As expert geeks (geexperts?), many of us could encourage acquaintances to buy non-HDCP equipment ("you'll have so many less problems if you get the one without HDCP, get the one with just component video"), just so they'll be pissed when companies make devices without component out.
"If you get the non-HDCP, it won't work with much for the next couple years, but then when nobody's buying the HDCP crap, the market will come back to component & you'll have a great device that'll last a long time. If you get the HDCP set, it'll work right now, but when the hacker in Sweden uses the same set to crack a movie next year, Sony will revoke its license and tell your cable provider, who will electronically inform your cable box, DVD player, PS3 & Blu-VD thingies that you're now unauthorized, and your set will henceforth be permanently b0rked... your choice!"
Really, laws regulations and initiatives like this (and this and this and this) make it increasingly necessary for the Powers that Be(tm) to think about criminalizing online anonymity altogether, lest the bureaucracy be powerless to enforce their will.
And with so few people who even know they should care about this, who's to stop it? Unless Tor and I2P get encapsulated within programs that millions of people use (à la Torpark), well... if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it...
You *cannot* know where the money is coming from for every bit of political activism you come across. Elected officials' campaign funding sources, maybe. Gifts made to those officials? Maybe that too. Beyond that, you have no right to know that supersedes my right to political speech with no requirement that I reveal my identity or disclose anything else about myself. In order for the government to facilitate that ability for you, it would need to do such severe damage to the first amendment that we might as well not even concern ourselves with government reform any longer.
Do not put weapons into the hands of your friends that you would not want wielded by your enemies.
If someone is working under a grant from the Mozilla Foundation, does that invalidate their paper on the relative security of IE vs. Firefox?
Good god, on Slashdot of all places I'd have thought people would evaluate arguments on their own merits, not on the motivations of the author, which are meaningless.
Some authoritative writer can be paid by the DNC to put out an article about the urgency of global warming, and some authoritative writer can be paid by the RNC to put out an article on the economic crisis that will follow if some new tax is enacted. The fact that they were paid doesn't make their arguments any different from those of the independent professor at the university. If they fudged the data, they fudged the data, and the proof of that is in what they wrote, not in their bank statement.
If this legislation conflicts with the right to anonymous political speech, who wins?
The senate has no entitlement to regulate either of them. Separating paid writers from volunteers isn't a valid means of separating BS from valid political arguments in the first place; it amounts to a Poisoning the Well fallacy at best. Saying "Sam wrote that under a grant from the AARP, so the arguments on his blog about needing to fund long term care for seniors are just astroturfing" doesn't speak to Sam's arguments about long term care, nor does pointing out that "Louie gets paid by the NRA fer chrissake!" address what might be said in Louie's 2nd Amendment blog.
Trying to draw fine lines like "it's just PAID writers we're talking about" around the issue does not give the government the authority to regulate political speech in any way. If you're okay with giving our elected officials the power to weasel around the bill of rights, then why stop with regulating political speech? Why not allow data seizure without warrants too -- after all, if someone fails to register and report their political writings, then they've deliberately concealed information from the government, right?
What reforms or improvements in the honesty of our government do people really think is going to come of this? Is it *really* going accomplish something worth shattering the first amendment over?
What I want to know is this: Exactly how do they intend to enforce this? Who's going to keep track of how many readers a blogger gets?
I previewed an 11th hour rider to the bill which covers that as follows: "Server logs must be written only by Trusted Hardware, signed with an HDCP key issued to Licensed Server Operators by the Office of Punditry Regulation, stored in a Windows(tm) Vista(tm) encrypted filesystem, submitted unaltered on an hourly basis to the Office of Punditry Regulation, and must not be readable nor writable by authors and administrators associated with said server, under penalties outlined in the DMCA."
...Are you really saying "being paid to write and distributing a pamphlet" is so fundamentally different from "being paid to write and distribute a pamp^H^H^H^H BLOG! ON THE INTERNET!" that it should abide by a second set of laws?
To put things in perspective, Slashdoters often complain there's fundamentally no difference in "doing X" and "doing X ON THE INTERNET!" so they shouldn't be patentable. Why did we suddenly decide "being a lobbyist" and "being a lobbyist ON THE INTERNET!" are so fundamentally different? From a readership perspective, I don't see the difference between pontificating on the internets and doing so elsewhere, nor between doing so for free and doing so for profit. If we accept this regulation, how do we measure whether an employer is of the sort that requires registration of its journalist employees? Are only the DNC & RNC covered? What about the NRA or PETA? CBS news? Fox news? How about The Heritage Foundation, or MoveOn.org? What about the Church of Scientology, or Richard Stallman...? Where does one draw the line between regulated and unregulated sponsors of published opinions?
Political speech is exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment is meant to protect. If a regulation usurps the freedom to publish political speech anonymously or pseudonymously, then that's not reform, it's a cancer.
I guess onion routers aren't just for Chinese dissidents anymore...
(By the way, I don't think bloggers and pundits should really be called "lobbyists." Lobbyists are generally folks who cajole the elected officials themselves into doing things.)
The P2P arms race eventually has to lead to something more robust... say, magnet links with structured.nfo content on Usenet, and trackers hosted across something like Gnutella, indexed by magnet ID. Usenet's good at keeping textual content accessible at a fixed location; let it do what it's good at while the distributed networks handle the tracker extensions and the scaling involved in the binary transfers.
When simple-to-install Gnutella & Bit Torrent clients are Tor-ified, do protocol switching on a dime, and have indexes & trackers that are themselves on distributed networks, I think P2P will have decidedly won the arms race.
At that point, perhaps the cartels will be forced into selling unencumbered content (or better yet, the creative people will start doing it themselves). Somebody's going to produce & distribute it; it might as well be the folks who deserve to get paid.
The fruit of your labour...
on
IsoHunt Shut Down?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I looked at your site, and it looks like you create good games and deal fairly. I'd be willing to bet that most insightful/.ers, anti-DRM stance notwithstanding, would view you as one of the "good guys." Of course you have a right to be paid for your work. Since you sell it directly, I'm happy to pay you for it. I hope many others feel the same.
My problem is that I find it socially irresponsible to fund media cartels who manipulate the legal systems of various countries in an effort to artificially inflate prices and maintain a monopoly over the distribution channel.
Is that more irresponsible than pirating content? I don't know; I honestly struggle with that question. I do not believe that "information wants to be free" means that people are entitled to take and enjoy the creative works of others without paying. Doing creative work is partly an act of investment, and like any other, one of the rewards can be passive income after the work is created. Some seem to believe that people should be denied rewards on that investment if their trade happens to be creative works. I don't agree, and I don't think that view represents the majority, either.
But along the same lines, I don't believe those who control the market for content creators' products (payola, etc.) are entitled to misrepresent the revenue stream on their balance sheet & rip those artists off, either. I don't believe corporate entities are entitled to retroactively rescind the public domain status of works that have passed into that domain. I don't believe that media corporations are entitled to force internet and satellite broadcasters into using expensive, proprietary streaming formats by legislatively mandating "approved" DRM frameworks. And I don't believe that distributors or creators are entitled to multiple payments for each device I wish to use my purchased content on. Except for a few bright spots, what we've got right now is a crap system, IMO.
Ultimately, I hope a system evolves that enables me to be a good customer of the artists I like and feel good about it. You going independent is a seedling of such a system; I hope something resembling an aggregator of your distribution system becomes the norm instead of the alternative in the near future.
If I buy an HD-DVD, I cannot back it up or archive it. I will also presumably run into playback restrictions in Windows Media Center, since it will not even play regular old-fashioned DVDs with CSS protection on an HDTV at > 640 x 480 resolution because of "restrictions set by the broadcaster," even with valid CSS decoders installed.*
If one *downloads* an HD-DVD, at least the time invested yields an archivable, portable movie.
If I could pay for a legitimate copy of what the torrent offers, I would. On the other hand, I would not buy the encumbered HD-DVD at any price.
* - Without using css circumvention techniques, that is.
What you're referring to ("FairPlay encrypted M4A") is also known as an M4P file. P = Protected. Overflow in my acronym recognition buffer again... thanks.
Excuse me, read that "FairPlay encrypted M4A" (which covers the most common species of m4a file).
And where the hell did the "Apple hating malcontent" bit come from? DRM turns my nose, yes, but in terms of that, Apple's significantly less evil than Microsoft IMO. As far as their OS, I haven't used it in about 8 or 9 years, so I literally have no opinion.
Where is the source code for the signature check that the hardware does? If the kernel loader is a derivative work of GPLed code, mustn't that loader be GPLed as well?
IANAL of course, but mightn't the D-Link case be precedent in that regard?
You cannot possibly be that naïve. Piracy may be real and may provide the excuse for tightening DRM, but make no mistake, DRM is *ultimately* about perpetuating a market for new hardware & replacement media, locking the market into proprietary formats like wma, wmv, rm, and m4a, and maintaining monopoly control of the distribution channel for digital media (yes, 'channel' is intentionally in the singular form).
Look at the details of LimeWire's lawsuit with the RIAA, look at the history of FairPlay, PlaysForSure, and the Zune, look at the PERFORM act -- which could well end up legislatively prohibiting Linux users from receiving internet radio broadcasts.
I know Slashdotters have a tendency to minimize piracy as a real motivation for the RIAA's actions, but while piracy may actually be a nontrivial motivator, stopping it is not the end game. There are many more dollars to be made by manipulating the future frequency with which you buy new equipment, operating systems, software & replacement content than by stopping piracy now. Media companies are not concerned with what their legal and moral rights are, as these don't have near the investment value that an equipment, content & delivery oligopoly does.
In my limited experience, libavcodec's MP4 compressor (also GPL, if I'm not mistaken) is between 50% and 100% faster than XviD's. Is PCIe the kind of animal where, if you had a machine with multiple slots, you could use one slot for input, sampling and ADC chores, and direct blast the bits to the other board (to handle encoding & muxing) straight across the PCIe bus without having to hit the other mobo bottlenecks?
All the Archos units I could find seemed to lack YPbPr *in*, though provided it as output.
Thanks for the kind words re: programming, though keep in mind that I hail from a VB background.;-) I'd love to learn the low-level stuff someday, time permitting, though binary arithmetic gives me fits.
At any rate, this is an exciting project if you take it up. I'll drop you a line shortly so we can collude outside of/.
For the HD Extreme, you'd have to adapt the YPrPb component outs to the card's YUV BNC inputs. I'm not sure how compatible all the signal processing is from there between the formats the Decklink expects and your average consumer analog component AV signal. Might be worth some investigation, though.
The HDMI, unfortunately, would run into HDCP issues, which is what the whole Component Capture subject is about trying to avoid. I don't think that card is HDCP compliant, but even if it is, I don't think a HDCP licensee would be allowed to make a card that would capture into an unencumbered format, so you'd still be stuck with DRMd content, not quite the plain old MP4 we're looking for.
1: Yes, without a doubt. If you build it, they will come.;-) There are already some PRO level component-in cards in the $1000 - $3000 price range (Blackmagic Decklink, Aja Xena LHe), but for the purposes of recording full-length HD content, they'd be prone to all the data rate problems already discussed here. To close the sale, the device would need *some* kind of simple data-dump interface that would work on an average PC with an average SATA drive. Since you seem to know low-level DMA programming, maybe the best strategy would be a self-contained recording device, where you just add your own HDD & go? Here's a player version of what I'm talking about: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16855182001. If something like that had a "record" button, I really think it would start a feeding frenzy, even at $2000-ish.
2: In today's market, I could see it being worth another ~$500 if you had a PCI and/or USB version of the device that did for HD component + analog audio input what a Hauppauge or ADS or Pinnacle device does for S-Video input. The price would have to fall eventually, of course, but I think $2,500 would be about right for the early-adopter market (i.e., before you could figure out how to get any economies of scale in the production process). For example, my Hauppauge PVR-150 will (a) tune my cable box via an IR blaster, (b) compress the captured S-Video stream to MPEG2, and (c) provide the muxed stream to a video input device channel that Windows recognizes. It's also compatible for use as a tuner card with Media Center, so some kind of drivers "know" that the IR-blaster & S-Video input "go together." If you are competent at writing Windows video capture source device drivers, then that might be the way to go (though I'd imagine that would add some serious levels of complexity.)
3: VideoHelp is one spot, yes; I'd also recommend checking out the HTPC area at AVS Forums: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f= 26/. If the word got out between those places and Doom9, maybe TheGreenButton.com and a few MythTv forums too, I think the sales momentum would take care of itself from there.
For starters, I'd say figure out if the boards you can program can indeed handle the input & scaling end of the deal. Then try finding out what it would take to get your board's output into MEncoder. On a Windows machine, I convert OTA HDTV streams from 1920*1080i MPEG-2 to 720*405 29.97fps MP4 w/AC3 audio (FFMPEG does the audio), and I can usually damn near run at realtime speeds (above 30fps) on an AMD 3800 X2. That's what makes me optimistic that a dedicated encoder based on MEncoder's code could do the job. Could one get 1080i/30 scaled to 720p/29.97 in hardware, perhaps using a GPU along with libavcodec's support for bicubic hardware scaling?
If you're really thinking about productizing this, I think the big decisions amount to deciding if your skill set is more suited to making a standalone device, or to going the extra mile to write device drivers for Linux and/or Windows. The icing on the latter option woudl be to add some sort of ability to bind to a tuner control / IR emitter, but that's probably not *strictly* necessary as it could be done with separate hardware & simpler, more platform specific software, I suppose.
I'm just a lowly C# programmer myself, but if there's anything I can do to help, or any alpha-testing I could do, please don't hesistate to hit me up.
Many people have gotten used to being able to casually record what they wish. If new DRM measures frustrate them enough, then the market for the dedicated pirates will expand.
I have HDTV cable service, but cannot get HD from my cable box to my Media Center PC. If some cable channel runs a High Def program that I'd like to *timeshift* in HD, well, tough.
Due to Media Center DRM, I also cannot play CSS encrypted DVDs to my HDTV unless I (a) set the resolution down to 480i, (b) decrypt the DVD to an.iso & play that, or (c) use on-the-fly CSS removal software.
So here, without even wanting access to any content I haven't paid for, I'm part of the market for DRM-defeating devices & software. With the direction the MAFIAA is making things go, I'm not far from being part of the market for pirated Dual Layer DVDs with high-def XviDs or MP4s of my favorite content. I pay my cable bill, my premium channel fees, my HD service fees, and my Netflix subscription. Basically, I've payed for just about every version of any media content that's available, so these draconian DRM measures are accomplishing little more than making me lose respect for content providers.
If you can actually pull this off, you could have a sizable customer base in very short order.
I've been actively looking for a solution like this for some time. Actually, it'd need a bit of tweaking for my purposes -- component video + analog stereo inputs into the ADC (instead of DVI or HDMI), and ideally, on-the-fly downscaling from 1080i to 720p & then compressing to MP4 / XviD or the like. MEncoder's latest mp4 compressors are damn fast, and that could probably actually keep up if someone implemented it in hardware. Then it's just a matter of interfacing to USB out or something, much like a Dvico Fusion USB would.
With as many people as are putting as much effort as they are into finding such a device, I'm really surprised that it's not cheaply available already if manufacturing it is really feasible. Videohelp & AVS's forums constantly have running threads full of people willing to pay $2000-ish for something that works, even if it's just a MacGyvered bunch of boards with the right I/O somewhere on 'em.
So basically, a big unmet demand is there. Economics would suggest that if economical manufacture was feasible, supply would already exist. I wish your project luck though, and be sure to hit me up for a couple grand if you can build it.
I see your point, but not *all* forced conformity is eeeevil.
When I see some asshat park his Beamer diagonally across 4 prime spots in a crowded parking lot, or change lanes into a lane that's ending just to force his way into a gapless line of traffic ¼ mile up, I'd like him to conform to my notion of civilized behavior. I'm too lazy to actually film him myself & Tube the video, but I'd defend someone else's prerogative to do so.
On the other hand, the goofy, perpetually drunk & shirtless dude that lives in the building next to me & roams the complex talking to whoever will listen... well, he'd look goofy & probably amusing on YouTube, and I could post it & then have a good laugh over it with all my sensible neighbors, but I don't consider his odd behavior worthy of something like that.
Although some people find it impolite and annoying, I personally could give a rats ass if you talk on your cell phone at the next table at some restaurant. If you were pissing in the coffee pot at work, though, well... I guess conformance in and of itself is neutral, and must be judged according to the thing that is being conformed to.
It is bizarre, and I'm a bit baffled and academically curious to explain it myself. It's a pretty recent thing, and it's only in GMail.
I think it has something to do with a perceived disparity between GMail's pages vs. the 'average' web page in terms of (a) their elegance & simplicity, and (b) the usefulness of their incidental / extraneous content.
Perhaps I'm too accustomed to the "manual approach," i.e. avoiding links altogether, typing command lines & URLs instead of using bookmarks, typing search phrases instead of clicking search links, etc. By the intelligence of their offerings, Google has challenged some of my entrenched habits; for instance, I now search for addresses on Google proper & then click the resulting "Google map" link, instead of going to Google maps to type the address in. This approach adds a bit of address correction on the front end, I can type my text into a single search box instead of having to split it up into separate fields, and it's available right from [Ctrl + k] in Firefox.
I was also in the habit of copying UPS, USPS and FedEx tracking numbers & navigating to their respective tracking URLs to paste & track, and that for some time after Google started parsing those references & hyperlinking them automagically. That was a matter of muscle memory, most likely; in the back of my mind I *knew* Google parsed & linked those, but I would already be on UPS's site before I really became conscious of the fact that I could have saved steps by just using the link.
Maybe now I'm forming a new pattern of web behavior that's Google (or GMail) specific. I'm not sure, but after enough instances where the "Google way" turned out to be simpler than "my way," I'm starting to reflexively look for the "Google way" more and more.
I think that unlike most other companies -- who constantly try to find ways to jam more annoying bs into my field of attention -- Google has consistently surprised me with stuff that's actually useful & time saving. My old habits were borne of the former kind of web experience. So ultimately, I think Google's behavior has caused me to have a different (better) set of expectations regarding their incidental content.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find out if Nextag has Fourier transforms in stock & ready to ship...
Slashdot Mirror
You know, you hit on a great PR idea there; the EFF can finally educate people about what HDCP is in a catchy, memorable way.
Bravo!
I *hope* people get fed up and annoyed.
As expert geeks (geexperts?), many of us could encourage acquaintances to buy non-HDCP equipment ("you'll have so many less problems if you get the one without HDCP, get the one with just component video"), just so they'll be pissed when companies make devices without component out.
"If you get the non-HDCP, it won't work with much for the next couple years, but then when nobody's buying the HDCP crap, the market will come back to component & you'll have a great device that'll last a long time. If you get the HDCP set, it'll work right now, but when the hacker in Sweden uses the same set to crack a movie next year, Sony will revoke its license and tell your cable provider, who will electronically inform your cable box, DVD player, PS3 & Blu-VD thingies that you're now unauthorized, and your set will henceforth be permanently b0rked... your choice!"
Really, laws regulations and initiatives like this (and this and this and this) make it increasingly necessary for the Powers that Be(tm) to think about criminalizing online anonymity altogether, lest the bureaucracy be powerless to enforce their will.
And with so few people who even know they should care about this, who's to stop it? Unless Tor and I2P get encapsulated within programs that millions of people use (à la Torpark), well... if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it...
Transparency *in* government is all well and good.
Monitoring those who want to petition, criticize or *change* government is another matter entirely.
...is that it negates the right to anonymous political speech.
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/
You *cannot* know where the money is coming from for every bit of political activism you come across. Elected officials' campaign funding sources, maybe. Gifts made to those officials? Maybe that too. Beyond that, you have no right to know that supersedes my right to political speech with no requirement that I reveal my identity or disclose anything else about myself. In order for the government to facilitate that ability for you, it would need to do such severe damage to the first amendment that we might as well not even concern ourselves with government reform any longer.
Do not put weapons into the hands of your friends that you would not want wielded by your enemies.
If someone is working under a grant from the Mozilla Foundation, does that invalidate their paper on the relative security of IE vs. Firefox?
Good god, on Slashdot of all places I'd have thought people would evaluate arguments on their own merits, not on the motivations of the author, which are meaningless.
Some authoritative writer can be paid by the DNC to put out an article about the urgency of global warming, and some authoritative writer can be paid by the RNC to put out an article on the economic crisis that will follow if some new tax is enacted. The fact that they were paid doesn't make their arguments any different from those of the independent professor at the university. If they fudged the data, they fudged the data, and the proof of that is in what they wrote, not in their bank statement.
If this legislation conflicts with the right to anonymous political speech, who wins?
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/
Trying to draw fine lines like "it's just PAID writers we're talking about" around the issue does not give the government the authority to regulate political speech in any way. If you're okay with giving our elected officials the power to weasel around the bill of rights, then why stop with regulating political speech? Why not allow data seizure without warrants too -- after all, if someone fails to register and report their political writings, then they've deliberately concealed information from the government, right?
What reforms or improvements in the honesty of our government do people really think is going to come of this? Is it *really* going accomplish something worth shattering the first amendment over?
I previewed an 11th hour rider to the bill which covers that as follows: "Server logs must be written only by Trusted Hardware, signed with an HDCP key issued to Licensed Server Operators by the Office of Punditry Regulation, stored in a Windows(tm) Vista(tm) encrypted filesystem, submitted unaltered on an hourly basis to the Office of Punditry Regulation, and must not be readable nor writable by authors and administrators associated with said server, under penalties outlined in the DMCA."
I'm moving to Sealand...
That's all.
...Are you really saying "being paid to write and distributing a pamphlet" is so fundamentally different from "being paid to write and distribute a pamp^H^H^H^H BLOG! ON THE INTERNET!" that it should abide by a second set of laws?To put things in perspective, Slashdoters often complain there's fundamentally no difference in "doing X" and "doing X ON THE INTERNET!" so they shouldn't be patentable. Why did we suddenly decide "being a lobbyist" and "being a lobbyist ON THE INTERNET!" are so fundamentally different? From a readership perspective, I don't see the difference between pontificating on the internets and doing so elsewhere, nor between doing so for free and doing so for profit. If we accept this regulation, how do we measure whether an employer is of the sort that requires registration of its journalist employees? Are only the DNC & RNC covered? What about the NRA or PETA? CBS news? Fox news? How about The Heritage Foundation, or MoveOn.org? What about the Church of Scientology, or Richard Stallman...? Where does one draw the line between regulated and unregulated sponsors of published opinions?
Political speech is exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment is meant to protect. If a regulation usurps the freedom to publish political speech anonymously or pseudonymously, then that's not reform, it's a cancer.
I guess onion routers aren't just for Chinese dissidents anymore...
(By the way, I don't think bloggers and pundits should really be called "lobbyists." Lobbyists are generally folks who cajole the elected officials themselves into doing things.)
The P2P arms race eventually has to lead to something more robust... say, magnet links with structured .nfo content on Usenet, and trackers hosted across something like Gnutella, indexed by magnet ID. Usenet's good at keeping textual content accessible at a fixed location; let it do what it's good at while the distributed networks handle the tracker extensions and the scaling involved in the binary transfers.
When simple-to-install Gnutella & Bit Torrent clients are Tor-ified, do protocol switching on a dime, and have indexes & trackers that are themselves on distributed networks, I think P2P will have decidedly won the arms race.
At that point, perhaps the cartels will be forced into selling unencumbered content (or better yet, the creative people will start doing it themselves). Somebody's going to produce & distribute it; it might as well be the folks who deserve to get paid.
I looked at your site, and it looks like you create good games and deal fairly. I'd be willing to bet that most insightful /.ers, anti-DRM stance notwithstanding, would view you as one of the "good guys." Of course you have a right to be paid for your work. Since you sell it directly, I'm happy to pay you for it. I hope many others feel the same.
My problem is that I find it socially irresponsible to fund media cartels who manipulate the legal systems of various countries in an effort to artificially inflate prices and maintain a monopoly over the distribution channel.
Is that more irresponsible than pirating content? I don't know; I honestly struggle with that question. I do not believe that "information wants to be free" means that people are entitled to take and enjoy the creative works of others without paying. Doing creative work is partly an act of investment, and like any other, one of the rewards can be passive income after the work is created. Some seem to believe that people should be denied rewards on that investment if their trade happens to be creative works. I don't agree, and I don't think that view represents the majority, either.
But along the same lines, I don't believe those who control the market for content creators' products (payola, etc.) are entitled to misrepresent the revenue stream on their balance sheet & rip those artists off, either. I don't believe corporate entities are entitled to retroactively rescind the public domain status of works that have passed into that domain. I don't believe that media corporations are entitled to force internet and satellite broadcasters into using expensive, proprietary streaming formats by legislatively mandating "approved" DRM frameworks. And I don't believe that distributors or creators are entitled to multiple payments for each device I wish to use my purchased content on. Except for a few bright spots, what we've got right now is a crap system, IMO.
Ultimately, I hope a system evolves that enables me to be a good customer of the artists I like and feel good about it. You going independent is a seedling of such a system; I hope something resembling an aggregator of your distribution system becomes the norm instead of the alternative in the near future.
If I buy an HD-DVD, I cannot back it up or archive it. I will also presumably run into playback restrictions in Windows Media Center, since it will not even play regular old-fashioned DVDs with CSS protection on an HDTV at > 640 x 480 resolution because of "restrictions set by the broadcaster," even with valid CSS decoders installed.*
If one *downloads* an HD-DVD, at least the time invested yields an archivable, portable movie.
If I could pay for a legitimate copy of what the torrent offers, I would. On the other hand, I would not buy the encumbered HD-DVD at any price.
* - Without using css circumvention techniques, that is.
Excuse me, read that "FairPlay encrypted M4A" (which covers the most common species of m4a file).
And where the hell did the "Apple hating malcontent" bit come from? DRM turns my nose, yes, but in terms of that, Apple's significantly less evil than Microsoft IMO. As far as their OS, I haven't used it in about 8 or 9 years, so I literally have no opinion.
Arrgghh... beat me to it.
Where is the source code for the signature check that the hardware does? If the kernel loader is a derivative work of GPLed code, mustn't that loader be GPLed as well?
IANAL of course, but mightn't the D-Link case be precedent in that regard?
You cannot possibly be that naïve. Piracy may be real and may provide the excuse for tightening DRM, but make no mistake, DRM is *ultimately* about perpetuating a market for new hardware & replacement media, locking the market into proprietary formats like wma, wmv, rm, and m4a, and maintaining monopoly control of the distribution channel for digital media (yes, 'channel' is intentionally in the singular form).
Look at the details of LimeWire's lawsuit with the RIAA, look at the history of FairPlay, PlaysForSure, and the Zune, look at the PERFORM act -- which could well end up legislatively prohibiting Linux users from receiving internet radio broadcasts.
I know Slashdotters have a tendency to minimize piracy as a real motivation for the RIAA's actions, but while piracy may actually be a nontrivial motivator, stopping it is not the end game. There are many more dollars to be made by manipulating the future frequency with which you buy new equipment, operating systems, software & replacement content than by stopping piracy now. Media companies are not concerned with what their legal and moral rights are, as these don't have near the investment value that an equipment, content & delivery oligopoly does.
In my limited experience, libavcodec's MP4 compressor (also GPL, if I'm not mistaken) is between 50% and 100% faster than XviD's. Is PCIe the kind of animal where, if you had a machine with multiple slots, you could use one slot for input, sampling and ADC chores, and direct blast the bits to the other board (to handle encoding & muxing) straight across the PCIe bus without having to hit the other mobo bottlenecks?
;-) I'd love to learn the low-level stuff someday, time permitting, though binary arithmetic gives me fits.
/.
All the Archos units I could find seemed to lack YPbPr *in*, though provided it as output.
Thanks for the kind words re: programming, though keep in mind that I hail from a VB background.
At any rate, this is an exciting project if you take it up. I'll drop you a line shortly so we can collude outside of
Cheers!
For the HD Extreme, you'd have to adapt the YPrPb component outs to the card's YUV BNC inputs. I'm not sure how compatible all the signal processing is from there between the formats the Decklink expects and your average consumer analog component AV signal. Might be worth some investigation, though.
The HDMI, unfortunately, would run into HDCP issues, which is what the whole Component Capture subject is about trying to avoid. I don't think that card is HDCP compliant, but even if it is, I don't think a HDCP licensee would be allowed to make a card that would capture into an unencumbered format, so you'd still be stuck with DRMd content, not quite the plain old MP4 we're looking for.
1: Yes, without a doubt. If you build it, they will come. ;-) There are already some PRO level component-in cards in the $1000 - $3000 price range (Blackmagic Decklink, Aja Xena LHe), but for the purposes of recording full-length HD content, they'd be prone to all the data rate problems already discussed here. To close the sale, the device would need *some* kind of simple data-dump interface that would work on an average PC with an average SATA drive. Since you seem to know low-level DMA programming, maybe the best strategy would be a self-contained recording device, where you just add your own HDD & go? Here's a player version of what I'm talking about: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16855182001. If something like that had a "record" button, I really think it would start a feeding frenzy, even at $2000-ish.
= 26/. If the word got out between those places and Doom9, maybe TheGreenButton.com and a few MythTv forums too, I think the sales momentum would take care of itself from there.
2: In today's market, I could see it being worth another ~$500 if you had a PCI and/or USB version of the device that did for HD component + analog audio input what a Hauppauge or ADS or Pinnacle device does for S-Video input. The price would have to fall eventually, of course, but I think $2,500 would be about right for the early-adopter market (i.e., before you could figure out how to get any economies of scale in the production process). For example, my Hauppauge PVR-150 will (a) tune my cable box via an IR blaster, (b) compress the captured S-Video stream to MPEG2, and (c) provide the muxed stream to a video input device channel that Windows recognizes. It's also compatible for use as a tuner card with Media Center, so some kind of drivers "know" that the IR-blaster & S-Video input "go together." If you are competent at writing Windows video capture source device drivers, then that might be the way to go (though I'd imagine that would add some serious levels of complexity.)
3: VideoHelp is one spot, yes; I'd also recommend checking out the HTPC area at AVS Forums: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f
For starters, I'd say figure out if the boards you can program can indeed handle the input & scaling end of the deal. Then try finding out what it would take to get your board's output into MEncoder. On a Windows machine, I convert OTA HDTV streams from 1920*1080i MPEG-2 to 720*405 29.97fps MP4 w/AC3 audio (FFMPEG does the audio), and I can usually damn near run at realtime speeds (above 30fps) on an AMD 3800 X2. That's what makes me optimistic that a dedicated encoder based on MEncoder's code could do the job. Could one get 1080i/30 scaled to 720p/29.97 in hardware, perhaps using a GPU along with libavcodec's support for bicubic hardware scaling?
If you're really thinking about productizing this, I think the big decisions amount to deciding if your skill set is more suited to making a standalone device, or to going the extra mile to write device drivers for Linux and/or Windows. The icing on the latter option woudl be to add some sort of ability to bind to a tuner control / IR emitter, but that's probably not *strictly* necessary as it could be done with separate hardware & simpler, more platform specific software, I suppose.
I'm just a lowly C# programmer myself, but if there's anything I can do to help, or any alpha-testing I could do, please don't hesistate to hit me up.
Many people have gotten used to being able to casually record what they wish. If new DRM measures frustrate them enough, then the market for the dedicated pirates will expand.
.iso & play that, or (c) use on-the-fly CSS removal software.
I have HDTV cable service, but cannot get HD from my cable box to my Media Center PC. If some cable channel runs a High Def program that I'd like to *timeshift* in HD, well, tough.
Due to Media Center DRM, I also cannot play CSS encrypted DVDs to my HDTV unless I (a) set the resolution down to 480i, (b) decrypt the DVD to an
So here, without even wanting access to any content I haven't paid for, I'm part of the market for DRM-defeating devices & software. With the direction the MAFIAA is making things go, I'm not far from being part of the market for pirated Dual Layer DVDs with high-def XviDs or MP4s of my favorite content. I pay my cable bill, my premium channel fees, my HD service fees, and my Netflix subscription. Basically, I've payed for just about every version of any media content that's available, so these draconian DRM measures are accomplishing little more than making me lose respect for content providers.
If you can actually pull this off, you could have a sizable customer base in very short order.
I've been actively looking for a solution like this for some time. Actually, it'd need a bit of tweaking for my purposes -- component video + analog stereo inputs into the ADC (instead of DVI or HDMI), and ideally, on-the-fly downscaling from 1080i to 720p & then compressing to MP4 / XviD or the like. MEncoder's latest mp4 compressors are damn fast, and that could probably actually keep up if someone implemented it in hardware. Then it's just a matter of interfacing to USB out or something, much like a Dvico Fusion USB would.
With as many people as are putting as much effort as they are into finding such a device, I'm really surprised that it's not cheaply available already if manufacturing it is really feasible. Videohelp & AVS's forums constantly have running threads full of people willing to pay $2000-ish for something that works, even if it's just a MacGyvered bunch of boards with the right I/O somewhere on 'em.
So basically, a big unmet demand is there. Economics would suggest that if economical manufacture was feasible, supply would already exist. I wish your project luck though, and be sure to hit me up for a couple grand if you can build it.
I see your point, but not *all* forced conformity is eeeevil.
When I see some asshat park his Beamer diagonally across 4 prime spots in a crowded parking lot, or change lanes into a lane that's ending just to force his way into a gapless line of traffic ¼ mile up, I'd like him to conform to my notion of civilized behavior. I'm too lazy to actually film him myself & Tube the video, but I'd defend someone else's prerogative to do so.
On the other hand, the goofy, perpetually drunk & shirtless dude that lives in the building next to me & roams the complex talking to whoever will listen... well, he'd look goofy & probably amusing on YouTube, and I could post it & then have a good laugh over it with all my sensible neighbors, but I don't consider his odd behavior worthy of something like that.
Although some people find it impolite and annoying, I personally could give a rats ass if you talk on your cell phone at the next table at some restaurant. If you were pissing in the coffee pot at work, though, well... I guess conformance in and of itself is neutral, and must be judged according to the thing that is being conformed to.
It is bizarre, and I'm a bit baffled and academically curious to explain it myself. It's a pretty recent thing, and it's only in GMail.
I think it has something to do with a perceived disparity between GMail's pages vs. the 'average' web page in terms of (a) their elegance & simplicity, and (b) the usefulness of their incidental / extraneous content.
Perhaps I'm too accustomed to the "manual approach," i.e. avoiding links altogether, typing command lines & URLs instead of using bookmarks, typing search phrases instead of clicking search links, etc. By the intelligence of their offerings, Google has challenged some of my entrenched habits; for instance, I now search for addresses on Google proper & then click the resulting "Google map" link, instead of going to Google maps to type the address in. This approach adds a bit of address correction on the front end, I can type my text into a single search box instead of having to split it up into separate fields, and it's available right from [Ctrl + k] in Firefox.
I was also in the habit of copying UPS, USPS and FedEx tracking numbers & navigating to their respective tracking URLs to paste & track, and that for some time after Google started parsing those references & hyperlinking them automagically. That was a matter of muscle memory, most likely; in the back of my mind I *knew* Google parsed & linked those, but I would already be on UPS's site before I really became conscious of the fact that I could have saved steps by just using the link.
Maybe now I'm forming a new pattern of web behavior that's Google (or GMail) specific. I'm not sure, but after enough instances where the "Google way" turned out to be simpler than "my way," I'm starting to reflexively look for the "Google way" more and more.
I think that unlike most other companies -- who constantly try to find ways to jam more annoying bs into my field of attention -- Google has consistently surprised me with stuff that's actually useful & time saving. My old habits were borne of the former kind of web experience. So ultimately, I think Google's behavior has caused me to have a different (better) set of expectations regarding their incidental content.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find out if Nextag has Fourier transforms in stock & ready to ship...