Join the Digital Television Liberation Front!

[Gregg Lengling]

Today, you can use any device you like with your television: VCR, TiVo, DVD recorder, home theater receiver, or a PC combining these functions and more. A year from now, when the FCC's broadcast flag mandate [PDF] takes effect, some of those capabilities will be forbidden.

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 this mandate doesn't take effect for another year. 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 this year can be re-sold in the future.

We at EFF want to do our part to advance the DTV transition -- and the public's rights to receive and manipulate DTV broadcasts with technologies they choose.

We want to keep the right to time- and space-shift that the VCR has given us (against Hollywood's protest). We want to keep the fair use rights that let us excerpt clips from press conferences or make our own "Daily Show" from the evening news. That's why we're encouraging people to buy HDTV tuner cards now and build multi-function receivers and recorders around them.

Here's where you can help. The folks at //www.pcHDTV.com make an HD-capable (ATSC) tuner card with Linux drivers. The MythTV project has built a terrific personal video recorder (PVR) platform that gives a GNU/Linux PC features like TiVo's pause live TV and "season pass" recording. These are great for geeks, and we're looking for volunteers to help make the combination more accessible to the general public.

There are also a number of alternatives for Windows and Macintosh computers that offer similar features. We still need volunteers to help make these products more accessible to more people.

The Broadcast Flag:

The essence of the FCC's rule is in 47 CFR 73.9002(b) and the following sections: "No party shall sell or distribute in interstate commerce a Covered Demodulator Product that does not comply with the Demodulator Compliance Requirements and Demodulator Robustness Requirements."

The Demodulator Compliance Requirements insist that all HDTV demodulators must listen for the flag (or assume it to be present in all signals). Flagged content must be output only to "protected outputs" or in degraded form: through analog outputs or digital outputs with visual resolution of 720x480 pixels or less--less than 1/4 of HDTV's capability. Flagged content may be recorded only by "Authorized" methods, which may include tethering of recordings to a single device.

The Demodulator Robustness Requirements are particularly troubling for open-source developers. In order to prevent users from gaining access to the full digital signal, the FCC ties the hands of even sophisticated users and developers. Devices must be "robust" against user access or modifications that permit access to the full digital stream. Since open-source drivers are by design user-modifiable, a PC tuner card with open-source drivers would not be "robust." It's not even clear that binary-only drivers would qualify.

Together, these rules mean that future PVR developers will have to get permission from the FCC and/or Hollywood before building high-definition versions of the TiVo. The products that they do build will be epoxied against user experimentation and future improvement. The rules mean that open-source developers and hobbyists will be shut out of the HDTV loop altogether.



EFF's Project:

Since machines you've already built will still work in high-def next year, we'd like to make HDTV tuner cards easy to use now, while they can still be manufactured. We want to help the MythTV project work seamlessly with the pcHDTV card so less technical users can beat the broadcast flag. We'll also use these systems as benchmarks against which to compare the capabilities of post-flag HDTV devices. We also want to hear about Windows and Macintosh HDTV tuner cards, with an eye toward helping people make the most of existing pre-flag products.

In addition, if you've already seen devices limited by premature broadcast flag compliance, we'd like to hear about them -- to warn others away and to track the limitations the flag rules impose.

» Volunteer to help!
» EFF's HDTV archive
» EFF's Annotations to the MPAA Broadcast Flag FAQ

[mrmike]

Although it's Linux-friendly and thus "cool", the pcHDTV isn't a great candidate IMHO.  It's a 5V PCI card, which is getting harder to find MB support for, the tuner is only 2nd generation and they don't support QAM.   It would be much better to start a reference design based on a newer chipset IMHO.