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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.
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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.
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.
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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!
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
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.
Hey, it's me, Cable. Remember me, you lying sack of shit? You still with that Youtube skank? You owe me $300, that's $60 a month for the past 5 months, and you'd better pay up, asshole. I don't care that you say you sent me a cancellation notice! I never got the papers, so you never sent them. Pay up or your credit rating gets it.
Hey. I'm sorry, honey. I'm sorry I said those bad things. Look, I've been thinking... could we give it another try? I can offer you two months of free HBO? In HD? Come on, wasn't it good when we were together? Please. You're really important to me. I just want you back. I need you.
Fine. Fuck you then. You owe me $300 plus $60 for HBO. Cash will do nicely, if you ever want to borrow money ever again. I hope you get AIDS from Bittorrent.