwilling to regulate it. Perhaps it's time that Comcast got the treatment AT&T received in the 80s (broken-apart) and introduce choice for consumers.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The Firewire requirement only applies to HD set-top boxes, which (of course) Comcast charges even more for. So those of us (such as myself) who want to be left alone to watch analog and/or standard-definition digital TV in peace using our perfectly good [digital]-cable-ready TV without a shitty box would not only have to get a box, but get the most expensive one ($10-$15 per box, per month)! Far from being a solution, it merely adds insult to injury!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And how, exactly, are they distributing the new keys?
If the new keys are distributed encrypted with the old cipher, then my TV is delayed by exactly however long it takes to decrypt the first one -- and once I do that, I can still fastforward to the end.
If they're using a common shared key on the device, we only need to crack open one such device.
About the only way I could see this working is if each model had an individual private key and was tamper-proof -- but it seems to me that having to send so much data unicast to a single subscriber may break their network. Even then, it's for some value of "work" -- all we need is one person to either get around the tamper-proof-ness, or exploit an analog hole, and then record and upload their TV to the Internet -- then everyone gets it for free.
That, or the one inside man who can get access to the original recording before it's encrypted...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Cable companies only have to provide the 1394 port for any unencrypted channels, IE your ABC, NBC etc.
Everything else they have the legal right to encrypt.
check out the mythTV forums for more information.
(however some companies "forget" to encrypt their channels, all depends on their contract with the content owners)
In some markets the cable companies can't give away their service. My house would be one such market. I suggest you join our growing numbers and cancel your cable subscription. It's simply not worth it.
Turn off the TV and step outside. It's nice out there. Usually.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
They're still required to send the over-the-air channels unencrypted, so this doesn't make ClearQAM useless, it just means some cable users won't get free extended-tier channels.
What the cable companies are most afraid of right now is people "Cutting the Cord" (i.e., people leaving the walled garden and getting their TV purely over the Internet). This will happen whether or not privacy mode is instituted. These companies are fighting the last war, which is generally not good for your long-term survival.
I use this software with my PC and xbox 360 to get hulu on my tv: http://www.themediamall.com/playon
There's been a few glitches, but it works quite well, and only costs around 1 month of regular cable at $39.
Working, but with a twist. Time Warner (through their attorneys in a response to an FCC inquiry spurred by a complaint by me) says they can give you a functioning Firewire port as per regulation 47 CFR 76.640(b)(4). *However* your machine must have compatibility with DTCP (Digital Transmission Content Protection). In effect another DRM scheme controlled much like CableCARD. The technology must be licensed from a company with no motivation to actually sell anything, and incorporated into secure boxes to be sold to the public. Few qualified devices ever make it into the wild.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? If it prospers none dare call it treason.
How would they catch you engaged in "signal theft" unless you do something really stupid?
How do they catch Britons not paying their TV license? Drive-by eavesdropping vehicles listening for sounds in your home from television channels you're not supposed to be receiving.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The firewire ports also have encryption. The FCC will keep the OTA channels unencrypted, but everything else seems to be fair game the way things are going.
Interesting. I have only skimmed the standards required by that section of the CFR, but I am relatively sure they dictate communications unencumbered by DRM. I shall have to investigate further.
is it a troll bridge ? xD
And they wonder why people stopped watching TV? It's been more and more annoying and frustrating as time goes on. I hardly watch anything on TV any more.
some comcast systems have HD cable card fees per card + rent + outlet fee.
much more talk hear with alot of anger.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/tvcomcast
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22921287-DTA-FCC-grants-DTA-waiver-to-ComcastPace
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22854926-DTA-Comcast-is-ALL-ANALOG-after-the-DTA
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22931752-Price-Downgrading-to-expanded-basic
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22653344-Comcast-Chicago-Suburbs-Going-All-Digitail-92909
I thought you only needed one m-card (which is apparently the follow on to the cable card but does multiple streams)? I'm new to this, but I thought I could take the m-card out of one of my comcast cable boxes once it was authorized and put it into another device like a TiVo?
Yes, the m-card will handle multiple signals, and there are some TiVO boxes that will accept it. But there are no PC-based solutions that work with it yet. The ATI tuners can use them, but you still need 2 tuners. Supposedly, there will be some multi-tuner cards coming soon.
If you want to look into what's possible, the The Green Button forums has a lot of information, at least about using Windows Media Center. But if you plan to bring HD content into your PC, it's the only option, unless you only want over-the-air channels.
For me, the hybrid was the best choice. I get about 13 channels of HD from the local stations. I use the HDHomeRunner for that. Then I've got an "IR Blaster" hooked up to the cable box, and I can record/watch those channels in SD. I put all that together with less then $600 (not including the TV).
Note that FCC regulations prohibit encryption on the re-broadcasted local channels, so you'll always have clearQAM on those stations
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
That would be a little more difficult here. Not only is the US orders of magnitude larger than the UK, but I doubt Dish or DirecTV have the resources to police the entire country. Not to mention they don't know how you're getting your signal. If you put your dish in your back yard and an eavesdropping Dish Network truck drives by, how do they know what you're watching, even assuming they can hear your TV (unlikely)? Maybe you're using cable. Maybe you're using free OTA broadcast. Maybe you're using one of their competitors. No way for them to know.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Comcast in my county does it already. The only ClearQAM signals are are the HD locals, and the analog channels are gradually being sacrificed to make way for more QAM channels.
Now, EB digital is the same price as EB analog, and you get back the channels they dropped from analog (such as G4!). I get one CableCARD-equipped SD box for free, and it's connected via S-video and IR blaster to my PC. I'd do it even if I didn't have to, because capturing the s-video output of a digital box is a hell of a lot cleaner than what you get over analog RF. The non-addressable "privacy mode" DTAs that will be required to view EB channels in the future can be used the same way.
In the next county over, Comcast turned off the encryption and starting sending ALL of the basic digital channels in the clear. Complete with proper PSIP data, so channel 52 on the digital box might be QAM 82.13 but actually shows up as "52 CNN" on your ClearQAM tuner.
WTF, Comcast, why can't you do that here? Might be 'cause they have a Motorola head-end vs. the Scientific Craplanta one I'm stuck with.
Am I the only one who used my cable money to upgrade to the highest tear internet? I still pay less.
comcast Chicago land is joke and a rip off next to other comcast systems.
$8-$10 per HD box and $16-$20 per HD DVR. $6-$8 per full box? that from Canadian cable cos you can buy from them for $50 - $100 some even have rent to own as well on HD and DVR boxes.
also pay the same as City of Chicago but get less HD.
Dta free may be 1 year only then $2 /m for a $50 or less box?
Direct tv with $5/m rent for any box box 1 free is much better and a better deal then comcast Chicago land as you need sports pack (that has some non sports channels) and comcast digital classic / preferred to get the same stuff as direct tv HD DVR and digital classic / preferred costs just about the same as direct tv HD DVR with no HD or DVR in it's price.
The big black eyes for comcast are sci-fi / Syfy and speed.
need full box + classic / preferred. and speed needs sports pack + full box.
Other comcast areas STILL HAVE THEM IN ANALOG and digital stater but not hear.
WOW cable has them in analog and IN HD.
RCN has syfy in lower level digital and speed in the higher one or lower one + sports pack.
at&t u-verse has them in the U100 level.
also I WANT MY CLTV on Direct TV.
I'm sure the cable company will be more than happy to provide you with a cable card if you need it. That'll just be an additional $9.95 per month rental fee for the additional outlet.
Well, no, since they aren't allowed to charge for extra outlets in your house. They can only charge a rental fee for digital boxes and such. They are required to provide a cable card for free also.
That's not going to work. The keys they use are derived from IDs stored in both the card and the tuner. And I think they may do some sort of pseudo-randomization on the tuner ID because I seem to recall that yanking it and putting it back in my TiVo made me go through the activation process again.
That said, my Comcast guys don't care what device I put my M-Card in. I just need to call them and read off the numbers from my TiVo. And then do the same thing for the next couple days while rebooting the box several dozen times before it actually will decrypt anything.
Well.... there might be a very small number of specially equipped vehicles, but mostly, they compare a list of all the addresses in the UK with a list of license owners and send people out to look through the windows of houses that don't have a license.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They don't. They just send threatening letters to everyone who didn't pay the TV tax under the assumption that essentially everyone owns at least one TV.
9 days is a pretty old figure. It's still more than 2 minutes, but it's not very long if you're willing to buy the hardware:
http://www.copacobana.org/
tiers of cable wikipedia is living in the past.
now / becoming like this
Basic / lifeline
analog ota + psa stuff + OTA clear qam. maybe tbs and some shopping channels.
Basic (digital)
same as Basic / lifeline but need a box, dta, or clear qam tuner.
OTA sub channles
more Leased Access, Access Channels
Expanded Basic + also in digital clear qam (some systems)
analog can no longer buy in many systems.
ending by end of 2009-2010.
more networks, epsn and your RSN.
family / digital economy (hidden pack some systems) a little more then basic no epsn, no rsn, no vod.
Digital Starter some channels need a full box or cable card (some systmes)
Expanded Basic + more stuff + vod
Digital Classic need full box
some sports stuff that is also in the sports pack.
other networks.
some old analog Expanded Basic stuff that was moved to old the digital pack. (some systems)
... when you can just get a tuner card that can pick up digital OTA channels. The picture is usually better than cable, not necessarily as good as satellite, and there are plenty of sub-channels to show crappy movies and weather all day that you won't notice cable is gone. And its free. And unencrypted. With no DRM. Just like the radio. You'll just have to deal with not being able to watch "Project Runway" now that it's on Lifetime.
Your smart card has a unique key, and the per-channel decryption keys sent to your device are encrypted against that key. If you could duplicate that key you could decrypt the per-channel keys on any device, though you'd still need to have a valid subscription for the original card; you could share a subscription, but not avoid the bill altogether. But it's not trivial to to pull private keys out of the smart card -- it can usually be done, but it's not easy -- that's why they use the smart card in the first place.
The per-channel authorization keys expire after some days (I'm thinking 14 days, but it's been a while since I checked); if you leave your receiver disconnected for that long it cannot tune again until it is re-authorized. There may be some more rapidly changing key in place for actual media streams, but it would have to be something you can decrypt with the multi-day authorization key -- disconnecting your receiver for a few minutes/hours does not prevent you from tuning when reconnected.
In short, it's not a simple key shared among all devices, nor is it a system where cracking a single key grants you access to all future keys; it's probably feasible to crack, but not cheap and easy, and therefore it's indifferent from impossible unless the data itself is very valuable.
There are hardware hacks that will output the decrypted but still compressed video stream from DirecTV and DishNetwork systems via FireWire, at least for their MPEG-2 streams. Last time I checked their newer streams were still unavailable, but things could have changed since then.
Would it do any good filing a complaint with the FCC about Comcast NOT letting us BUY our DTA boxes? Yeah, yeah, I know. Only at the 100 month mark they begin "profitting" off of us renting them. I hear they're $200, so $1.99/month, enough said.
As someone who used to work as a TSR (Tech Support Rep) for Time Warner, I can tell you that your incorrect. Those CableCards were in fact one-way (passive). So being able to access channels that relied on switched-video technology, On Demand, or anything that required feedback of information back to headend would never work. I can't recall how many times I've been on phone with both frustrated customers and on-site installer techs trying to troubleshoot problems. Some issues could be resolved by "re-paring" the unique TV and cable card codes again, but most of the time it was the TV's fault. Either the QAM tuner in the set was crap, or the TV's logic board needed a firmware update. Any other issues that remained were traced to a weak signal or ingress on the line.
Basically, Comcast and Co did *not* sabotage the cable card. It truly failed because its implementation from the very start was just that BAD! While its true the cable card was just as expensive as having a nice Scientific Atlanta box, you at least got more channels and interactive programming (like on-demand) with that box. The theory was that they could make up for the cost over-all from the extra packages you might want to add-on later and on-demand movie rental fees. But over all, supporting the cable card was such a nightmare that it drove up the support costs for both TSRs and field techs. Naturally, they rose the rates on the cards, or just phased them out. Seriously, the cards were crap.
Life is not for the lazy.
Where are you going to get your pirated material if nobody is able to rip it anymore?
I have to disagree with cable card integrated TV availability. i was fortunate enough to purchase one of the early cable card integrated TV (Sony) and more recently, Samsung LCD/TV display. Both works great with EB tiers and happy without "on demand" and other crappy and expensive leased cable box. Just checkout the Google product page for models with CableCard slots.
http://www.google.com/products?q=TV+digital+cablecard
There are plenty to choose from.
Customer to Cable Co:
"Im done with you ripping me off and screwing me over!I'm cancelling my service!"
Cable Rep:
"Will that be all sir?"
Customer:
"Would you be a dear and sign me up for your cable internet connection?"
In Japan all TVs and other tuners have cards. They're free, though.
Protip: When giving your brother in law a 12 pack to install an antenna on the roof, give him the beer AFTER the install, not before.
With that in mind, it's interesting to note that Comcast moved one of my local PBS stations to the scrambled digital tier from the basic lineup. I suspect that Comcast got away with it because the broadcaster's business offices are (a mile away) just a nudge over the state line and they broadcast to more than one state. The circumstances may be rare, but the result is that Comcast felt free to make them part of a premium subscription. I think the intention is to exploit every legal loophole and take every opportunity to charge premium prices for any and all content. Even local broadcasts.
Considering the FCC requires the Cable companies own equipment to use cablecards now. I'm not sure what your getting on about. CableCARD is the entire reason TivoHD works.
Not only that, I am still analog on TV scene. Comcast is removing channels that are NTSC, to digital encrypted, but still calling it EB. Blaming the station for change. We just lost MSNBC.
Top it off, they are still showing in the NTSC listing that MSNBC is there at channel 81. But it is now digital and encrypted.
To me that is false advertising.
I have legal access to cable, but somehow haven't bothered to get around to installing a tuner into my mythtv box.
I find bittorrent much more convenient for everything except live tv.
expandfairuse.org
> Is anybody planning to sue over it, and/or do you know of a class-action I can join?
IIRC, in the US it's called FCC.
They should be planning to sue. It's their duty.
but mostly, they compare a list of all the addresses in the UK with a list of license owners and send people out to look through the windows of houses that don't have a license.
You guys really need to do something about your Government. It's pretty sad that the country that gave us Americans most of the freedoms and traditions that we enjoy has stooped so low as to monitor it's citizens to make sure they aren't operating an illegal television.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They are not required to provide cable cards for free. Customers typically get 1 cable card free instead of the first cable box, but AFAIK, even that isn't required. They definitely can/do charge for extra ones too.
So, someone sets up a distributed computing project that decrypts them, and broadcasts working results online, everyone grabs them and watches TV.
I think you're on to something here. What would we call this peer-to-peer cyclone of swirling bytes, though?
Not really, I use DirecTV, and my MCE setup uses an IR blaster to change the channels on the box. It's not the most reliable way, but I'm sure you can do it with cable too.
First encryption is mandated by the content carrier deals signed by cable companies with the content providers. Remember, the cable company doesn't own the content, they only purchase the rights to broadcast it.
Encryption is pushed on the cable companies to protect content by the content providers. The substantial cost of the content licensing agreement, and all the encryption hardware required to cipher and broadcast content comprise a good chunk of your monthly cable bill.
Second, the Cable Card is a result of the consumer electronics providers whining to the FCC about how the cable companies have encrypted their networks to protect the content. They can't play on the now proprietary encryption scheme networks and sell more TVs so they pressure the FCC, who in turn "looks out" for consumers by mandating "separable security".
The cable industry response is the Cable Card which is a standards based device any CE vendor can support to decipher content. Again costing the cable company millions to develop (vis a vis CableLabs) and deploy, and again the cost is passed to consumers. But by God your Tivo works now so at least we don't have to put up with a crappy set top box. Too bad everyone doesn't own a Tivo so we can all enjoy what we pay for.
Third Cable Labs has nothing to do with the restrictions on PCs. It is again the content providers - they refuse to allow their content to be streamed on an open bus (PCI/PCI Express/USB) that may be easily sniffed or otherwise compromised with their content in the clear.
Now I know every Slash Dotter on the planet is all about open source, Linux, and free love, but here is one case where Microsoft was actually able to do something the open source community can't. At least in my humble opinion.
Microsoft convinced the content providers that Windows Vista security could protect their content (via Win DRM, the draconian premade PC, dmi and BIOS scans, etc) and earned the exclusive rights to support the PC version of a Cable Card tuner (OCUR). I don't believe for a minute this is due to Microsoft's technical superiority in the security space. Rather a substantial amount of under the table money was forked out to secure rights. So while free love is cool and all, monopoly level income has it's advantages.
So I come back to the point which is don't blame the cable companies, Cable Labs, or cable cards. The root of the issue lies with the content providers. If the content guys could pull their heads out of their asses and figure out how to protect their content for reasonable cost, or otherwise establish a sustainable business model so they didn't have to protect it, we could all quit paying the price tag to keep their ridiculous profit margins safe.
How do they catch Britons not paying their TV license? Drive-by eavesdropping vehicles listening for sounds in your home from television channels you're not supposed to be receiving.
Errr, no. Utterly, utterly wrong. What they *used to do* was have a van with a bloody great loop aerial that looked like a marine radar. This could detect the massive interference caused by CRT scan coils. Latterly they could detect the local oscillator in the tuner. Now, with digital TV and LCD flat screens that's pretty much impossible to detect (although plasma TVs chuck out enough RF to detect at over a mile) they just rely on having a list of people who don't have a TV licence who they then send nasty letters to. The solution to this is to send a nasty letter back.
Man, I wish slashdot had a "-1 Just Plain Wrong" moderation.
Found an easy way around all this: Don't pay for cable. You're really not missing much but adverts anyways. If no one provides the service the way you want it, then do without the service, it's the only way to make em change.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
Doing this is considered signal theft.
This world is so absurd. I'm sorry, but if YOUR signal hits MY antenna, it's now my signal too. If your throw your ball into my yard, you better believe I'll keep it if I so desire, as you were the one who intentionally put it in my possession, so It must be ok. Encryption is irrelevant, if I can figure out how to read it, tough shit.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
It's pretty sad that the country that gave us Americans most of the freedoms and traditions that we enjoy has stooped so low as to monitor it's citizens to make sure they aren't operating an illegal television.
Heh, so you don't have the DMCA? Isn't one of the problems described here that it's illegal - Federal-Pound-You-In-The-Ass-Prison illegal - to use a non-approved TV receiver in the US?
I've got a newsflash for you: those are all obsolete models leftover from 2005 or so.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What I'm "getting on about" is that cableco-owned set-top boxes and TivoHDs are about the only devices that have CableCARDS. TVs -- new ones, the kind you'd find in normal retailers like Best Buy or Sears -- don't have them. TVs did have them, briefly (in models released circa 2005), but manufacturers subsequently quit putting them in because, as I said, the standard is dead.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That's funny: you tell me I'm incorrect, then agree with me in great detail! For example, read my quote:
And your quote:
You see the similarity there? And my other quote:
And your corresponding quote:
I'd say my quote pretty much summarizes yours...
So anyway, thank you for taking the time to re-iterate my argument; it's nice to have someone from the industry validating what I said.
Of course, there is one tiny nuance to the issue you missed, though:
Have you ever asked yourself why the implementation was bad? I'll tell you why: because the people implementing it wanted it to be bad! And who implemented it, you may ask? Why, CableLabs of course, which is -- wait for it -- OWNED BY THE CABLECOS!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And introducing encryption is nothing more or less than a scheme to convert those pesky free-by-law extra outlets into fee-paying set-top box rentals. Greedy fuckers!
So what? That's completely useless and irrelevant because the only current devices that support cable cards are TiVos and the cableco's set top boxes themselves!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That works because they have a monopoly. You can't watch ANY TV channels without having to pay the license. They can simply check who is not paying, and come'on, everybody has a TV... In the US, there's no license, and even when the cable company has a monopoly on the cable, there's still satellite and terrestrial. So where in Britain the 10% who are not paying are likely to be viewing without paying, the 60% in the US who are not paying company1 could be paying company2, or watching terrestrial free to air channels.
So what? That's completely useless and irrelevant because the only current devices that support cable cards are TiVos and the cableco's set top boxes themselves!
There are many TVs on the market that have cable card slots built in. I have no problem with a Tivo because I can buy one, and own it outright, and take it with me whenever I move and not have to rent a box.
No, they just have a database of people without a tv licence, and then they send threatening letters and occasionally turn up to do random inspections.
If they find any equipment capable of receiving a tv signal in your house they will bust you for it, they don't have to catch you in the act of using it.
Also, anyone who sells tv receiving equipment in the uk is required to hand over the names and addresses of anyone who buys it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The DCMA sucks but the last time I checked the US Government wasn't looking at lists of citizens and sending out people to make sure that they aren't using a "non-approved" TV receiver.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Seriously, Mr. FCC why do you allow this?
That pissed me off when Comcast did it to my TCM channel. For years I've had it "free" with my monthly service, and then suddenly they moved it to the digital tier (and without two months notice as required by law). I'm supposed to pay an extra $5/month (times three sets) to watch it. Bullshit.
They pulled that shit with Cartoon Network down where I am... scumbags...
I miss The Venture Bros, but I ain't paying those fucks any more.
come'on, everybody has a TV...
BZZZT - WRONG
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
1998 called. It wants it's FUD back.
The problem with Linux is a question of whether or not the device is supported.
Beyond that "plug it in and it works" is generally the "driver install" method.
Infact, the official Windows drivers & utilities for the Hauppauge 1212 have given
me a renewed appreciation for community built drivers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Cablecards are already obsolete in some places. The fact that the slots
are built into the TVs and the Tivos really don't help that much. By
creating a complicated and incomplete standard, the industry has ensured
that most of the TVs out there are improperly equipped.
The situation is actually worse than if you needed a proper STB and that
device spat out a conventional sort of unecrypted cable signal on channel
3 or 4.
The FCC handed the cable providers a newly regenerated monopoly on a silver
platter.
This defenders of the status quo whine about a single blessed hardware
vendor rather than the sea of independent manufacturers that existed
during the heyday of the VCR.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
O RLY? Fine then; I challenge you to find one listed for sale at the website of a major national retailer (e.g. Fry's, Best Buy, Sears, etc.), and one which is a new model (as opposed to a discontinued or refurbished one).
No, seriously -- please do find one, because I've looked and looked and haven't been able to! And bonus points if you can find one at Sears, in the $1200-$1400 range (as I've actually got a warranty replacement credit that I need to use to buy a new TV...)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
NOT TRUE!!!
I spent a whole weekend trying to get my wireless card working in Ubuntu. I finally gave up and went the hackint0sh route. (ironically, that was actually easier...)
Desire is not an occupation.
Quite true - the industry is certainly making me reconsider cable completely. With OTA HD (now that I have a suitable tuner in MythTV) and Hulu-type sites (streamed to the PS3 via Playon) I wonder if I can sever the cable-cord completely... oooh that would be nice. What's more, I get better picture quality that way - Comcast has been delivering poor picture to me for the past many years, and continues to blow me off with support/service. I hate Comcast...
Agreed. OTA HD is less compressed and has better image quality in most cases, for the major network channels anyway, and most of the rest of what I would watch can be found online somewhere. An antenna + an internet connection has been working great for me.
abandon TV. I assume you all can stream video over your network to whatever pc is running media on your display/projector.
So many solutions for organizing your "TV" media these days. -or pick up another book.. no commercials there.. propaganda only if u choose..
Kill your TV
That may be, but now many cablecos are dropping OTA local channels on their streams altogether. I have to use an antenna to get mine. They want you to pay and pay some more, so anything that has the word "free" in it is anathema to them.
Northwestern PA, how I hate thee and thy shitty single providers.
Only good news I've heard recently is that several companies applied for and were granted some of that broadband expansion money the Fed is offering. Two of the six companies have already started surveying for fiber-optic rollout.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
In the old days, the cable-cos would monitor for "signal leakage" which helps to indicate approximately how many cable tuners are on that particular line. (See http://articles.latimes.com/1992-10-06/business/fi-524_1_cable-operators ). So, basically, the cable tech visits the line into your house, and can "see" how many devices are connected. These days, this isn't enough information, but I think they can even detect how much "load" is on a particular "band" of the spectrum, and then determine what channels you're tuned to? Seems possible, from an electrical standpoint... but then again, I'm a Mech-E... so I could be full of crap.
But if the decryption devices on the network are communicating to get updated, you could simply crack that process, and get the keys delivered to you, couldn't you? Then you don't need to crack each individual key every time... just the one for the update-process?
The big wildcard here is broadcast.
For a lot of people, cable just became redundant when it comes to accessing
their local broadcast channels. Those local broadcast channels show a lot of
the same sort of crap you can get on cable. Cable customers might start to
notice that they don't need cable as a basic transport medium anymore.
They might also notice the quality difference as ALL cable providers degrade
signals.
A PVR makes it very easy to get a feel for what channels provide you useful
content and which ones don't.
Plus, this whole shenangigan suddenly gives a usability and accessability
edge to broadcast TV. This used to work in favor of cable TV. Now I think
they are in their own reality distortion field and don't realize the
negative potential here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
When we made our latest move, we did not order cable for the new house. It was tough but now we are very glad to have done so. OTA ATSC we get about 15 channels here in Dayton. With commercial skip via our HTPC (Vista WITHOUT the "TV Pack") we don't waste as much of our time watching what we do choose to watch. We also have Zinc (www.zeevee.com) integrated into the Vista Media Center menu. This gives us couch-surfable Internet television including Hulu and Youtube - also with reduced or zero commercial interruption. Also has an interface to Amazon and Netflix, which are more than adequate replacements for the cable company's "On Demand" feature. All of this in sparkling HD quality. And then there is justin.tv, which though lower quality is our "movie channel". We see absolutely no reason to go back to spending $100 / mo just for entertainment. We do spend some of that now on entertainment outside of the house: movies are easier to justify, as well as evenings out with friends.
This is not a self-referential sig.
While I agree with the sentiments of your post, I do believe that your use of the word
theft
is not compatible with its actual definition.
So I come back to the point which is don't blame the cable companies, Cable Labs, or cable cards. The root of the issue lies with the content providers. If the content guys could pull their heads out of their asses and figure out how to protect their content for reasonable cost, or otherwise establish a sustainable business model so they didn't have to protect it, we could all quit paying the price tag to keep their ridiculous profit margins safe.
This is why I never feel one iota of remorse when I download any TV content from Bittorrent. I have a DVR, if you stop me from recording, I will download your content from bittorrent. If my cable TV becomes worthless to me because everything is encrypted, I'll just dump cable, upgrade my telephone company provided high speed connection and watch everything over hulu. It would actually cost less than keeping cable....
Obviously that isn't the solution for you. Cable companies have stopped providing the service that is right for you? Well, that is completely within their right, just as it is completely within your right to complain pointlessly or just cancel your account and join the ranks of hundreds of /. users who incessantly inundate their friends, coworkers, and anyone within earshot with anecdotes of how meaningful their lives are now that they don't have cable.
It still seems bizarre to me that you have to pay a yearly fee to even watch over-the-air broadcasts in the UK. People in the U.S. complain when MS asks them to pay $45 a year for Xbox Live. I can't imagine the uproar that would follow here if you asked people to pay $65 a year just to watch TV with a lousy rabbit-ear antenna. I guess it might be worth that to lose the advertisements, but that's only on the BBC channels, not all the others.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A TivoHD with cablecard most certainly *doesn't* work if your cableco uses Switched Digital Video (SDV). The last time I tried out Tivo, I found that out the hard way (when a bunch of my HD channels disappeared).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's not that the government is unwilling to regulate it. It's that government grants them the monopoly. Your local government prohibits other companies from competing with the "authorized" cable franchisee. Get rid of this and allow companies to compete and at least you'll have an option to switch when one of them does something stupid.
Plus, we can use any TV receiver we want to receive over-the-air broadcast programming with no direct* out-of-pocket expenses at all except for buying the set in the first place. This entire discussion only involves receiving signals from private, closed transmission systems (i.e., cable and/or satellite).
* "Direct" being a weasel word so we don't digress into a "but you pay for the ads when you buy the advertised stuff" conversation.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Because the people it bothers are more likely to complain on Slashdot than to the FCC and their elected representatives, whereas the people who prefer this arrangement act directly, clearly, and forcefully in the political arena to protect their preferences.
In other words... IT WASN'T SUPPORTED.
I have another little "exercise" for you.
Buy yourself a Hauppauge 1212 or a Streamzap remote and try to use it on your "Hackintosh".
You can post your results after the weekend.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
While I haven't read every cable TV franchise in the USA, the portion I bolded is probably wrong in most cases. Every franchise agreement I have read specifies that it is "non-exclusive"; i.e., any other qualified operator who comes into your town and who wants to set up a system should be able to get a franchise from the town. The issue is that, with a very few exceptions, the population density in a given area isn't great enough to make it profitable to run side-by-side systems, so the first operator in winds up being the only one. The only places I have heard of which had multiple systems available were a section of Manhattan Island (i.e., central New York City) and some places where people were so fed up with their service that a municipal system was set up to compete (which sidesteps the profitability argument). Note: IANAL, but I have served on a municipal Cable TV committee.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Plus IIRC it only allows you to store in an encrypted format and enforces something broadcast flag-like.
Yeah, I'm sure the content companies _forced_ Comcast to get a waiver from the FCC. And they're the ones forcing Comcast to drop unencrypted analog service. Riiiight
I'm planning on doing the same with OTA upstairs and OTA + computer downstairs. I barely get FOX (static might be preferable) though when balancing a standard antenna on the door of our closet upstairs, so there is no hope in hell to get anything downstairs(brick apartment building). Any suggestions on a good wall-mountable amplified antenna? Also, would 1 amplified antenna with a splitter and a cable running downstairs cut it, or would I need 2 amplified antennas? I've already got a drop from upstairs to downstairs, as that is how Comcast had run the cable previously.
Doing so would bring me from Cable Internet + TV (no landline phone) at around $130 down to DSL + OTA TV + landline phone at $65 a month. Thats $780 a year, screw Comcast.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
Whatever happened to hooking up your standard Digital cable box to your computer via composite (or even coax) and using an IR Blaster or serial cable to set the channel on the box? Not the perfect solution, but would suffice for most people.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
My favorite theory is that ATSC stations have so much bandwidth and so little content, that its only time before small channel networks start coming to NBC, ABC, CBS and the likes to bring content over the air nationally.
Add to that a mass exodus from cable, and perhaps we will see more of this sooner
yeah, when I moved I thought about getting cable. They wanted $60 per month, plus $35 setup fee. I asked if it was alright if I did my own "setup", since nothing in the house needed to be touched, and the cable in the box outside (which wasn't locked or secured in any fashion, and which the coverhad happened to fall off in a recent storm) just needed to be connected to the other. They said "no". The best they could do is give me a 3-month intro price if I signed a contract. I didn't mean I needed to be the one to screw it in, I just didn't want to get screwed with a setup fee. I am not going to pay anyone for the privilege to be entered into their billing system. At that point cable and the computer did divorce each other, and TWC was the one that lost out. I actually like it better. Between Hulu, the network websites, and colbertnation.com, I have everything I care to watch (plus more!) and with very limited commercials. (Did I mention free as well?) All TWC would have needed to do was drop the setup fee and I would have been too lazy to seek alternatives.
Doesn't change the fact that Brits need to give their nanny state its comeuppance. You're giving ours ideas and vice versa.
The more restrictive they make the content, the more people will find alternate means of getting it (Hulu, BitTorrent). In the extreme case, someone could crack the digital cable encryption scheme.
the ads (even on pay tv) drove me away. they ruin your brain, they insult you and it builds up over the years.
ENOUGH!
I dropped my sat-tv about 6 months ago when my tivo (actual tivo from 7 yrs ago) died. took all my very old stored content with it, too ;(
I called to cancel. got the retentions dept (lol). was on the phone for easily a half hour telling them that, until they are myth-tv friendly (really; and not via analog-hole junk) I will not be paying for tv service or using broadcast/cable/sat tv. netflix does all I need and I can strip the drm and commercials very very well. the image quality is also better (when upscaled) and is quite hassle free.
really, the commercials are incredibly insulting and demeaning. my life is measurably better for cancelling out, completely, from the 'tv system'.
I'm spending my time *interacting* on the net (duh) and that's orders of magnitude more stimulating than passively sitting there watching some guy in a rowboat inside toilet bowl hawking some product ;)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Strange, my 8VSB cards don't have any trouble with encryption and I don't have to pay an exorbitant monthly fee. :)
(bunny-ears for those unfamiliar with the acronym).
Regarding the cable box cablecard:
It *might* work. And I repeat "might", depending on how poorly your local CO operates their system. Since there is supposed to be proper host/card pairing for Cablecards, moving an authorized card to another device should NOT work.
And from reports elsewhere, the Cablecards that are in the boxes the cable companies are distributing are pre-paired and authorized when they're taken into cable company inventory. There appears to be no way to re-pair the cards (because the cable company doesn't actually want you to rip apart their cable box for the Cablecard).
I don't think an interior wall-mount is going to cut it. I not only had to place the antenna in front of a window, but also had to play with the spires quite a bit to get all of my local channels in. For awhile, I actually had it stuck to the window with double-sided tape, but condensation made that iffy and I found a creative way to prop it.
I use a Phlips SDV2740 amplified antenna. There may be better ones out there, but this was the one with the widest spectrum that I could find in local stores.
It's wired via 50-feet of coax to my tv, where it's split so that both my tv and the digital tuner for my PVR can use it.
Whatever happened to hooking up your standard Digital cable box to your computer via composite (or even coax) and using an IR Blaster or serial cable to set the channel on the box? Not the perfect solution, but would suffice for most people.
Well, sure, that still works, and probably always will. In fact, I do that in my own setup, although it's more of a hybrid (check out my other post about this) in that I get some channels in HD, but most are in SD out of the cable box's SVideo port.
I think the issue is that most people would prefer HD when it's available, and there are a lot of channels being broadcast in HD these days.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The only problem is that you miss some programming. I love several shows on USA Network and the Discovery Channel. My kids love shown on Nickelodeon. An antenna can't get you those channels.
One reason that I have ALWAYS preferred cable over satellite is that you do not need a set-top box for cable. Since that advantage is going away, there is no reason NOT to go to satellite. Now, cable can say good-bye to its last advantage over satellite.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
A few notes on that. First of all we (U.S. citizens) do pay a yearly fee for ota television, it is just not named that, and is completely mandatory for all residents even if they don't have TV's. It is just one of the many components of income tax. The money is invested in public television, just like in the UK.
Now the differences are that we don't spend as much on public television, and as a result, the US has nothing that approaches the BBC in quality.
The UK could in theory switch to such a system, but they already have the infrastructure in place for the current, more fair system (If you have no TV, you don't pay the license). The system also makes it harder to neglect the funding of the public television system, when trying to balance the budget, since the money is not pooled in with other taxes, but instead goes directly to its intended purpose.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
See, you say that as though it was a statement of fact. Yet, you have no proof to back up your assertion. The burden of proof lies with you.
I can't tell you one way or another from a factual standpoint. However, my experience and employment with Time Warner doesn't back up your assertion as factual. That was really what I was trying to convey.
Life is not for the lazy.
If you could duplicate that key you could decrypt the per-channel keys on any device, though you'd still need to have a valid subscription for the original card; you could share a subscription, but not avoid the bill altogether.
Not a problem.
And of course, there's still the Pirate Bay problem -- it only takes one person who's willing to pay the bill and record a given show.
But it's not trivial to to pull private keys out of the smart card
Would it be possible, then, to instead create a device which talks to the smart card?
it's probably feasible to crack, but not cheap and easy,
Granted. Most things aren't.
and therefore it's indifferent from impossible
Unless cracking it once can be replicated.
Anyway, thanks. That was informative -- lots of things I didn't know at all.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I cancelled my Directv service a few months ago, too. Looks like a lot of other people have: http://www.tvpredictions.com/tivo082709.htm ... 139,000 last quarter. At $70 a pop, that's almost $10M. I, too, and using Hulu, Netflix and torrents to replace the incredible over-priced services that Directv was offering. I didn't even mention they swapped my broken TiVo box for a really crappy DVR. I replaced the old rig with a Mac Mini running Plex, and I love it (though it isn't quite as nice as the old TiVo experience... a lot more manual steps, for torrents).
Big deal.
Currently, my cable company only sends terrestrial broadcast channels as ClearQAM. I get everything else through Hulu or the show's web site.
No, I will not work for your startup
Your experience as a technical support representative contains no insight into the decisions that may have been made in the executive suite. It stands to reason that if they decided at a strategic level to sabotage CableCard with a crappy implementation, they still would want people at your level with customer contact to do whatever was in your power to avoid alienating the cable customer (while at the same time hamstringing your efforts). It's called plausible deniability. Clearly the cable companies realize they still have some competition like the sat and telco providers and can't go completely batshit crazy like the RIAA members have.
So, does this mean that soon any TV plugged directly into the coax cable won't work?
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Meh, HD just eats up hard disk space. There's very few shows that get anything out of HD. Even high action shows like Heroes get very little from adding HD. The only place where HD actually matters is movies, and most of my movies come in disc or on demand, so it doesn't really make a difference as far as a PVR is concerned.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The idiot that wrote the article at Anandtech is not "somewhat confused", he is flat out wrong on the fundamental facts of what he based his conclusions on.
The acronym DTA does not stand for "Digital Transport Adapter", it stands for "Digital Tuning Adapter".
Furthermore, DTAs are not "little more than a basic QAM tuner attached to an RF modulator"; they are, in fact, two-way DOCSIS devices designed to not for the purpose of decoding an encrypted channel but rather for the purpose of allowing un-watched channels to give back space to either other channels or your Internet connection (Switched Digital Video (SDV)). http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=357703.
As someone who actually has a CableCard-equipped TV (bedroom wall) and a CableCard-equipped DVR (TiVo HD), I am more than a little unhappy at the introduction of SDV (not least because it is going to add yet another delay to channel changing above and beyond what's already experienced when tuning ClearQAM channels) so I am not defending the cable industry here but it's astounding how fundamentally wrong on basic technical facts the Anandtech article is (6 or 7 years ago they used to be a solid tech-y folks, what happened?)
I think you're on to something here. What would we call this peer-to-peer cyclone of swirling bytes, though?
ByteTsunami is catchy.
Thank you for your opinion , but you haven't said anything factual. To me, that's important in this discussion.
Life is not for the lazy.
They don't seem to be changing...
In your opinion, perhaps.
You know, I try to leave the door open for benefit of the doubt. Yes, I understand Comcast believes it to be in their best interest to lock down content and ensure that they control as much of the signal chain as possible. Yes, they're probably under some pressure from content creators to ensure as much encryption as possible is used.
What I really don't understand is why they don't get that the ubiquity of equipment I can use to tune into their programming, and specifically, the ability to run that signal into my computer for my system to record the programs I want to watch is A) *increasing* not decreasing the amount of Comcast / content creators' content I'm enjoying, and B) basically the only good reason I can think of to maintain Comcast's service.
If they break my setup and insist I get one of their boxes for each TV (or PC) I want to run the A/V signal into, Comcast loses its single compelling, discriminator. IOW, for me, by making themselves as locked down as everyone else, they effectively *increase* the number of players in my marketplace, and at that point, I'll almost certainly choose a different provider as a result, or at the very least, kill my TV "service" altogether. Either way, net loss to Comcast.
My city went one step further and built a FTTH network, offering voice, data and cable tv service. They launched shortly after Comcast bought out adelphia.. so I actually have real competition. Which is odd, because comcast seems to only be doing the usual tricks and pricing, even though the service my city operated company is much better and cheaper.
See, you say that as though it was a statement of fact. Yet, you have no proof to back up your assertion. The burden of proof lies with you.
Um, no, it doesn't. I've dealt with Comcast. I have no doubt in my mind they purposefully made the implementation bad. Why? Well, if they made it good, in the end it would cost them money.. no more charging for STB rentals, which get more expensive as you want more features... like a DVR.
Remember, this is a company that inspired an old woman to try and smash up one of their of their offices with a hammer, while other customers applauded.
Comcast and all its employees can burn in hell, and not too soon.