Re: Anybody's machine working most of time?

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry

Tiny Tim wrote:
"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ou-dnRV5yfy1evLfRVn-3A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<snip>

However, the nature of the problem is completely different from the
areas of evolutionary improvement that you discuss.

The primary reason that no MCE system has (or will have) component
or RGB (or SCART) inputs is fear that people will use them to create
high quality copies of copyrighted works.  "Fair use" used to provide
ample justification for high quality consumer recording, but the DMCA
has shifted the balance of power significantly toward media distributors
and away from media consumers.


Well if that is really the case then I think we are all wasting our time even entertaining the MCE concept. What on earth is the point in a product that sets out to guarantee inferior quality through its use and at considerable cost too. 

Hear, hear.

In the UK, Sky offers the Sky+ service, which allows direct recording of the MPEG bitstream coming straight from the satellite. Watching a recording is a bit-perfect match of the original broadcast. There is zero loss of quality. The box outputs RGB, s-video and composite, plus digital bitstream audio including DD5.1 for films. It will record two programmes at once from its EPG while playing back a recording if required. 

That option is also available in the US from (at least) DirectTV.

However, they do not offer such a receiver/PVR with DVD writing
capability.

There are a few "renegade" manufacturers who partially skirt the
licensing limits to offer consumers more freedom.  Philips is the
only DVD recorder manufacturer I know of that provides component
inputs to its recorder--and high quality A/D conversion to preserve
most of what comes in.  I wonder how long that capability will last...

But, so far, I haven't found anyone who will get the _already encoded_
HDTV bitstream onto a removeable disk (though, in principle, re-coding
need not sacrifice much quality).

The unfortunate thing is that Sky's pricing policy for this sucks. They want you to pay for the box and then pay £10 per month just to be able to use it. Unlike Tivo, where the monthly fee pays for the EPG, the Sky EPG is already provided as part of the basic channel subscription. You are effectively forced to pay £120 per year just to use your PVR. Also the basic Sky+ box is a bit constrained by a 40GB disk. End user upgrades are possible at risk to warranty, or there is a far more expensive version with a 160GB disk. There is no option to pay a one-off fee instead of the monthly. 

Standard predatory proprietary policy...

For decades, the monopoly phone company in the US charged $3.00 per
month for the "privilege" of using TouchTone dialing, when its use
actually decreased their switching costs significantly and preventing
its "unauthorized" use required them to install additional line filters!

A classic case of trying to prop up the quarterly results by mortgaging
the future!  Fortunately, economic natural selection eventually works...

Of course, as a PVR it offers none of the additional features of an MCE PC but it does prove (in the UK at least) that fears of copyright theft need not impede the enjoyment of high quality time-shifted material. If it wasn't for the stupid monthly fee I would have adopted Sky+ a long time ago. With an Xbox already installed under the TV I could have used any crappy old PC to serve the rest of my media - music and photos - and my existing DVD player for DVDs - without anywhere near the expense and aggravation of an MCE setup. My Pronto has served me well for tying together all the disparate components with minimum effort. 

Time-shifting seems to be reluctantly accepted as inevitable--even in
the face of the liklihood of commercial skipping.  But transfer to
standard DVDs is verboten in the minds of Hollywood moguls.

But if I installed a digital tuner card in my MCE PC then I could capture the mpeg bitstream from the broadcast in much the same way that Sky+ does. The problem is that our digital terrestrial service offers almost no channels of any entertainment value (for me at least). So I can keep Sky for its great channel choice but suffer a quality drop, or get higher quality recordings of things I don't want to watch. It's a bit of a rock and a hard place sort of thing. Either way there can be no rational argument (in the UK) for deliberately hampering attempts to record high quality video for time shifting. Please give me RGB capture!!!!!!

Next year we will start to see HD content coming from the Sky platform. I'm not sure of the implications of that for my MCE PC. I shall probably have to consign it to the rubbish bin as there will be no suitable PCI cards to accept the HD broadcast. So I'll have to adopt Sky's own recording solution or accept recording in the SD domain only. That should look lovely on a 1920*1080 flatscreen (NOT!) 

In the US, the "broadcast flag" is intended to keep those high-quality
bitstreams from finding their way onto any exchangeable media, like DVD.

If MS cannot ensure that MCE recordings are at least 95% as good as the original material then I think it will ultimately fail. Maybe in the US that will not be a problem due to the broadcast options available but for Sky users (UK and Europe) it will be a disaster for MCE. 

I agree.

-michael

8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
.

Relevant Pages

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