I'm not there yet but I'm not likely to give my money to the bad guys when I give up. I'd like to have a video source and library that does not depend on some third party's permission scheme. The problem is digital restrictions that should be against the law:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/20/2322202 The ultimate price is not $5/month, it's technological stagnation. HDTV today reminds me of MTV and the early days of cable TV. High quality, commercial free entertainment did not last many years. Competition never arrived and the broadcasts are hardly better than broadcast used to be. HDTV today looks like a come on to get people hooked into the secure path, and the game is rigged. There are land mines at every step of the way from patents on obvious compression routines, DMCA outlawing of DeCSS to civil lawsuits that can strip you of everything for "making unauthorized copies". We should stand up to this nonsense now and not give our money to people who have trampled our freedoms and will do worse in the future. If you think you miss cable+VHS now, just wait a while. Big media has done nothing but consolidate over the last 40 years. If you think restrictions on entertainment are bad, imagine future libraries ruled by the same greed. BT878 based cards work well enough but will be increasingly difficult to use. I've made 640x480 movies that stand up to SD quality and are good enough for entertainment. CPU hit is not significant on a 1GHz machine, which is modest now. My wife and I mostly watch YouTube and analog DVDs and neither of us care about seeing actor's pimples. The kids get PBS, DVDs and tapes of the same. It would be very easy for us to replace our ancient CRT TV with a monitor and PC. Still, I can see that VHS and DVD have already been consigned to oblivion along with analog output that the card requires. On Tuesday 20 November 2007 1:21 pm, -ray wrote: > I'm in the same boat. ?I gave up on MythTV/SageTV/BeyondTV/etc. ?Maybe i'm > getting old. ?Tinkering with the hardware/software is fun, and you learn a > lot. ?But at the end of the day, I just want to watch TV. ?The Tivo > hardware is cheap, the software works, and the $10/month is worth it to > me.
