What am I talking about? “Build my own DVR?” you say in the same way you would say “Make a radio from coconuts?”
Well, here’s the two paragraph summary from the Electronic Frontier Foundation issue page on the ‘broadcast flag‘:
Responding to pressure from Hollywood, the FCC has adopted a rule requiring future digital television (DTV) tuners to include “content protection” (aka DRM) technologies. Starting next year, all makers of HDTV receivers must build their devices to watch for a broadcast “flag” embedded in programs by copyright holders. When it comes to digital recording, it’ll be Hollywood’s DRM way or the highway. Want to burn that recording digitally to a DVD to save hard drive space? Sorry, the DRM lock-box won’t allow it. How about sending it over your home network to another TV? Not unless you rip out your existing network and replace it with DRMd routers. Kind of defeats the purpose of getting a high definition digital signal, doesn’t it?
The good news is that we have until July 1, 2005, to buy, build, and sell fully-capable, non-flag-compliant HDTV receivers. Any receivers built now will “remain functional under a flag regime, allowing consumers to continue their use without the need for new or additional equipment.” [PDF] Any devices made until then can be re-sold in the future.
The good news is that the EFF are also providing you with a cookbook describing what to buy and how to put it together.
The cookbook is not for everyone who reads this blog. In fact, they say:
This guide is aimed at experienced hobbyists who would like to set up a Linux-based personal video recorder on a PC platform. For those who would like to use Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, there are alternatives available that provide generally comparable functionality at somewhat greater cost (and that use non-free/open source software components). Those alternatives are not described in this document, but you can read about them on EFF’s DTV Liberation page. For those who are most interested in ease and speed of setup, the fastest option is probably El Gato’s EyeTV 500 product, which is an external FireWire-based tuner currently only supported on Mac OS X.
So, like I said, it’s not for all my readers, but I know there are a couple of people reading this who could really dig into a project like this.
