Join the Television Digital Liberation Front! According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) it will soon be illegal to “sell or distribute in interstate commerce a Covered Demodulator Product that does not comply with the Demodulator Compliance Requirements and Demodulator Robustness Requirements.” This takes effect on July 1, 2005.
This means that if you have been thinking of using MythTV to create your own digital video recorder (in other words, a homebrew TiVo), and you want it to be able to handle HDTV signals, you have six months to buy the hardware.
Surprisingly, this technology is even crappier than the CSS encryption on DVD’s. It’s just a flag that indicates whether or not digital rights need to be enforced on the media. And since they’ve stated that legacy hardware needs to still work, regardless of the flag, all you have to do is use old hardware and it’s fine. But unlike the CSS encryption, all hardware capable of accessing the signal is required by FCC ruling to enforce it. So you won’t be able to get around this with a simple piece of software like you can with CSS.
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