The cable companies certainly don't WANT to encrypt channels they don't have to because that eats up CPU time on both ends, meaning they have to buy more expensive boxes. Most cable providers now transmit everything but premium channels "in the clear".
Wrong. So, so very wrong. Do you have anything with a straight-up QAM (non-CableCARD-equipped) tuner? I tried getting clear QAM channels; my cable provider had almost nothing in the clear (local Fox affiliate, IFC, History Channel International, and Music Choice channels), certainly nothing too interesting other than the local Fox affiliate in HD. Most of the headend gear handles this all for them, and they go with whatever the defaults are - which are (generally) encrypt everything. Their tiering systems wouldn't work very well if they didn't - they'd have to just let anyone with a QAM tuner get a bunch of stuff. They don't want to do that.
Hope you like getting your HD locals - because you may be able to make a DVR that can capture them via clear QAM, but that's about all you'll get (assuming your cableco follows the must-carry rules - many play a bit fast and loose with them). You won't be getting HDnet, or Discovery HD Theater (or any of the other new Discovery HD channels), or TNT in HD, or HBO in HD, or ESPN in HD, or... well, you get the picture. Before I finally got my CableCARDs for my Series3 TiVo, the only channels I could get in clear QAM were my local Fox affiliate in HD, sometime IFC, History Channel International, and Music Choice stations. That was all. Whoop-de-frickin'-doo. Without CableCARD, or a cableco-provided DVR, your choices are going to be very, very narrow.
Actually as I understand it, UltimateTV was developed by the same people that did WebTV - a company which Microsoft bought, so was outside their culture. I'm betting that's the only reason UltimateTV was decent.
I never understood why DirecTV dropped Tivo. I know people who have been forced to drop their Tivos due to this shortsightedness, if they want HD channels; the Tivos got far-better reviews than DTV's homegrown boxes. Why go to the expense to change, especially after lots of satisfied customers were left with pieces of junk?
Because Rupert Murdoch and friends (yeah, that's right, News Corporation, DirecTV's current owners) decided "screw you TiVo, we can make a better DVR on our own!" Except based on most reviews, it's "alright", but still no TiVo. There are rumors that DirecTV, after the buyout from Liberty Media, might kiss and make up with TiVo; however, it's still just a rumor, no substantiation. Yet.
But what happens when your Tivo's hard drive fails? What if it's something worse? You're out the $300-$600 you spent buying that equipment. If the set top you rent from the cable company fails, you get a new one -- no questions asked.
And what happens when the Moto or SA box screws up? Have you read the customer reviews of the boxes? This is NOT an infrequent occurrence, and in the vast majority of cases, it's not 2 years later - more like 1-2 *months*. I've seen cable customers with cableco DVRs say "The box does weird things, and when I got another box from the cableco, it did the same weird stuff! And I'm on my (third, fourth, fifth,...) box now! And the cable company has no idea what to do, or they said 'Sorry, known issue, it'll be fixed eventually'! What am I supposed to do?"
Please riddle me that - what *are* they supposed to do? The litany of known issues with both major makers' DVR boxes is astonishing, and guess what - they're in no apparent hurry to fix them, based on the fact that customers keep hitting the same issues, and getting the same shoulder-shrug responses from their cable companies. Where's the fix? Where's the customer satisfaction? Where are the glowing "oh this works so well" reviews, other than the tech sites like CNet that hand out shining reviews like candy at Halloween? The best that most cable customers can muster is "well, it mostly works... it doesn't do a lot, but it *usually* works". I don't think that's okay. Do you?
This whole CableCARD thing is a sham. Firewire works. So what if you can't use a different box? You can get the firewire feed straight out of the cable-company provided box, connect it to another box and then connect your TV to that box. All of your navigation can be done from your box, the cable-company provided box just decrypts the channels for you.
Except that unless you have a D-VHS deck (maybe not even then?) you can't actually capture anything other than (maybe) your HD locals; most everything else digital is subject to 5C encryption, which prevents its capture on PCs (and probably some other devices as well). I have CableCARDs in my TiVo Series3, and I can get (other than PPV and on-demand content, which I don't care about anyway) everything that any other digital cable customer can get (and there's no on-demand through the local cableco... boo hoo). I don't care about their PPV - if I want that, I can use Unbox on TiVo or XBox Live on my 360. So no, IEEE1394 is not "good enough" - also, there's the fact that many MSOs still ignore the IEEE1394 mandate. If yours doesn't, count yourself lucky.
As others mentioned, these devices are UDCP (uni-directional cable) receivers; the license under which they're produced doesn't allow two-way communication support. However, SDV is supposedly going to be taken care of using an external USB-attached device known as a "tuning resolver". At least, that's the rumor; however, they're most likely going to be provided by the cable companies, which means you have to wait for them to get around to offering them. Maybe the FCC will mandate them - of course, who knows if they'll follow it...
They are the same cards; the problem isn't the cards, it's mostly tied up in cable MSO employees who just don't care. They won't or can't transcribe a sequence of numbers correctly and enter them into a computer - or in some cases (like my cableco), they try to deny, deny, deny, preventing you from even getting the cards (until you call in the FCC, anyway). This is the second time I've had CableCARDs (in my TiVo Series3 HD DMR, by the by), and haven't had a bad card yet - it's just a matter of being sufficiently insistent, and having competent people.
They won't do that, because the content providers won't let them. If they did, the content providers would shut them down so fast, it would make their heads spin. The content providers are paranoid about having their content stolen by the end user - stolen and sold or traded on the Internets. (Never mind that it happens anyway - they want to have something in place to fight it.) Also, the cable companies like being able to push a button and enable/disable channels for you - if they're all provided unencrypted, they can't do that (and they can't just use filters with QAM channels like they did with analog cable, as multiple video/audio muxed streams are bundled into a single 256QAM channel).
Oh, there's a mandate about it - but about as many cable MSOs follow that mandate as follow the mandate that their boxes provide working IEEE1394 ports. Which is to say, some, but not a lot...
Did you even read the article? Every, yes, *EVERY* CableCARD ever made is capable of two-way communication - because the card has basically nothing to do with the return channel, that's a function of the tuner device - i.e., the CableCARD host. However, CHILA - the CableCARD Host Licensing Agreement - won't allow two-way functionality to be built into a receiver device unless it implements OCAP for *everything*. It can't run the box vendor's slicker-than-snot interface - it has to run a generic OCAP stack, and run the software the cable company pushes to it. Most of the potential box vendors hate OCAP deeply - mostly because it takes away any level of product differentiation that could be had in software, unless the vendor makes a deal with EVERY cable MSO to carry their OCAP software, and offer it to their customers (most likely for *yet another* monthly fee) - oh yeah, and did I mention that OCAP is Java? And as we all know, the best thing about Java is how fast it isn't. Whee!
And the irony is that the cable MSOs, through NCTA and CableLabs, speced out CableCARD - and yet they loathe it with every fiber of their beings. Gotta love it...
I actually helped a friend use that method to install OS X 10.4 on his iBook - his girlfriend had one as well, but his didn't have a DVD drive. It's amazing how handy such a simple feature can be.
Mostly because you'd need a dedicated USB port - FireWire/i.Link/IEEE 1394 is a *peer to peer* bus, so all ports work the same, whereas USB ports have *host* ports and *device* ports. It makes it much more difficult to implement. On the older NewWorld PPC systems, FireWire target mode was simply implemented by a little bit of Forth that talked on the FireWire bus, accepted commands, and read from/wrote to the system's internal disk as directed - it's so dirt simple. (I understand the Intel based systems have it as well, and I'm sure it's implemented similarly, with a small EFI program.)
Paravirtualized domUs can be booted by using a pseudo-bootloader called pyGrub, which mostly emulates GRUB in its functionality, allowing a self-contained domU image to self-bootstrap (no dom0-hosted kernel image is needed). Unfortunately the script runs within dom0, which is where the issue comes in - since it's executing within that domain, and with root's privileges (it has to be able to examine the root block device), I guess it was only a matter of time till someone figured out how to make it do... things.
Slightly off-topic, but am I the only one who finds it funny that (at least that I can recall) David Boies' *only* high-profile "victory" (if it can be called that - it was more a pyrrhic victory than anything) was on the side of the US Government, in the case against Microsoft? It seems like *every* case he's been involved in since then, his involvement is much talked about, but he's universally on the losing side. Where does this wonderful reputation spring from? I don't think it's from reality - at least not this one, as if I was looking for a lawyer, I wouldn't hire him...
Dunno when season 3 is out, but I'd guess soon; seasons 1 and 2 are already (though 2 is split up into 2 separate packs - the easier to separate you and your money with, natch).
No, just anyplace where you could watch or rent them. NC-17 is considered the "kiss of death" for movies - you'll note it's been many moons since ANY movie was released with an NC-17 rating, mostly because none of the middlemen will touch 'em with a 10-foot pole.
DirectTV uses open boxes. Echostar uses proprietary boxes.
Actually, I think you got that the wrong way around - the DirecTV systems use Hughes' proprietary DSS system, whereas the Dish receivers I've seen use DVB, an open standard (specifically DVB-S, but whatever). I don't know what that does for interactivity, but from what I've seen of modern DirecTV reception hardware (my parents have a Samsung DirecTV HD receiver), the "interactivity" is pretty much absent there. Not that I'd care much - the only "interactivity" that I've seen via cable is the On Demand and PPV stuff (gag me with a spoon kthx) and the stupid polls during shows like Top Chef (I don't watch it, but I was at a friend's place when he did - even worse, and so pointless).
Thank you for doing what I was going to do anyway - seems every thread involving CableCARD requires at least a few people to drag out the "but CableCARD is only one way isnt that stupid lolz" crap.
Actually, your statement that an HD channel takes about 4x the bandwidth of an SD channel may be true - if you're comparing to a *digital* SD channel. However, many major cable MSOs still broadcast their basic lineup, as well as several other channels, in *analog* SD - those channels actually each take about the same bandwidth as an HD channel. The question remains, then, why not just move more SD channels to digital transmission? They could free up ridiculous amounts of bandwidth that way.
Well, the player is coming - the Samsung BD-UP5000 will play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs, and unlike the vaunted-but-unfulfilling LG hybrid player (you know, the one that plays video from HD-DVDs but didn't support HDi interactive content, making the menus non-functional), supports interactive content for both disc formats. Admittedly it's not going to be cheap - at least not right away, but I'm hoping the price will come down a few months after its debut. Hey, at least one company is making "one with everything"...
I saw a comparison recently, I believe linked from AVSforum, that showed the replication price difference between the two - it showed that yes, Blu-Ray replication is somewhat more expensive, but not substantially so - and replication of single-layer Blu-Ray discs is actually *cheaper* than replication of dual-layer HD-DVD. That matters because most HD-DVD movies *have* to be dual layer, due to the size, whereas most Blu-Ray movies are still single layer.
I think that pretty well shoots the "but HD-DVD is cheaper!" argument directly to hell - while it's *strictly* true, the most common situation is one that is, in fact, less expensive. (Yes, the players are still more expensive... though I'm waiting for Samsung's BD-UP5000 so I can get one player, watch everything, and not have to worry anymore.)
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Well, they'd just say those were faked too. There's always a loophole.
I have three words for you: "Normalized trade relations". That's the problem.
The cable companies certainly don't WANT to encrypt channels they don't have to because that eats up CPU time on both ends, meaning they have to buy more expensive boxes. Most cable providers now transmit everything but premium channels "in the clear".
Wrong. So, so very wrong. Do you have anything with a straight-up QAM (non-CableCARD-equipped) tuner? I tried getting clear QAM channels; my cable provider had almost nothing in the clear (local Fox affiliate, IFC, History Channel International, and Music Choice channels), certainly nothing too interesting other than the local Fox affiliate in HD. Most of the headend gear handles this all for them, and they go with whatever the defaults are - which are (generally) encrypt everything. Their tiering systems wouldn't work very well if they didn't - they'd have to just let anyone with a QAM tuner get a bunch of stuff. They don't want to do that.
Hope you like getting your HD locals - because you may be able to make a DVR that can capture them via clear QAM, but that's about all you'll get (assuming your cableco follows the must-carry rules - many play a bit fast and loose with them). You won't be getting HDnet, or Discovery HD Theater (or any of the other new Discovery HD channels), or TNT in HD, or HBO in HD, or ESPN in HD, or... well, you get the picture. Before I finally got my CableCARDs for my Series3 TiVo, the only channels I could get in clear QAM were my local Fox affiliate in HD, sometime IFC, History Channel International, and Music Choice stations. That was all. Whoop-de-frickin'-doo. Without CableCARD, or a cableco-provided DVR, your choices are going to be very, very narrow.
Actually as I understand it, UltimateTV was developed by the same people that did WebTV - a company which Microsoft bought, so was outside their culture. I'm betting that's the only reason UltimateTV was decent.
I never understood why DirecTV dropped Tivo. I know people who have been forced to drop their Tivos due to this shortsightedness, if they want HD channels; the Tivos got far-better reviews than DTV's homegrown boxes. Why go to the expense to change, especially after lots of satisfied customers were left with pieces of junk?
Because Rupert Murdoch and friends (yeah, that's right, News Corporation, DirecTV's current owners) decided "screw you TiVo, we can make a better DVR on our own!" Except based on most reviews, it's "alright", but still no TiVo. There are rumors that DirecTV, after the buyout from Liberty Media, might kiss and make up with TiVo; however, it's still just a rumor, no substantiation. Yet.
But what happens when your Tivo's hard drive fails? What if it's something worse? You're out the $300-$600 you spent buying that equipment. If the set top you rent from the cable company fails, you get a new one -- no questions asked.
...) box now! And the cable company has no idea what to do, or they said 'Sorry, known issue, it'll be fixed eventually'! What am I supposed to do?"
And what happens when the Moto or SA box screws up? Have you read the customer reviews of the boxes? This is NOT an infrequent occurrence, and in the vast majority of cases, it's not 2 years later - more like 1-2 *months*. I've seen cable customers with cableco DVRs say "The box does weird things, and when I got another box from the cableco, it did the same weird stuff! And I'm on my (third, fourth, fifth,
Please riddle me that - what *are* they supposed to do? The litany of known issues with both major makers' DVR boxes is astonishing, and guess what - they're in no apparent hurry to fix them, based on the fact that customers keep hitting the same issues, and getting the same shoulder-shrug responses from their cable companies. Where's the fix? Where's the customer satisfaction? Where are the glowing "oh this works so well" reviews, other than the tech sites like CNet that hand out shining reviews like candy at Halloween? The best that most cable customers can muster is "well, it mostly works... it doesn't do a lot, but it *usually* works". I don't think that's okay. Do you?
This whole CableCARD thing is a sham. Firewire works. So what if you can't use a different box? You can get the firewire feed straight out of the cable-company provided box, connect it to another box and then connect your TV to that box. All of your navigation can be done from your box, the cable-company provided box just decrypts the channels for you.
Except that unless you have a D-VHS deck (maybe not even then?) you can't actually capture anything other than (maybe) your HD locals; most everything else digital is subject to 5C encryption, which prevents its capture on PCs (and probably some other devices as well). I have CableCARDs in my TiVo Series3, and I can get (other than PPV and on-demand content, which I don't care about anyway) everything that any other digital cable customer can get (and there's no on-demand through the local cableco... boo hoo). I don't care about their PPV - if I want that, I can use Unbox on TiVo or XBox Live on my 360. So no, IEEE1394 is not "good enough" - also, there's the fact that many MSOs still ignore the IEEE1394 mandate. If yours doesn't, count yourself lucky.
As others mentioned, these devices are UDCP (uni-directional cable) receivers; the license under which they're produced doesn't allow two-way communication support. However, SDV is supposedly going to be taken care of using an external USB-attached device known as a "tuning resolver". At least, that's the rumor; however, they're most likely going to be provided by the cable companies, which means you have to wait for them to get around to offering them. Maybe the FCC will mandate them - of course, who knows if they'll follow it...
They are the same cards; the problem isn't the cards, it's mostly tied up in cable MSO employees who just don't care. They won't or can't transcribe a sequence of numbers correctly and enter them into a computer - or in some cases (like my cableco), they try to deny, deny, deny, preventing you from even getting the cards (until you call in the FCC, anyway). This is the second time I've had CableCARDs (in my TiVo Series3 HD DMR, by the by), and haven't had a bad card yet - it's just a matter of being sufficiently insistent, and having competent people.
They won't do that, because the content providers won't let them. If they did, the content providers would shut them down so fast, it would make their heads spin. The content providers are paranoid about having their content stolen by the end user - stolen and sold or traded on the Internets. (Never mind that it happens anyway - they want to have something in place to fight it.) Also, the cable companies like being able to push a button and enable/disable channels for you - if they're all provided unencrypted, they can't do that (and they can't just use filters with QAM channels like they did with analog cable, as multiple video/audio muxed streams are bundled into a single 256QAM channel).
Oh, there's a mandate about it - but about as many cable MSOs follow that mandate as follow the mandate that their boxes provide working IEEE1394 ports. Which is to say, some, but not a lot...
Did you even read the article? Every, yes, *EVERY* CableCARD ever made is capable of two-way communication - because the card has basically nothing to do with the return channel, that's a function of the tuner device - i.e., the CableCARD host. However, CHILA - the CableCARD Host Licensing Agreement - won't allow two-way functionality to be built into a receiver device unless it implements OCAP for *everything*. It can't run the box vendor's slicker-than-snot interface - it has to run a generic OCAP stack, and run the software the cable company pushes to it. Most of the potential box vendors hate OCAP deeply - mostly because it takes away any level of product differentiation that could be had in software, unless the vendor makes a deal with EVERY cable MSO to carry their OCAP software, and offer it to their customers (most likely for *yet another* monthly fee) - oh yeah, and did I mention that OCAP is Java? And as we all know, the best thing about Java is how fast it isn't. Whee!
And the irony is that the cable MSOs, through NCTA and CableLabs, speced out CableCARD - and yet they loathe it with every fiber of their beings. Gotta love it...
I actually helped a friend use that method to install OS X 10.4 on his iBook - his girlfriend had one as well, but his didn't have a DVD drive. It's amazing how handy such a simple feature can be.
Mostly because you'd need a dedicated USB port - FireWire/i.Link/IEEE 1394 is a *peer to peer* bus, so all ports work the same, whereas USB ports have *host* ports and *device* ports. It makes it much more difficult to implement. On the older NewWorld PPC systems, FireWire target mode was simply implemented by a little bit of Forth that talked on the FireWire bus, accepted commands, and read from/wrote to the system's internal disk as directed - it's so dirt simple. (I understand the Intel based systems have it as well, and I'm sure it's implemented similarly, with a small EFI program.)
Paravirtualized domUs can be booted by using a pseudo-bootloader called pyGrub, which mostly emulates GRUB in its functionality, allowing a self-contained domU image to self-bootstrap (no dom0-hosted kernel image is needed). Unfortunately the script runs within dom0, which is where the issue comes in - since it's executing within that domain, and with root's privileges (it has to be able to examine the root block device), I guess it was only a matter of time till someone figured out how to make it do... things.
Well, at least on Linux, there's always bind mounts (mount -o bind /directory /target_directory)...
Slightly off-topic, but am I the only one who finds it funny that (at least that I can recall) David Boies' *only* high-profile "victory" (if it can be called that - it was more a pyrrhic victory than anything) was on the side of the US Government, in the case against Microsoft? It seems like *every* case he's been involved in since then, his involvement is much talked about, but he's universally on the losing side. Where does this wonderful reputation spring from? I don't think it's from reality - at least not this one, as if I was looking for a lawyer, I wouldn't hire him...
Dunno when season 3 is out, but I'd guess soon; seasons 1 and 2 are already (though 2 is split up into 2 separate packs - the easier to separate you and your money with, natch).
No, just anyplace where you could watch or rent them. NC-17 is considered the "kiss of death" for movies - you'll note it's been many moons since ANY movie was released with an NC-17 rating, mostly because none of the middlemen will touch 'em with a 10-foot pole.
DirectTV uses open boxes. Echostar uses proprietary boxes.
Actually, I think you got that the wrong way around - the DirecTV systems use Hughes' proprietary DSS system, whereas the Dish receivers I've seen use DVB, an open standard (specifically DVB-S, but whatever). I don't know what that does for interactivity, but from what I've seen of modern DirecTV reception hardware (my parents have a Samsung DirecTV HD receiver), the "interactivity" is pretty much absent there. Not that I'd care much - the only "interactivity" that I've seen via cable is the On Demand and PPV stuff (gag me with a spoon kthx) and the stupid polls during shows like Top Chef (I don't watch it, but I was at a friend's place when he did - even worse, and so pointless).
TiVo or death.
Thank you for doing what I was going to do anyway - seems every thread involving CableCARD requires at least a few people to drag out the "but CableCARD is only one way isnt that stupid lolz" crap.
Actually, your statement that an HD channel takes about 4x the bandwidth of an SD channel may be true - if you're comparing to a *digital* SD channel. However, many major cable MSOs still broadcast their basic lineup, as well as several other channels, in *analog* SD - those channels actually each take about the same bandwidth as an HD channel. The question remains, then, why not just move more SD channels to digital transmission? They could free up ridiculous amounts of bandwidth that way.
Well, the player is coming - the Samsung BD-UP5000 will play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs, and unlike the vaunted-but-unfulfilling LG hybrid player (you know, the one that plays video from HD-DVDs but didn't support HDi interactive content, making the menus non-functional), supports interactive content for both disc formats. Admittedly it's not going to be cheap - at least not right away, but I'm hoping the price will come down a few months after its debut. Hey, at least one company is making "one with everything"...
I saw a comparison recently, I believe linked from AVSforum, that showed the replication price difference between the two - it showed that yes, Blu-Ray replication is somewhat more expensive, but not substantially so - and replication of single-layer Blu-Ray discs is actually *cheaper* than replication of dual-layer HD-DVD. That matters because most HD-DVD movies *have* to be dual layer, due to the size, whereas most Blu-Ray movies are still single layer.
I think that pretty well shoots the "but HD-DVD is cheaper!" argument directly to hell - while it's *strictly* true, the most common situation is one that is, in fact, less expensive. (Yes, the players are still more expensive... though I'm waiting for Samsung's BD-UP5000 so I can get one player, watch everything, and not have to worry anymore.)