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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
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.
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 ----
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.
There is one advantage of broadcast media -- ability to get information to a lot of people without burning up large amounts of Internet bandwidth. It takes up a lot less bandwidth to do one 1024p HD channel on a dedicated line than streaming the same content to millions of viewers.
However, by end running around the Audio Home Recording Act with DRM, it only means technical viewers will find other sources for viewing, a market will be created for decoder boxes, or more people will end up hitting the P2P systems for content.
One compromise -- if Joe User wants to watch Fox News on their media box, let them. Advertisers benefit because Joe User will see their ads on the machine. The broadcast place benefits because advertisers may target Internet-savvy users more, thus more income from that.
Best of all worlds -- have broadcasters have a standard, well documented, streaming interface to a PC that requires nothing more than a cable, so people can use their PC as a TV or a DVR to their heart's content.
It is called ANSI/SCTE 52.
http://www.scte.org/documents/pdf/Standards/ANSI_SCTE%2052%202008.pdf
In his own mind, Booth was a patriot. Maybe thinking you are a patriot isn't always a good thing.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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
I have another suggestion: just get a Netflix membership. The cheapest level, which I have, is only like $7/month, and lets you watch all the online content you can handle. Unfortunately, it does require Windoze/Silverlight (anyone know how to run it on Linux?), but other than that, it's quite handy, and certainly much, much cheaper than your typical cable TV package.
It's pretty cool being able to call up any episode of Star Trek I want to see at the moment.
Personally, I just don't see the point in cable TV. There's so many movies I've never seen (Netflix has a large selection of foreign movies, which are really fun to watch) that I can easily spend all my entertainment time watching those, without ever going to a theater or watching live TV. The only thing worthwhile (barely) on live TV is local news, and that's free with rabbit ears. Wait, there's also some good stuff on PBS, which again is free with rabbit ears. And sometimes there's a decent show on network TV, like Lost, which again is free with rabbit ears. For other things, there's always BitTorrent.
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!
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.
I have Comcast digital cable in Atlanta. Currently, Comcast sends SD (480i) extended basic cable stations (e.g. Discovery) in ClearQAM, albeit on weird frequencies (e.g. channel 103.5 for the afore-mentioned Discovery). The set-top box is allegedly "required" not in order to do any decrypting, but rather merely to translate the channels to their "official" frequencies (e.g. channel 40 instead of 103.5). Now, what they're planning to do is to start encrypting those channels for no good reason.
There are several major problems with what Comcast is doing:
In other words, the situation that's developing now is exactly like how AT&T used to control telephone equipment 30(?) years ago: it's monopolistic, murderous to technological process, and should not be allowed!
And that brings me to my final point: I really want to do everything I can to stop and/or punish Comcast for this. Is anybody planning to sue over it, and/or do you know of a class-action I can join?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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).
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.
[big snip]
Best of all worlds -- have broadcasters have a standard, well documented, streaming interface to a PC that requires nothing more than a cable, so people can use their PC as a TV or a DVR to their heart's content.
Advertisers: "Eww, people can timeshift with that!!"
MAFIAA: "No DRM?! How will we protect helpless copyrights from dangerous pirates?!"
Broadcasters: "So if we sell a cable box/service package to John Smith and he decides to switch to [competitor], then he keeps the box and uses it with them?!"
Lobbyists^H^H^H^H Congress: "Ain't gonna happen. Not via a new law, anyway."
Mods and other speed readers, please be sure to notice the presence of the quotation marks -- these are not my opinions.
$ make available
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
How much time do you spend sifting through the crap? I watch about an hour of TV a night before bed. Stewart, Colbert, and the first half of Conan. By that time of night, I just want to veg. Trying to decide whether something is going to suck or not is way too much work for 11pm.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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?
The phrase you're looking for is "snobishness." There are a few less-harsh synonyms you could use, but it's the same general feeling of "my choice is better than yours" that folk who watch community theater over a TV broadcast of the same play have.
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?
>>>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
Hulu Stargate SG 1.
We're sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States.
Hulu Stargate Atlantis.
We're sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States.
Sigh!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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
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?: