Dean Christakos« MIT in the New York Times | Main | The Summer Spike In Gas Prices »
August 3, 2004
The end of Tivo?
In a continuing attempt to comment on news stories only when I actually have something to say about them, Wired informs us that HDTV broadcasts will soon come with an anti-broadcast flag to prevent Tivo users from sharing video they've received.
The next step will be that some programs will be flagged by broadcasters indicating that the programs cannot even be recorded. Flagging or encrypting digitally-encoded video to prevent it from being rebroadcast or recorded makes it very difficult to record. However, at some point, the video obviously needs to be decoded and displayed on a TV screen. As I argued earlier, once you display media to people, the media can get recorded and redistributed. Outside of preventing people from actually watching their HDTVs, there's nothing that can be done about this.
Meanwhile, a group of programmers has claimed to have figured out how to work around the HD-Tivo software in order to bypass the built-in restrictions.
However, if you want to bypass the whole process of dealing with Tivo's wranglings with the government in order to get features you actually want, you can build your own Tivo. First it requires a video encoder such as the Hauppauge 350. Next, this goes in a computer with some free software to support video-recording schedules, such Myth TV or Freevo.
Ideally, you'd set it all up in a case like this.
Other points of interest: Software to hack Series 2 Tivos
Posted by Dean at August 3, 2004 1:15 PM