TiVo OS Update Adds Content Protection 615
generic-man writes "According to PVRBlog, TiVo's new operating system update enables content protection flags on a per-show basis. On some programs, notably syndicated shows, a red flag appears to indicate that the copyright holder has requested that TiVo devices not save a program past a certain date and that the program may not be copied to a PC using TiVo to Go. TiVo users were told to expect this style of flag only on pay-per-view and video on demand programming, and as such are upset that TiVo has restricted the capabilities of the receivers they bought and subscribed to use. The TiVo Community boards have some screen shots and firsthand accounts."
MythTV (Score:5, Interesting)
Just one more good reason to bite the bullet, sit down, and build yourself a MythTV box. [mythtv.org]
There's a good walkthrough on building a MythTV box over on O'Reilly Digital Media [oreilly.com], and another on the Electronic Frontier Foundation [eff.org].
7 days? (Score:2, Interesting)
They limited the particular program stored to only 7 days?!?! That's ridiculous.
So much for saving your favorite concerts, as I have done.
(I just hope my ReplayTV doesn't head toward this...)
Relevant question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MythTV (Score:3, Interesting)
Directivo too? (Score:1, Interesting)
Advantages to living in the cracks (Score:5, Interesting)
Replay got sued for the automatic commercial skip, but once that PVR had been thoroughly surpassed in numbers by Tivo, attention shifted elsewhere and now the only people who know about Replay are the owners.
1. I can pull my shows off my Replay over the network, no broadcast flag.
2. My 5060 (w/ the requisite hard drive upgrade, of course) still automatically skips commercials. They aren't taking away features I bought, and I appreciate it.
3. There's no pop-up advertisements like Tivo has. There just isn't the money in doing stuff like that because the user base is so small (but the development effort doesn't get cheaper as a result).
You can see some of the same stuff happening with Apple. The Macintosh has, lately, demonstrated less enthusiasm about adopting the various DRM flavor of the month technologies that the Windows PC has. This is in part because there isn't the same level of scrutiny, and also because the development effort of adding that stuff doesn't amortize across the user base as well. I'm sure there are other 'do no evil' type considerations and whatnot, but money is the real motive power to be reckoned with.
I sometimes wonder what the implications are for the rest of society. Do I, the middle class anonymous guy have more freedom than the popular, rich people? Probably. There's no media scrutiny of my every move, if I had a T-mobile Sidekick, nobody would bother trying to break into it, I can post diatribes to slashdot without apologizing via a press release, and so on.
Just a thought on the trade offs between being comfortable and caged in the living room above versus being a bit cramped, but living the freedom that only the unknown can claim...
DVD restrictions (Score:2, Interesting)
SageTV anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
MythTv is awesome too, from what I hear.
Now what does Tivo actually DO? (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, I understand why you can't play emulators or rip DVDs (that I bought) with Tivo, but now you can't even record TV shows permanently? I mean, isn't that the whole point of getting a Tivo in the first place?
good bye tivo (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:BUG!!!! (Score:1, Interesting)
SOURCE:
Discussion Thread from the tivo community blog
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.p
Pissedmonkey quote:
"And the real joke is that I'm using attenna reception, no cable, no satellite. (Yes yes, I know it doesn't make sense. I moved to the woods, and I'm 0.3 of a mile out of Time Warner's service area. Also, trees are too dense for satellite.)"
Re:BUG!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, no. I think you can get about any desired reliability by just making the signal sufficiently strong and sufficiently spread out. The fact that this didn't work out in this case shows that the implementation is either bad or BAD [catb.org]. In the first case, it can be fixed by TiVo. In the second case, it's likely that the users are screwed, because the big corps probably don't care that you can't copy even the shows that don't have the flag set.
I don't think you get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying MythTV doesn't have its benefits, but it certainly isn't a replacement for my TiVo.
Replay TV here I come .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting read, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That's fine for us ... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't care enough to do tech support, what do you care about this latest TiVO development? I.e. why mention the trouble your parents would have with MythTV at all?
It was a good run, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
This initial incident seems to have been caused by a big that has highlighted a legitimate feature, but the cat is out of the bag now.
Here is my problem with this.
Tivo changed the way I watch TV, but perhaps it changed it more than they thought it would. I have no problem recording a show and not watching it for a few weeks, then sitting down on night and catching up on a months worth of new episodes. If the show gets dumped after 5 days, well, then I'm not going to see it.
So now, depending on the network's whims, my Tivo box may have just become much less usefull. I can tell you 2 things that I will NOT be doing.
1) Changing my TV viewing habits back to where I work around the shows schedule. There are precious few shows that I;m now going to rearrange my schedule around.
2) Buy another Tivo. I was considering replacing my lifetime service series 1 with a lifetime service hacked series 2 (waiting for HDTV), however, it looks like this will be much less useful than what I am used to having.
Sorry Tivo. It was a good run, but the other options are looking better and better all the time.
Re:That's fine for us ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently, however, I've taken another fstab at it using Gentoo. I've come to learn much more about Linux that I've ever understood, thanks to the crisp documentation and hands-on aspect of Gentoo.
Thus far, my experiences with building MythTV on Gentoo, with all sorts of crazy features (gaming, VFD text displays, universal remote support, PS2 gamepads, HDTV capture and TV output, etc) has been extremely positive.
My problem now? Spending absurd amounts of money modding the hell out of my MythTV box. I bought one of those dedicated Media PC cases, and am going crazy installing lighted pushbutton switches, rewiring my PSU to be like an XConnect, running neon lights all over the place, soundproofing the heck out of the machine. I've spent almost $2k on this box! But, it has Dual layer DVD-R, half terabyte of hard drive space, can record two HD channels, and looks more A/V than my A/V receiver! Buying a similar box from Sony costs about $1,200, which doesn't let you play games, run Windows apps via Wine, or have file sharing and version control services.
I'll take that over Tivo any day of the week for $2000, Alex! And now I don't have to worry about some product manufacturer farking around with my rights after I've bought a lifetime subscription to their service.
Re:That's fine for us ... (Score:3, Interesting)
As for building DVRs without a fee, there are companies that sell pre-built MythTV boxes. They cost more than TiVo plus lifetime, though.
Re:That's fine for us ... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, this summer I found out that my BIOS had an optional setting to automatically cut power if it thought the MB temperature was too high. The machine had been crunching on shows for months, but once the warm season arrived, it would mysteriously power down with no warning during long transcoding jobs. It took me a little while to figure out what was going on and turn off that option (the MB really wasn't getting all that hot; the threshold was just set way too low).
I've had video card driver I/O errors lock up the machine more than once.
Once an error at the Zap2it server caused the entire program guide database to empty out, so recording stopped until I reloaded it.
The latest screwup was somebody left the CD tray slightly open and then closed the front access door so the tray was stuck between open and closed. The kernel started logging millions of messages about not being able to access the CD drive. After a couple of days, it filled up the OS partition and MythTV stopped working.
MythTV has a lot of compelling features that make it worth it for me to maintain it, but I would never consider taking on the hassle of doing it for someone else. People tend to think that the shows they record are a high priority, so of course any problems have to be fixed NOW. It's bad enough answering to members of my own household when the thing starts messing up, much less handling the crisis for someone else on a phone help line.
Re:That's fine for us ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't think you get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
MythTV is like a lifelong friend. It may not be as soft and curvy, and it might not flirt with you. But it won't wake up one morning and start deleting your belongings either.
Re:That's fine for us ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not trying to start a flamefest, but it seems that for everyone that says "ewww, you use EXT3" there is one that says "ewww, Reiser is teh suck!".
How does tivo records it's data, anyway? Some custom filesystem?
Re:That's fine for us ... (Score:1, Interesting)
The fsck took almost an hour, but I had all my 300GB of data from that drive at the end of it, even though my dmesg was full of drive error reports.
Namesys has earned my confidence with their software.
Funny, I feel the same way about Ultimate TV (Score:3, Interesting)
The menus are much simplier to navigate, the +30/-7 second skip is perfect, the keyboard has a nice layout (A little bulky, but comes in handy for searches). Nothing else comes close.
Maybe it's just that we like what we are used to?
Re:I don't think you get it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Thing is, I don't have much to complain about in this situation. Of my six TiVos, the three Series1 units don't have this restriction and likely never will, two of them having $6.95/month service and the third having never been subscribed (and is full and idle). Of the three Series2 units, two of them are lifetime service ($199 ea. transferred from the Series1 units) and the other is prepaid for 1 year of service (equating to 22+ months of service at $6.95/mo.).
There's no reason for me to discontinue guide data service on the units unaffected by this change and less reason to give up service already paid for on the others.
I can however use the Series1 units preferentially over the Series2 units for any programming that seeks to exert control over my retention habits and look into boxes that filter out this variation of the Macrovision copy protection or otherwise disable the TiVo's ability to recognize it.
So far I've seen no restrictions on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, the most likely show to be affected by restrictions in my set of recorded shows with HBO threatening to protect all their shows. Sports? I'd rather listen to the game on the radio than pay for PPV sports.
(Normally service is $12.95/mo., but up to 5 additional units in the same home are only $6.95/mo. each, but a one year commitment is now attached. Lifetime service fee is now $299.)
Re:I don't think you get it... (Score:4, Interesting)
He might as well have said... "OOOhhhh! Pretty buttons! Weeee!!! Look! They so shiny! Me likey the pretty buttons!"
But he didn't say that. He said the UI was "thoughtfully designed" and he's exactly correct. Just because you don't like TiVo's interface (I've got some small bones to pick with it, but have been consistently pleased with how it behaves, and the ease with which you can get into a rythm with skipping annoying segments, etc) doesn't mean that someone who does find it well designed isn't thinking about the larger picture.
You seem to be implying that the presence of a pleasant UI somehow precludes real functionality. So... non-hardcore-geeks who like the way a Mac interface looks/feels should be considered losers, and the Mac itself must therefore be trash? Extend your lame car analogy to iPod shopping, while you're at it. A lot of people would consider the iPod to have severly limited, or misplaced resources/UI. So, the people that find it just right, as it is and for what it costs, are... what... part of the great unwashed "so many of you" that you're stooping to lecture? I'd be curious to hear what OS you use. No, never mind. I'd be more curious to hear what your "rocket scientist" grandmother uses (for, surely she must be one, right?).
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
My car can 'theoretically' go up to 240km/h. The damned thing has a governor/limiter installed in it that won't let the car go faster than 180km/h. Solution, get rid of the governor.
Why can't we do the same with the TIVO? It might be a gray area, but it's your device since you purchased it (not renting it), so you can modify it... or am I missing something?
Re:You miss the point (Score:1, Interesting)
After your contract expires and/or you buy the phone outright, you are indeed correct that the unit is yours to use. However, to say that cell phone providers in this country do not provide any form of subsidy in purchasing is patently false.
To be frank, if you're the kind of person who will take a one- to two-year-old phone and reuse it on another provider, your old provider would probably be glad to see you go as they couldn't milk you on a new handset with your contract renewal (unless, of course, you're on the $150/month business plan).
All in all, be sure to check the agreement you sign with a new handset purchase. You'll notice that a new contract with a new handset requires two signatures; take a minute and read the fine print before you talk about racketeering. "A sucker is born every minute" or some such.