One of the (many) things getting people riled up is the upcoming introduction of the broadcast flag on HDTV signals, and what that means for people like PVR users. Any equipment manufactured past a certain date must comply with the broadcast flag requirements, and the flag limits many of the abilities that PVR users are accustomed to having, so you’d better hurry and buy something before that point!
But wait, this flag only seems to apply to over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts. HDTV uses different modulation schemes for OTA and over-cable broadcasts, and the flag doesn’t even exist in the over-cable version. So, living in a place that’s unlikely to see any significant HDTV channels delivered OTA, I’d be getting the cable version anyway, so it doesn’t really matter to me. Whew.
But wait, the cable-delivered signals can be *encrypted* instead, and a lot of places are already doing that with at least their higher-tier DTV channels. You’re thus locked in to needing the cable company’s special equipment to decode it, and their equipment only provides the final video output to the TV set. Although a lot of these cable boxes have Firewire ports, you only get the encrypted stream from it. Since their equipment is in control, it will enforce any additional restrictions the cable company wants to impose, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Grabbing the raw video output and re-encoding it is impractical in the near future simply because there’s so much data (HDTV at 1920×1080 is a lot harder to encode in real-time than plain old 720×480 NTSC. Hell, it takes a 1.5-2GHz processor just to *display* HDTV on a computer), and they’re working on ways to stop even that method in the future.
But then again, this is all based on how the U.S. is rolling out HDTV. The same legal problems don’t necessarily exist up here, but considering how slowly it’s being rolled out (Five boring channels so far! Woohoo!), how much pressure the U.S. can apply, and that most of the equipment comes from the States anyway, it may not matter in the end.
In short, PVR users may be screwed when HDTV finally arrives in full force.