Comments on: Personal Video Recorders: Ofcom consultation indicates that the BBC wants to make yours obsolete

By: nike mercurial victory fg

nike mercurial victory fg — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 03:23:36 +0000

This method is more powerful than trying to listen to many different kinds of things.

By: Nick Reynolds

Nick Reynolds — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:58:43 +0000

People who have commented here may be interested in this blog post:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/01/freeview_hd_content_management.html

Nick Reynolds (Social Media Executive, BBC Online)

By: Nick Reynolds

Nick Reynolds — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:46:57 +0000

People on this thread may be interested in this latest post on the BBC Internet blog:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/10/freeview_hd_copy_protection_a.html

Nick Reynolds (Social Media Executive, BBC Online)

By: Andrew John Hughes

Andrew John Hughes — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:18:14 +0000

This proposed scheme, as I understand it, seems trivial to get around but will cause a lot of misery for users who just want to watch the programmes they’ve paid for via the license fee. It effectively places a tax on developing PVR software for FreeView HD. I think the BBC perfectly understand that this is ineffective, but need to be seen to do something to satisfy the content owners. Ofcom should throw it out and stop such a hack being deployed on the British public.

The service information which they intend to encrypt is carried as part of the stream of data transmitted on each digital frequency. It’s present on current standard definition broadcasts and an updated (DVB-T2) version will be included with high definition. The BBC plan to encrypt the latter. As the packets of audio and video data that are transmitted will still be perfectly readable, anyone who wants to will be able to copy the stream. What they won’t be able to do (if they really intend to encode all PSI data) is match up a particular video stream, audio stream and subtitles as, say, BBC ONE. Further, it also includes all the other interesting metadata in there such as the EPG. So it will still be possible for the stream to be captured. But it won’t be possible to provide the service of identifying certain streams as a television channel and the necessary mapping that says, for example, that programme X is on at 19:00-20:00. In the original standard for DVB-T, it explicitly said that the stream to channel mapping part of the service information couldn’t be encrypted (you can still identify the video and audio that make up the paid channels on current Freeview), but I haven’t looked at the standards for DVBT-2.

So it only hurts those who want to develop a PVR for end users, not someone who wants to just grab the streams and upload them onto some file downloading service. Allowing someone to make copies is pretty much unstoppable (if you intend it to be watchable at all) without breaking the laws of physics; in the worst case, you could playback the programme and film it with your video camera. It’s not going to be great quality but many people don’t seem to care. The scheme proposed by the BBC doesn’t even need to be broken; you can just ignore the service information, capture all the video and audio streams, then pair them up yourself. It’s the automation of this process that is prevented.

By: peter

peter — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:36:47 +0000

So Tom is delving into things he does not understand…

PVRs will record BBC HD, it just won’t be possible to output HD to something else.

Nothing becomes obsolete.

By: Nick Reynolds

Nick Reynolds — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:50:44 +0000

You may be interested in this post from the BBC Internet blog:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/09/freeview_hd_copy_protection_up.html

(NB I am the executive editor of the blog)

By: Backburner» Blog Archive » The pirate’s gospel (2)

Backburner» Blog Archive » The pirate’s gospel (2) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:34:08 +0000

[...] you want to hand control of your shiny new high-definition Freeview recording box over to the BBC. It could mean that they, and they alone, decide exactly what you’re allowed to do with their HD programmes. [...]

By: DRM’s tentacles snare British HDTV | Newsblog

DRM’s tentacles snare British HDTV | Newsblog — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:00:54 +0000

[...] from programming their existing set top boxes,” warned British MP Tom Watson in a recent post. “If implemented, this will make it difficult to view or record HDTV broadcasts with free [...]

By: DRM’s tentacles snare British HDTV | btclip

DRM’s tentacles snare British HDTV | btclip — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:01:54 +0000

[...] from programming their existing set top boxes,” warned British MP Tom Watson in a recent post. “If implemented, this will make it difficult to view or record HDTV broadcasts with free [...]

By: David Newman

David Newman — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:19:06 +0000

Once again, the proposed technical changes will overrule existing copyright licensing arrangements, like the one offered by the CLA to all schools and universities to use for education all over-the-air broadcasts forever.