Well, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty bad.
I had forgotten about the channel 2 issue, I don't watch a lot of PBS here in the Boston area.
What I do like is that: these boxes are pretty sensitive receivers, don't lock up on intermittent signals, I can hook them up to an otherwise worthless VGA monitor and make a cheap TV, I can hook them up to the DVI input of my LCD TV and get very good picture, and they can be gotten cheap on eBay.
And if you get lucky, DVD playback can be extremely good. I have one in my mother-in-law's room driving an old 17" VGA monitor and some old 2.1 speakers, and she can watch TV, video CDs, and DVDs using a "TV" made out of obsolete computer hardware and a 3510A I could have picked up for $80 on eBay. (I actually paid substantially more for it from geeks.com.) And because it is a CRT based monitor, standard definition looks better than it does on the LCD HDTV in the TV Room. And this all comes down to the 3510A having lots of output ports.
I have a couple LG 3510A's in the house, and recommend them for OTA use, very flexible devices, lots of output ports. Forget the fact they are DVD players; too flakey. Every now and again there are a bunch of refurbished players on eBay. Don't overpay, look for ones marked as having bad DVD playback.
As for where the standalone tuner boxes went. They are only useful for people who (a) don' have a HD cable box, and (b) don't have a QAM/ATSC tuner built right in their TV. Also, a growing fraction of people have some sort of media PC with a tuner attached. You'll notice there are plenty of choices there. (I like the networked HDHomeRun).
Here in Nashua, New Hampshire, I've heard the reason Verizon does not offer TV service along with their fiber optic Internet service is that the mayor is insisting on universal access until he allows the franchise (and conveniently preventing competition with Comcast). So I get my TV via a ugly Dish Network dish on my roof, and my Internet via the zippy fast Verizon fiber optic service.
This is not exactly pushing the limits of the bandwidth of the fiber.
There are 2 possible ways, of which I'm aware.
1) Buy an external tuner which uses El Gato's EyeTV software. I have an EyeTV 500 Firewire tuner box which works fairly well. Also, get a large external hard drive to store your recordings. (Be sure it's quiet).
2) Put your noisy MythTV running Linux box in a closet or basement (as long as it's well ventilated), and run the MythTV frontend on the Mini. I run the frontend on my MacBook and can watch HDTV over wireless.
Re:The Hadamard Transform and Multiplexing Advanta
on
A Single Pixel Camera
·
· Score: 1
I didn't make this clear, there is a definite multiplex disadvantage for measuring visible light, as noise in the source will be emphasized in contrast to a single measurement, and signal to noise will drop markedly.
The Hadamard Transform and Multiplexing Advantage
on
A Single Pixel Camera
·
· Score: 1
When I was in graduate school, I proposed making an imaging spectrometer based upon the then new digital micro-mirror array, a stationary defraction grating, and a CCD array. I would say that is a fairly similar problem to the idea of making a camera. Some issues as a spectrometer:
1) In spectroscopy, we have the idea of a multiplexing advantage. This is the increase in signal to noise which occurs from measuring the same information multiple time via its inclusion in a convolution of signals which is later isolated via the Fourier Transform algorithm. Devices based around digital micro-mirrors have an even bigger advantage because instead of sinusoidal waves which need a Fourier transform, they use binary square waves which can use the Hadamard Transform.
2) The multiplexing advantage does not generally work for visible light because the noise comes from the source and not the measuring element. It does work great for the infrared (where sensing elements tend to have a lot of thermal noise) and marginally well for the near infrared.
So, then you could make a low noise infrared imager?
Well maybe not because the mirrors tend to be on the order of the wavelength of light, which means it defracts. But maybe you could compensate for that in software. You could make a near-infared imaging camera though, with good signal to noise and little defraction.
If you follow the links in the Instapundit posting you get to this description of the SWIFT system.
A SWIFT consists of a one-page document containing the name and code of the originating bank, the date and time, the address and code of the receiving bank, the name and internal code of the officer initiating the transmission, the names and numbers of the accounts involved in the transfer, a description of the asset being transferred, the MT category of the transmission, and acceptable, standardized phrases as described above.
Just passing along this comment I saw on Instapundit: What has not been stressed is that SWIFT is not used for individuals. It is used for processing money transfers, stock transfers and bond transfers from companies, governments, banks, insurance companies and NGO's. What we essentially had on file was the holdings for almost all our clients and the clearance data for these transactions dating back for years. We had to keep all this on file to satisfy all the governmental regulations on taxations, etc.
It seems to me that if Apple has future plans for distributing movies using their preferred.264 codec then it would be nice if their "Home Theatre" Mac had hardware decoding of.264, not just regular MPEG-2 video. Obviously, they might have trouble convincing Intel to add that to their integrated video chipsets, but it would be nice.
I suspect the original poster just wanted to watch DVDs with DTS or Dolby Digital surround tracks using his surround speakers. Since it has an optical S/PDIF output, yes you will be able to get 5.1 sound out using the Apple DVD Player. Just go to the preferences dialog for DVD Player and choose Digital Output in the audio section of the Disk Setup pane.
There is a mythfrontend for the Mac. No mythbackend, AFAIK. I'm hopeful that when and if it's compiled for Intel, a Mac Mini will be able to keep up with 1080i, I'd really like to know how the choice of integrated graphics in the new Mac Mini affects full screen video performance.
I'd buy a refurbed El Gato EyeTV 500 for $199. It's an extremely sensitive HDTV Firewire tuner. I don't know when they'll have an Intel version of their software out, so wait till that's available.
Given that I seem to get my best ideas while brushing my teeth, having a computer to distract me would eliminate my last chance for an original thought.
The problem, in my mind, with Apple's syntax is that it takes something which should be a single element, and makes it into two elements. Thus when you are parsing it in an application, let's say using some sort of C++ library, instead of dealing with one element at a time, you will have to keep references to two elements at a time, which makes using natural ways to access the XML tree cumbersome, as in the case if you are using some sort of iterator, or a visitor pattern to see all the elements of the XML document. It's obviously doable but unnecessarily complex, as if walking through a piece of XML using C++ wasn't complex enough as it is.
Or (and this is second hand reporting on my part as I am not a Perl coder) coming up with a simple Perl script to extract the data associated with a given key is supposedly quite hard.
Look at the property lists which are used in executable bundles and application preference files. Supposedly in XML, but not making good use of XML syntax.
Apple Usage: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>AppleSavePanelExpanded</key> <string>NO</string>
...
Would it have killed them to make use of XML attributes to simplify parsing?:
Peter: Everybody I've got bad news. We've been cancelled.
Lois:Oh no Peter! How could they do that?
Peter: Well unfortuantely Lois, there's just no more room on the schedule. We just gotta accept the fact that FOX has to make room for terrific shows like Dark Angel, Titus, Undeclared, Action, That 80's Show, Wonder Falls, Fast Lane, Andy Richter Controls The Universe, Skin, Girl's Club, Cracking Up, The Pitts, Firefly, Get Real, Freaky Links, Wanda At Large, Costello, The Lone Gunman, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Normal Ohio, Pasadena, Harsh Realm, Keen Eddy, The Street, American Embassy, Cedric The Entertainer, The Tick, Louie, And Greg The Bunny....
Lois:Is there no hope?
Peter:Well I suppose if ALL those shows go down the tubes we might have a shot.
NVidia drivers cannot handle resolutions which are non-integral multiples of 8. 1366 is not a multiple of 8. Depending on the TV, you might be able to get it into 1to1 pixel mode and drive it at either 1368x768 or 1360x768. Some TVs do not allow 1to1 modes over DVI (like my new Syntax), some do (like older Syntaxs when in 4:3 mode). You can use the PowerStrip software to setup your own custom resolutions.
As someone with both a G4 based Mac, and setup a Linux based MythTV, I can say that Macs and Linux boxes have their strengths and weaknesses as PVR platforms.
Linux Box strengths:
* NVidia driver support for decoding MPEG-2 streams on the video card.
* Cheap hardware
Linux Box weaknesses:
* Unbelievable setup complications (I'm talking days of setup time).
* GUI limited to what can be done in Qt.
Mac strengths:
* Devices "just work" (if they work at all). Comparing the time it takes to setup an EyeTV 500 to a MythTV, we are literally talking two orders of magnitude less setup time.
* Potential for much more attractive GUI elements from CoreImage and Quartz. (Beautiful transparent onscreen controls, vectored display elements, etc.)
Mac weaknesses:
* PowerBooks, iBooks, and MacMini's do not have the horsepower to display full screen, full framerate HDTV. My 1.33 GHz Powerbook G4 can do maybe 2 frames a second running MythFrontend for Mac OS X. It can do significantly better running EyeTV, but still not good enough.
* Portables and MacMini have too small a hard drive for serious PVR use.
Notice the Mac weaknesses are probably going to be solved in the next 2-6 months, (and you could use a Firewire hard drive right now anyway), so the MythTV community's challenge is to match EyeTV's (or any Apple PVR) ease of setup.
I watch football on my MythTV box and have done so for months (also various dramas, the odd comedy, and even standard definition reality shows). Setting it up was Linux hell, but now it's done and works semi-well. I can sit here in my cubicle and schedule recordings with the MythWeb (Apache hosted) interface.
Don't know how you'd watch much pr0n on a MythTV, it generally records only free OTA programming.
If I had the new 15", I'd watch DVDs on my 20.1" monitor, and pass sound data via TOSLink to my 5.1 receiver, and it would deliver the best quality DVD viewing experience in my apartment. Better than the s-Video/SPDIF combination my standalone DVD player gives me; better than the DVI/stereo mini-jack combination my 12" Powerbook gives me. And better in terms of the useability than the junky applications on Windows or Linux which also give me DVI/TOSLink.
And the problem with Airport Express is the sync issue between audio and video. I'm wondering what people's experience is with music videos in iTunes. Aren't they noticeably out of sync when using Airport Express?
Yes, but only with that massive Amazon discount. The retail price is $60. It's not really fair to compare Amazon's super-duper mega-discounted price.
Why not? It's an example of a better value for the money than buying a whole season of Desparate Housewives. If someone were to ask me the best deal for buying Season 1 of Desparate Housewives, I would tell him to log onto Amazon, and buy it along with some $12 movie he likes so he gets free shipping. I wouldn't tell him to pick it up at the drugstore for full retail.
Actually, if it were something BlockBuster stocked, I'd tell him to wait a month till Blockbuster sells it used for $25.
I don't disagree with you in principle. If we can get 1080p (or 1080i) content delivered via the Net into some kind of home server (a next generation Mac-Mini?) then the whole debate about BlueRay versus HD-DVD will be somewhat moot.
Thanks to everyone for pointing out that ABC broadcasts in 720(p?). Desperate Housewives looks absolutely fabulous regardless. And it does take 5.9 GB per hour, which you could burn to a dual layered DVD if you were so inclined.
Also, it isn't that complicated to set up a Mac to be a HDTV PVR, all it takes is buying an EyeTV 500 Firewire box for $299, and installing the included software. It's incredibly simple, that is except for the need for enough raw speed for rendering 1080i content in real time, which most Macs (including the Mini) just do not have, yet. Next year they will. So again, for about the price of an iPod, you can have much better content: assuming your computer is fast enough. If it isn't...
Well the main technical issue with "free" recorders, or at least MythTV for Linux is the enormous pain in getting it running. Once you do get it running, the results real and they are spectacular.
Cable companies are required to provide the local over the air content as an unencrypted QAM stream, and if not that there is always the possibility of an antenna.
Depending on how tricked out your existing desktop Linux box is, you could add this kind of functionality to it for less than the cost of a video iPod. I certainly did.
The problem is one of perceived value. Desparate Housewives, Season 1 costs $38 on DVD on Amazon. It's enhanced for widescreen which means it is encoded at 720x480 (some of which may not be used due to matting). The same content available from the Apple Music store is $35 for a 320x240 cropped version. The DVDs also come with a 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Unless you desparately, need to watch the show right now, it's a much, much better deal to just order the DVDs.
If you wanted, there are ways to rip said DVDs into a format playable on the iPod.
Even better, you could record the magnificent 1920x1080 interlaced MPEG-2 widescreen broadcast every Sunday going forward, it'll take up 10GBs of space which at today's hard drive prices is around $2.50 of space, and if you buy your tuner card before the broadcast flag gets rammed through there will be zero DRM encumbrances.
The value you are getting is: it's already pre-ripped and encoded for your video iPod. You can get yesterday's show for a semi-reasonable price. So this is good for people who just want to catch up with their stories and don't want to wait for the DVD. I'd be happy to get Curb Your Enthusiasm this way so I could cancel my HBO subscription. It'd save me a ton of money over the course of a year. (Don't tell HBO).
UPS will be dropping off my Firewire HDTV tuner box from El Gato today. I bought it even though I don't have enough horsepower on my desktop to decode the hi-rez MPEG streams, or a proper antenna, but I wanted to get it before they were outlawed. Oh well, I'll get a G5 someday.
As to the politics of it, it's gratifying when the bureaucracy gets told they can't just usurp authority, that they need permission from the democratically elected Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, DiVX players could play DVDs as well. I bought my parents an RCA player which was built quite well, and served them for many years.
Well, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty bad.
I had forgotten about the channel 2 issue, I don't watch a lot of PBS here in the Boston area.
What I do like is that: these boxes are pretty sensitive receivers, don't lock up on intermittent signals, I can hook them up to an otherwise worthless VGA monitor and make a cheap TV, I can hook them up to the DVI input of my LCD TV and get very good picture, and they can be gotten cheap on eBay.
And if you get lucky, DVD playback can be extremely good. I have one in my mother-in-law's room driving an old 17" VGA monitor and some old 2.1 speakers, and she can watch TV, video CDs, and DVDs using a "TV" made out of obsolete computer hardware and a 3510A I could have picked up for $80 on eBay. (I actually paid substantially more for it from geeks.com.) And because it is a CRT based monitor, standard definition looks better than it does on the LCD HDTV in the TV Room. And this all comes down to the 3510A having lots of output ports.
I have a couple LG 3510A's in the house, and recommend them for OTA use, very flexible devices, lots of output ports. Forget the fact they are DVD players; too flakey. Every now and again there are a bunch of refurbished players on eBay. Don't overpay, look for ones marked as having bad DVD playback. As for where the standalone tuner boxes went. They are only useful for people who (a) don' have a HD cable box, and (b) don't have a QAM/ATSC tuner built right in their TV. Also, a growing fraction of people have some sort of media PC with a tuner attached. You'll notice there are plenty of choices there. (I like the networked HDHomeRun).
Here in Nashua, New Hampshire, I've heard the reason Verizon does not offer TV service along with their fiber optic Internet service is that the mayor is insisting on universal access until he allows the franchise (and conveniently preventing competition with Comcast). So I get my TV via a ugly Dish Network dish on my roof, and my Internet via the zippy fast Verizon fiber optic service.
This is not exactly pushing the limits of the bandwidth of the fiber.
There are 2 possible ways, of which I'm aware. 1) Buy an external tuner which uses El Gato's EyeTV software. I have an EyeTV 500 Firewire tuner box which works fairly well. Also, get a large external hard drive to store your recordings. (Be sure it's quiet). 2) Put your noisy MythTV running Linux box in a closet or basement (as long as it's well ventilated), and run the MythTV frontend on the Mini. I run the frontend on my MacBook and can watch HDTV over wireless.
I didn't make this clear, there is a definite multiplex disadvantage for measuring visible light, as noise in the source will be emphasized in contrast to a single measurement, and signal to noise will drop markedly.
When I was in graduate school, I proposed making an imaging spectrometer based upon the then new digital micro-mirror array, a stationary defraction grating, and a CCD array. I would say that is a fairly similar problem to the idea of making a camera. Some issues as a spectrometer:
1) In spectroscopy, we have the idea of a multiplexing advantage. This is the increase in signal to noise which occurs from measuring the same information multiple time via its inclusion in a convolution of signals which is later isolated via the Fourier Transform algorithm. Devices based around digital micro-mirrors have an even bigger advantage because instead of sinusoidal waves which need a Fourier transform, they use binary square waves which can use the Hadamard Transform.
2) The multiplexing advantage does not generally work for visible light because the noise comes from the source and not the measuring element. It does work great for the infrared (where sensing elements tend to have a lot of thermal noise) and marginally well for the near infrared.
So, then you could make a low noise infrared imager?
Well maybe not because the mirrors tend to be on the order of the wavelength of light, which means it defracts. But maybe you could compensate for that in software. You could make a near-infared imaging camera though, with good signal to noise and little defraction.
Just passing along this comment I saw on Instapundit:
What has not been stressed is that SWIFT is not used for individuals. It is used for processing money transfers, stock transfers and bond transfers from companies, governments, banks, insurance companies and NGO's. What we essentially had on file was the holdings for almost all our clients and the clearance data for these transactions dating back for years. We had to keep all this on file to satisfy all the governmental regulations on taxations, etc.
It seems to me that if Apple has future plans for distributing movies using their preferred .264 codec then it would be nice if their "Home Theatre" Mac had hardware decoding of .264, not just regular MPEG-2 video. Obviously, they might have trouble convincing Intel to add that to their integrated video chipsets, but it would be nice.
I suspect the original poster just wanted to watch DVDs with DTS or Dolby Digital surround tracks using his surround speakers. Since it has an optical S/PDIF output, yes you will be able to get 5.1 sound out using the Apple DVD Player. Just go to the preferences dialog for DVD Player and choose Digital Output in the audio section of the Disk Setup pane.
There is a mythfrontend for the Mac. No mythbackend, AFAIK. I'm hopeful that when and if it's compiled for Intel, a Mac Mini will be able to keep up with 1080i, I'd really like to know how the choice of integrated graphics in the new Mac Mini affects full screen video performance.
I'd buy a refurbed El Gato EyeTV 500 for $199. It's an extremely sensitive HDTV Firewire tuner. I don't know when they'll have an Intel version of their software out, so wait till that's available.
Given that I seem to get my best ideas while brushing my teeth, having a computer to distract me would eliminate my last chance for an original thought.
The problem, in my mind, with Apple's syntax is that it takes something which should be a single element, and makes it into two elements. Thus when you are parsing it in an application, let's say using some sort of C++ library, instead of dealing with one element at a time, you will have to keep references to two elements at a time, which makes using natural ways to access the XML tree cumbersome, as in the case if you are using some sort of iterator, or a visitor pattern to see all the elements of the XML document. It's obviously doable but unnecessarily complex, as if walking through a piece of XML using C++ wasn't complex enough as it is. Or (and this is second hand reporting on my part as I am not a Perl coder) coming up with a simple Perl script to extract the data associated with a given key is supposedly quite hard.
Look at the property lists which are used in executable bundles and application preference files. Supposedly in XML, but not making good use of XML syntax.
Apple Usage:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AppleSavePanelExpanded</key>
<string>NO</string>
...
Would it have killed them to make use of XML attributes to simplify parsing?:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<PrefItem key="AppleSavePanelExpanded">NO</PrefItem >
Peter: Everybody I've got bad news. We've been cancelled.
Lois:Oh no Peter! How could they do that?
Peter: Well unfortuantely Lois, there's just no more room on the schedule. We just gotta accept the fact that FOX has to make room for terrific shows like Dark Angel, Titus, Undeclared, Action, That 80's Show, Wonder Falls, Fast Lane, Andy Richter Controls The Universe, Skin, Girl's Club, Cracking Up, The Pitts, Firefly, Get Real, Freaky Links, Wanda At Large, Costello, The Lone Gunman, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Normal Ohio, Pasadena, Harsh Realm, Keen Eddy, The Street, American Embassy, Cedric The Entertainer, The Tick, Louie, And Greg The Bunny....
Lois:Is there no hope?
Peter:Well I suppose if ALL those shows go down the tubes we might have a shot.
NVidia drivers cannot handle resolutions which are non-integral multiples of 8. 1366 is not a multiple of 8. Depending on the TV, you might be able to get it into 1to1 pixel mode and drive it at either 1368x768 or 1360x768. Some TVs do not allow 1to1 modes over DVI (like my new Syntax), some do (like older Syntaxs when in 4:3 mode). You can use the PowerStrip software to setup your own custom resolutions.
Go to avsforum.com for more help.
As someone with both a G4 based Mac, and setup a Linux based MythTV, I can say that Macs and Linux boxes have their strengths and weaknesses as PVR platforms.
Linux Box strengths:
* NVidia driver support for decoding MPEG-2 streams on the video card.
* Cheap hardware
Linux Box weaknesses:
* Unbelievable setup complications (I'm talking days of setup time).
* GUI limited to what can be done in Qt.
Mac strengths:
* Devices "just work" (if they work at all). Comparing the time it takes to setup an EyeTV 500 to a MythTV, we are literally talking two orders of magnitude less setup time.
* Potential for much more attractive GUI elements from CoreImage and Quartz. (Beautiful transparent onscreen controls, vectored display elements, etc.)
Mac weaknesses:
* PowerBooks, iBooks, and MacMini's do not have the horsepower to display full screen, full framerate HDTV. My 1.33 GHz Powerbook G4 can do maybe 2 frames a second running MythFrontend for Mac OS X. It can do significantly better running EyeTV, but still not good enough.
* Portables and MacMini have too small a hard drive for serious PVR use.
Notice the Mac weaknesses are probably going to be solved in the next 2-6 months, (and you could use a Firewire hard drive right now anyway), so the MythTV community's challenge is to match EyeTV's (or any Apple PVR) ease of setup.
I watch football on my MythTV box and have done so for months (also various dramas, the odd comedy, and even standard definition reality shows). Setting it up was Linux hell, but now it's done and works semi-well. I can sit here in my cubicle and schedule recordings with the MythWeb (Apache hosted) interface.
Don't know how you'd watch much pr0n on a MythTV, it generally records only free OTA programming.
If I had the new 15", I'd watch DVDs on my 20.1" monitor, and pass sound data via TOSLink to my 5.1 receiver, and it would deliver the best quality DVD viewing experience in my apartment. Better than the s-Video/SPDIF combination my standalone DVD player gives me; better than the DVI/stereo mini-jack combination my 12" Powerbook gives me. And better in terms of the useability than the junky applications on Windows or Linux which also give me DVI/TOSLink.
And the problem with Airport Express is the sync issue between audio and video. I'm wondering what people's experience is with music videos in iTunes. Aren't they noticeably out of sync when using Airport Express?
Yes, but only with that massive Amazon discount. The retail price is $60. It's not really fair to compare Amazon's super-duper mega-discounted price.
Why not? It's an example of a better value for the money than buying a whole season of Desparate Housewives. If someone were to ask me the best deal for buying Season 1 of Desparate Housewives, I would tell him to log onto Amazon, and buy it along with some $12 movie he likes so he gets free shipping. I wouldn't tell him to pick it up at the drugstore for full retail.
Actually, if it were something BlockBuster stocked, I'd tell him to wait a month till Blockbuster sells it used for $25.
I don't disagree with you in principle. If we can get 1080p (or 1080i) content delivered via the Net into some kind of home server (a next generation Mac-Mini?) then the whole debate about BlueRay versus HD-DVD will be somewhat moot.
Thanks to everyone for pointing out that ABC broadcasts in 720(p?). Desperate Housewives looks absolutely fabulous regardless. And it does take 5.9 GB per hour, which you could burn to a dual layered DVD if you were so inclined.
Also, it isn't that complicated to set up a Mac to be a HDTV PVR, all it takes is buying an EyeTV 500 Firewire box for $299, and installing the included software. It's incredibly simple, that is except for the need for enough raw speed for rendering 1080i content in real time, which most Macs (including the Mini) just do not have, yet. Next year they will. So again, for about the price of an iPod, you can have much better content: assuming your computer is fast enough. If it isn't...
Well the main technical issue with "free" recorders, or at least MythTV for Linux is the enormous pain in getting it running. Once you do get it running, the results real and they are spectacular.
Cable companies are required to provide the local over the air content as an unencrypted QAM stream, and if not that there is always the possibility of an antenna.
Depending on how tricked out your existing desktop Linux box is, you could add this kind of functionality to it for less than the cost of a video iPod. I certainly did.
The problem is one of perceived value. Desparate Housewives, Season 1 costs $38 on DVD on Amazon. It's enhanced for widescreen which means it is encoded at 720x480 (some of which may not be used due to matting). The same content available from the Apple Music store is $35 for a 320x240 cropped version. The DVDs also come with a 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Unless you desparately, need to watch the show right now, it's a much, much better deal to just order the DVDs.
If you wanted, there are ways to rip said DVDs into a format playable on the iPod.
Even better, you could record the magnificent 1920x1080 interlaced MPEG-2 widescreen broadcast every Sunday going forward, it'll take up 10GBs of space which at today's hard drive prices is around $2.50 of space, and if you buy your tuner card before the broadcast flag gets rammed through there will be zero DRM encumbrances.
The value you are getting is: it's already pre-ripped and encoded for your video iPod. You can get yesterday's show for a semi-reasonable price. So this is good for people who just want to catch up with their stories and don't want to wait for the DVD. I'd be happy to get Curb Your Enthusiasm this way so I could cancel my HBO subscription. It'd save me a ton of money over the course of a year. (Don't tell HBO).
UPS will be dropping off my Firewire HDTV tuner box from El Gato today. I bought it even though I don't have enough horsepower on my desktop to decode the hi-rez MPEG streams, or a proper antenna, but I wanted to get it before they were outlawed. Oh well, I'll get a G5 someday.
As to the politics of it, it's gratifying when the bureaucracy gets told they can't just usurp authority, that they need permission from the democratically elected Congress.