The Broadcast Flag, She Is Dead : Gizmodo
Maybe it shouldn't -- but it kinda surprises me how quickly this saga seems to be coming to resolution, but the broadcast flag appears to be dead for good. And we have a republican from Texas to thank?
2005
TV Executives couldn't care less about Consumers
Edward Felton (Freedom to Tinker) has a blog entry about what the Television Network executives have to say about the Broadcast Flag, and how it can negatively impact device compatibility. To sum it up, Rick Lane, vice president of government affairs at News Corp. said: "Compatibility is not a goal". His comment was seconded by NBC Universal's Senior Counsel for Government Relations Alec French. From Ed Feltons blog:
Brad Ideas: We strike down the broadcast flag!
Happy Happy day! As Brad Templeton writes:
Brad Ideas: We strike down the broadcast flag!
On both a personal and professional note, I am happy to report that the federal courts have unanimously ruled to strike down the FCC's broadcast flag (that's a PDF) due to our lawsuit against them.
cx88_dvb fun
I use MythTV (atrpms) with the pcHDTV HD-3000 card. I downloaded the 2.0 driver and compiled, and, as per the instructions, attempted to modprobe the cx88_dvb driver. I kept getting kernal errors, module mis-match errors, and on and on. Finally, after a few re-boots, rearranging of modules, etc... I got it to work. The unfortunate thing is that I really have no idea what I did, so writing up a how-to would be impossible.
Local HD channels
Setting up a channel table can be a bit of a bear when you are using the HD-3000 in DVB mode. As such there have been a few folks that I work with and around here that are interested in a dump of my channels table. Obviously this is only useful for people in the Portland, OR area, but here it is: channel.sql
Update to 0.18
I'm looking forward to getting some time to update from 0.17 to 0.18 of MythTV. Chris Pinkham updated some mythtranscode bits to help us pcHDTV folks.
FC 3 install on SATA drive - finally
I've finally gotten Fedora Core 3 installed on my SATA drive. You may remember that I had some problems getting Fedora Core 3 installers to see my sata drive (bug in sata_nv). My solution was a bit complex, but it ultimately worked:
Wendy's Blog: Legal Tags: Broadcast Flag: D.C. Circuit Asks About Standing
Wendy Seltzer (fellow MythTV HD user, and lawyer working with the EFF) has posted a bit about some progress they're making against the implementation of the Broadcast Flag.
Link: Wendy's Blog
Dvorak on MythTV
John C. Dvorak has written a small bit on MythTV for pcmag.com. There's nothing earth-shattering or revealing in his writings, but simply having Dvorak write about MythTV is yet another step bringing the 'future' technology to the masses.
Fedora Core 3... Where for art thou?
I've got some new hardware for an updated front end, and I'm dying to get it up and running on the new version of MythTV (0.17) and Fedora Core 3. It's a Shuttle SN95G5 with 1Gig of Ram, two 300Gig SATA drives and one 250Gig external (total .85 TBytes). nVidia GeForce 6600GT Vid card, pcHDTV HD-3000 High Definition capture card, Dual Layer DVD Writer and AMD 64 3200+ CPU.