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Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Flagged Channels For XBMC PVR?
AlphaWolf_HK writes "I own an HDHomeRun Prime tuner, and unfortunately I live in an area where the cable provider (Cox) blanket flags all channels to be copy restricted. I'm tired of using Windows Media Center due to bugs and other problems, but since the channels are flagged it is the only option. Satellite is of course not an option at all (no cablecard or similar standard.) I've already begun moving most of my content watching to XBMC in the form of using sickbeard and couchpotato, both of which do an amazing job even with torrents now that Usenet has been getting hit pretty hard. To match this, I've already dropped my cable tier to the lowest possible for some basic digital channels that people in my household still watch and aren't available over torrents. But ideally I'd like to cut the cord completely as the service is otherwise useless. Are there any options for obtaining this content without physically moving to Comcast territory where they don't do this? Or perhaps any workarounds for the CCI flag? Ideally, anything that allows XBMC with digital content and no transcoding."
Write to your congress critter, whine online, nothing will happen. Cancel the service, you can live without cable-TV.
What about using an antenna? I cut cable about 7 years ago - everything comes in on Mythbuntu via an HDHR hooked up to a small roof-mounted antenna. We get about 30 channels OTA with no excess compression and no copy protection. Everything else comes in over the net (Netflix and "other").
You don't say what metro area you are in or whether you are living in an antenna-friendly building but you've already got 90% of the gear you need. Lots of info on the web about how to make the jump. You may have already investigated OTA, but if not you definitely should.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Thanks for that post. What would we do without you?
Use an HD PVR with the component outputs of your cable box - no cable card so you have to pay the monthly cable box rental fee. This will allow you to record anything that the cable box can see.
http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html
I haven't used XBMC but this works very well with MythTV and Verizon FIOS.
First world problems...
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
a) Cancel cable service. Retain or sign up for broadband.
b) Erect old fashion antenna. (We get 13 digital channels off the antenna, although many of them are crap.
c) Buy roku box. ($99 Amazon), less than the cost of 1 month of cable.
d) Subscribe to Netflix streaming, and/or Hulu +, Amazon streaming (Any combination still a tiny fraction of the cost of cable/satellite)
e) Whatever you can't get via above, torrent, or maybe read a book, go walk the dog, try to remember what your kids look like.
f) When all else fails, remember, It's Only TV. It's quite a ways down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Can someone moderate this idiot as off topic flamebait?
If you personally dislike TV, that's your business. Other people like TV. We like shows like "How they make that".
You are like an idiot that hears how the 1997 NY city phone book was the most popular book ever published, reads it, then complains that all books are stupid.
Stop telling other people what to enjoy, and live your own life.
Wrong.
The entire post is can be summurized as:
I was paying for it and they won't let me fucking watch it on my equipment so now I just steal it since apparently pirates can do a better job of getting me what I want to watch FOR FREE than Comcast can manage to pull of while consume copious amounts of my money for the disservice.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
> There are legitimate gripes about access, copy protection, and copyright issues... but this doesn't come close to any of them.
Sure it does and you're a big fat jackass.
This is about some guy wanting to use the service he's paid for in the way he wants to use it. The service provider will let him use Windows but this guy doesn't want to do that because he finds that it sucks. He can't use alternatives and is stuck using one monopoly product to deal with another.
This whole "we need to encrypt everything" is nonsense. As soon as you paid for it, you should be able to use it however you like.
The path between the cable box and the TV should be all in the clear.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Been over-the-air for years.
We get pristine 1080i network-supplied digital picture for free, no broadcast flag, a fair number of local channels, and Netflix, Amazon and Sony Playstation Store supply the rest over the internet.
Haven't really done much with Hulu, but it's another opportunity for you to stream fresh content.
I use MythTV and a HD Homerun tuner, running on Debian on a QNAP TS-119 (which draws something like 6 watts spun up). For TV frontends, I use the PS3, or a recent Mac Mini.Very reliable.
Took a fair amount of setup, but all works great. My just-turned-five kid has been working the remote himself for about 18 months, getting lots of great commercial-free kids programming from PBS.
Been forever since I've paid for cable TV.
You must not watch sports...which is fine. But your whole strategy blows up for half the population that sees the primary purpose of a TV being for sports.
Incorrect. Both UHF and VHF are still used by digital broadcasters and the same old antennas are still used (rabbit ears for VHF and bowties for UHF).
The USA decided that digital broadcasting was so efficient that they could auction off UHF channels 59 through 69 in 2008.
Please do some googling before making such erroneous comments.
I'm not big on sports, so I haven't done the research you have - but it makes me curious how much money they are leaving on the table by not making games available as streams. I expect if the cable companies rigged up pay per view streams for all of the games they cover, they could bring in tons of money from folks not interested in huge season costs.
Then again, I stopped letting TV rot my brain long ago! After all, every hour spent watching TV is an hour not spent playing video games...
+1 Disagree
If you truly mean *all* channels, even rebroadcasts of OTA channels, are protected, then this is against the FCC's rules, and you should file a FCC complaint.
Also, if *other channels* don't want themselves to be protected and they are being protected, you can help get them unprotected (I have seen people talk on tivocommunity.com of having this work on their cable systems).
hat's funny, but this naturally and frequently arises in casual conversations because most people do watch TV and many TV watchers insist on making this a prime topic of discussion.
Except that's not what happened here. Nobody was talking to him. Nobody asked him anything. Indeed, he could have simply clicked the back button in his browser and read the next slashdot story.
But instead, he had to take the time out to tell someone who had never approached him personally that he didn't have cable.
I've never watched an episode of "Seinfeld" but people have mentioned it to me innumerable times.
Understood. But if you hear two people "having a conversation at the watercooler" about Seinfeld do you sidle up, get their attention, look down your nose and say "I don't watch that show."? Because THAT is what people find annoying.
IMO, the reason people get annoyed when you tell them that you don't own or watch TV is that on some level, they also realize that it's wasting their time and polluting their brain.
For my part, I don't watch reality TV, and refuse to watch it out of principle. If someone engages me in conversation about a reality show I can either deflect it as something I didn't watch, or I can do the whole "I don't watch garbage like that routine." depending on whether I want to simply politely change the subject or whether I want to make the point that I think its stupid and that watching it is stupid. With my mother in law, for example, I tend to be the diplomat; "Oh, no, I haven't seen that." with others I'll take the shot.
In my experience few people are offended unless I take the effort to at least imply that I think the show they are talking about is not worth my time, or anyone else's.