CableCARD In-Depth

Atvtg writes "Ars Technica has an excellent article on CableCARD, and where it's heading. After discussing the history of the initiative and some of the technical details, they cover how CableCARD may meet its end shortly after the launch of 2.0 (the bi-directional spec) because of DCAS. The real surprise, however, is that CableLabs, which controls the CableCARD spec, has to certify computers to use CableCARDs for DVRs and the like. Ars points out that the upshot of this is that it will not be possible to build your own DVRs using CableCARDs. Will this kill the DIY market?"

Lars Technica

[Anonymous Coward]

wasn't he in metallica? a real jack-of-all-trades, this one.

The reality is...

[Bullfish]

They would love to do away the DIY market, not just for the mark-up they can hit people who want PVRs with, but because in the DIY market it is much harder if not impossible to enforce DRM. Having failed for the nonce with the broadcast flag, there are going to be other attempts to bring the hobbyist to heel. Cable card wars will be one of them.

Locked down and out

[digitaldc]

Despite all the DRM technology being built into our TVs, PCs, and DVRs, copying and fair use will still be allowed so long as the content providers do not flag their material with the most draconian copy-control settings.
Welcome to the future of digital television--it has never looked so good, and never looked more locked down.

If this is the future of television, it looks pretty bleak.
I guess we MIGHT be able to use our DVRs, but not if the content providers say no.

kill the DIY Market? I think not

[monkeyserver.com]

You can't kill the DIY market, because they will always be there. They create demand, and where there's demand, there's supply. It's what commerce is built on. Yes, the end game that those fat cats want is to control everything from lens to living room, but people outside that system will find a way. It may be illegal at first, it may be bread boards for a while. It might be something you have to import, but in the end, DIY will still be there.

The real question is, Will DIY really mean DIY, instead of buying a computer, adding a capture card, and installing a ready-to-go program. DIY moves in cycles, it starts as a real nitty gritty DIY where people are building stuff from spare parts, creating solutions that didn't exist. Doing it cause they just want to make it happen. then others get infected with the idea, ideas are shared, innovations fly, people collaborate. Eventually some one else wants to make a profit... blah blah blah ... I'm rambling here. But the point I'm making (somewhere) is that there is a lot of motivation here, and potential profit. So it will find a way.

I hope.

Saving Money

[akac]

I guess if this happens I can go to using my HDTV for watching movies and just saving lots of money from not using cable or DVRs.

You hit the nail - it's really the end of CABLE!

[maillemaker]

>I guess if this happens I can go to using my HDTV for watching movies and just saving lots of money from not using cable or DVRs.

You hit the nail on the head.

The day they succeed in locking down the incoming cable stream so I can't record things and watch them whenever I want to as many times as I want to is the day I no longer need the cable stream.

Already the only reason we have cable TV is because it was cheaper to order broadband internet access /with/ the cable TV than without it. Otherwise we wouldn't even have cable TV - just the internet access.

All they are doing is making TV less and less appealing to me as an entertainment medium.

Steve

Hrm....

[vertinox]

FTA:

But what about a DVR?" you ask, and with good reason. The cable company did not build all this encryption into the product only to see it thwarted by a digital video recorder that outputs an unencrypted HDTV signal to the television. Therefore, if the host device is not a display device, it is required to encrypt the video stream yet again for transmission to another device. This last type of encryption is "link encryption" such as HDCP, which Vista will also require between the PC and the monitor in order to display protected content in its full high resolution glory. It is likely that other operating systems (e.g., Mac OS X) as well as consumer electronics will use HDCP too.

Someone is obviously spending a lot of research time and money that won't really improve their product.

I mean seriously, if your company is spending money (and lots of it) on technology just to restrict what a customer can do by removing features, then you might as well be shoveling money into a gaping fire pit of doom.

For an anology as think it as if a Microsoft Office project manager showed up at a meeting and said "Hey guys! I'm going to get us a million dollar budget so we can find out how to remove the Save feature for Word and Excel! Our customers will be so pleased they'll buy two copies of Office for every computer they own!"

They have put a great deal of effort into something that won't earn them a cent of profit. The majority of people who were going to use DVR aren't going to pay twice for things and if you try to force them to then they'll probaly go elsewhere for their movies (DVD, satellite, or iTunes Video).

On the flip side, I'm sure it keeps techy engineers employed helping them spend all this money on HDCP.

Re:It won't kill the DIY market ...

[tgd]

The beauty of that is they don't care. Not in the slightest.

The cable companies are not making these calls, its the media companies forcing it on them. If the cable companies lose 1% of people in order to be able to continue to provide content for the 99% who don't care, if you think they spent even a millisecond worrying about you as a customer, you're horribly mistaken.

If you want to see the mainstream media, you play by their rules. You can try going anywhere you want, but the same restrictions are coming for satellite. Via the broadcast flag, they will eventually come for OTA as well.

Re:You hit the nail - it's really the end of CABLE

[NoMaster]

The day they succeed in locking down the incoming cable stream so I can't record things and watch them whenever I want to as many times as I want to is the day I no longer need the cable stream.

Yes, but until then you're still giving them $60/Mo...

Why not stop now?

What you're doing is more like an abusive/dysfunctional relationship than anything else - you know you're going to be smacked hard and beaten to a pulp in the future, but until that actually happens you'll stick with it because, damn it, you're enjoying yourself NOW!

Re:HDTV

[Jherek Carnelian]

Nobody is going to be passing this stuff around the net, or archiving it, or much of anything, DRM or not, - it's just too darn big.

Yeah, and 640K is more RAM than anyone will ever need.

Gotta break it to you - people are already passing this stuff around on the net and have been doing so wide-scale for almost 2 years. Furthermore, that ~35GB mpeg2 of about 4 hours of superbowl can be relatively easily converted to ~8GB or less of h.264 with little perciptible loss of quality. HD movies which tend to run 10-20GB in mpeg2 can be similarly re-encoded with h.264 to ~4.5GB to fit on a single DVD-R.

Any copy-prevention scheme that relies on "its too big to copy" has a life-time of months nowadays.

A minor hurdle...

[evilviper]

Are any Linux users playing DVDs on their systems? Are you watching MPEG videos and MP3s? Did you pay the required license fees to do so? Then why do you care that a DIY HDTV PVR will now be (borderline) illegal as well? People want freedom, but they aren't willing to make any sacrifice to get it. So here we are.

If you want to see a change, people need to cancel their monthly subscriptions en masse, and stick to OTA out of spite. Or, just don't pay the additional charge to upgrade the equipment and subscription to HD.

The only thing worse to the entertainment industry than theoretical money lost due to copying, is real money lost, due to lots of people refusing to accept their restrictions...