[mythtv-users] Time Warner & Firewire

[Brad Templeton]

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 11:21:30AM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> I happened to be at Comcast this morning getting a replacement remote
> for my non-HD box. I managed to run into a fairly knowledgable tech
> person while I was there. She said Comcast here in the Bay Area does
> not enable 1394 by default on any box going to the field. If a
> customer calls and asks for it to be turned on they ask what equipment
> it's going to be attached to. Unless the answer is on a list of things
> they support it won't be turned on. After that she says that even

Well, I think they are violating the FCC regs by saying this.  However,
seems that you should be able to just tell them you have one of the
TVs with a DTVLink (new name for 1394 in TVs) port.  My Mitsubishi
52725 has such ports, I know that Toshiba and some RCA TVs have them.
Or perhaps one of the digital VCRs that have the ports.   I don't see
a moral issue in lying to them if they are going to break the regs.

However, at least for now the hard truth is that the ability to get
your HD -- or even your non-OTA SD -- over 1394 is likely to be a
temporary situation, something flying under the radar until they notice
it.   I can understand why they are leaving the 5C off at first.
DRM systems can cause a great deal of user trouble and incompatibility
even for people who have the blessed equipment.

But once a lot of people start using this, particularly if they find
a lot of torrents sourced from people who got 1394 output of programs,
then weenies at the studios will start calling the cable companies and
forcing them to turn on the copy prevention and 5C stuff.

However, it's certainly great to have until that happens.  For now,
tuner cards are legal again, but there's no clear path to the abliity 
of a Mythbox to record non-OTA HD shows in a way that will remain
stable.  We're not too far away from people making cheap 720p capture
equipment, in fact I think it could be done if people saw the market
for it (which they will as consumers start demanding 720p camcorders,
which won't need the A2D but will need the compressing chips).

Unfortunately, it will always be a kludge to convert digital to
analog and then re-capture and re-compress/transcode it.  You will
spend a lot to get (probably) larger recordings that are not as good.

Digital capture (DVI) would technically make it possible, if you compressed
with exactly the same algorithms and parameters as the original source,
to get approximately the same file out as came in, just with a lot of
work.