[kwlug-disc] Future of [Rogers] PVR (wrt HDMI)? Black boxes? MythBuntu?

[unsolicited]

Andrew Kohlsmith (Mailing List Account) wrote, On 09/15/2009 8:14 AM:
> On September 9, 2009 10:45:09 am Colin Mackay wrote:
>> At the moment, I am not certain if the HDMI output on Rogers or Bell
>> receivers actually uses HDCP or not.  It probably can be turned on rather
>> quickly, if it's not already.
> 
> They most certainly do.  In fact, the HD receivers that Rogers ships don't 
> even allow you to stream content out of the FireWire port. I tried this last 
> month.  Very disappointing.

Last I looked, all Rogers boxes are Scientific Atlanta (taken over by 
Cisco). Pretty much any Scientific Atlanta box is acceptable as a 
Digital Terminal, you just have to call up Rogers and let them know. 
(Not all SA boxes have HDMI out. And some are PVR's.) Much like firing 
up a non-carrier non-gsm cell. [Determining this took quite some 
searching of the Roger's site and '{search term} site:rogers.com' type 
googling.] Not much difference between disabling features on these SA 
boxes and doing the same on a cell. <sigh>

Any encounters with people hacking their SA box to (re)enable these 
disabled features? e.g. Firewire?

	Let alone the USB ports being used as storage devices. At least, 
then, perhaps, you could walk it over to your computer and copy the 
content off. <He dreams.>

> I'm buying an 8' Yagi and LNA, mounting it on the roof and aiming it at the CN 
> Tower. I'll be downloading my specialty content and pulling in CBC, CITY, 
> Omni1/2 and Global in HD from Toronto.

Keep us posted as to your progress and success, please.

(Apparently an alternative is RSS/podcasts. Yeah, right. What's the 
point of having a TV to see these tiny, tiny little ... <bah>.)

> I'm tired of this crap.

You and me both, and a lot of other people too. And it doesn't seem to 
matter, given the Bell/Rogers monopoly. If the new Copyright bill ever 
does get passed, I doubt it will help.

I just want to be able to play back content I've paid for, at a time 
convenient to me, using my own non-restricted equipment, in my own 
non-restricted way. Evidently this isn't considered reasonable. <sigh>

>> Of course, for the time being, there are HDCP strippers out there, but
>> they'll only work as long as the keys aren't revoked:
> 
> The problem with capturing the HDMI content is that you still have to encode 
> it again to get reasonable storage capability. I'd thought about this as well, 
> and short of building an HDMI-to-H264 PCI or PCIe board, it's not very 
> practical.  OpenCores has all you need if you're looking to do it, though...

No doubt a reasonable (quick, easy, cheap) solution will surface. It's 
just hurry up and wait. But no (small) critical mass will occur until 
some time after Rogers stops analogue transmission. [Which is 
probably, my guess, not 'til after 9/1/11 when Canada goes all 
digital. Currently, digital only content is copied to the analogue 
stream. I expect that will stop, and Roger's bottom line will take a 
sudden leap forward into deep gravy train territory.]