Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
On Monday 14 February 2005 6:49, Cory Papenfuss wrote:Well, why does it have to be a PCI card? Whose to say it wont be some other proprietary device, or even a combo of both, fit PCI card into PC, then connect wire(s) in some new interface. You have to hook your cable or cable box to the 'other' device.
The bigger question is whether or not there will ever be a linux-friendly implementation of the CableCard. When cable companies go to all (or almost all) digital, homebrew PVRs will be marginalized if they can't play encrypted streams. Piracy issues notwithstanding, playing encrypted content is something that you should be able to do if you're paying for the service. It shouldn't matter what kind of box you want to do it with.
Kind of ironic, but I have to say it's quite possible that Microsoft might actually be a help in this... for Windows MCE to suceed in the long-term, it's going to need to be able to record & play back digital cable content. Tivo has already announced a CableCard Tivo box. Microsoft will need to have a PCI card that can tune QAM *and* decrypt the stream (probably via CableCard) if they want to compete. With Microsoft support, you can bet such a card will eventually be developed. Then it's just a question of obtaining one (they might only be OEM) and reverse-engineering a driver (you can bet the manufacturer won't release specs on the card without a license and/or NDA).
Of course, even the idea of having a PCI card that works in a standard PC goes against parts of the FCC's broadcast flag mandate, because it would be too easy to hack. I'm interested to see how Microsoft addresses this challenge, but they most certainly will address it. Of course, it will probably involve industry collusion, proprietary DRM and possibly a 'trusted computing' platform, but the important first step is to get a card that fits in a slot!
-JAC
If they did use PCI, and all the above happened as you said, wouldnt this then trigger the FCCs robustness rule for the broadcast flag(my shorthand)? Wouldnt that be seen as defeat of the broadcast flag which would mean that it triggers a reissuing of the broadcast flag 'keys/pairs' etc.? Only way I can see any sort of device every working in a consumer level hardware made after July 05 for Linux is if the broadcast flag is declared illegal/invalidated. Im just afraid that from here on out, its just going to get harder for this issue and Linux.
Tom _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
