Explain this to the person who's not steeped in the broadcast or technology businesses, like an elderly person who doesn't use technology beyond the basics if they can help it. "You have to get a cell phone, figure out how to turn on hotspot, connect your device to hotspot, do a scan, then turn off the hotspot, and hope you never have to scan again, or else you have to do all this stuff again for each scan." Versus the current method of "Scan the TV." And then explain to them that the encryption is why channel changes can take upwards of 10-12 seconds in some cases. And that once High Noon hits, a shadowy unaccountable non-governmental entity can shut off TV signals at will by revoking their signing certificates.
ATSC 3.0 is a really cool standard with lots of upsides, though the viewer really doesn't see or notice them for the most part. There's a ton of non-technical nonsense that's creating problems on top of that.
- Trip
Excellent points. I saw fybush's post late yesterday evening, and was too sleepy to respond at the time. (DRM encryption is a longstanding pet peeve of mine.) But you covered some of what I wanted to say, almost exactly the way I imagined saying it. Kudos.
Scott, you also mentioned using those black market HDMI to MP4 recorders for making permanent recordings not bound to particular DVRs, for example. Well, for one, that means I'm losing the power to record things without generational loss caused by transcoding. Considering how artifacty many over-the-air channels already are, I absolutely don't want
more layers of visual grunge in my recordings. And what happens to those who don't know about these devices, or who is too skittish to be a "scofflaw?" The right to record clearly cannot belong exclusively to the well-informed and noncompliant. Most importantly, what happens when those devices get
too popular and industry scare campaigns commence, splattering idiocies like "the digital
analog hole" everywhere until the --
*rolls eyes* -- "crack downs" commence? If replacements become difficult or impossible to buy, are you and I sure that the ones we already bought will last forever? Are we sure that the Motion Picture Ass. of America won't combine their "crack downs" with Black Sunday revocation attacks against the models it discovered in the wild prior and reversed in its labs? Sigh.
Having to stake my right to record on a house of cards like a grey market device (not to mention going back to eating generational loss) is a total deal-killer for me, no matter how great ATSC 3.0's other improvements are. Too many things can go wrong to upset the availability of those products, and until that happens, I'm living with the constant dread of that moment's arrival. To me, a television dial infected with encryption for anything other than a few token premium services is indistinguishable from a CD library infected with the old
Sony rootkit. It's a rotten orchard and I just won't eat from those apple trees.
Incidentally, this is about more than strictly preserving the right to record. There are also freedoms power users rely on that would be completely gutted by encryption. For instance, the Linux world often builds its own home theater PCs and DVRs using devices like the HDHomeRun. With one of those, I can tune any ATSC 1.0 channel I want with any HLS (m3u8) streaming aware hardware device or software player, and the HDHomeRun will stream it across my LAN without any transcoding or other quality losses whatsoever. Today, HLS awareness is basically in everything, and there are entire communities of people making elaborate projects with on-screen interfaces that beat the pants off commercial consumer DVRs. All these communities would be devastated by encryption. Even if such elaborate setups aren't your forte, owning an HDHomeRun makes it possible to simply do straight live viewing of ATSC television on any device without owning a television. Any computer VLC Player (among others) can run on, for example, can display live HDHomeRun streams. I personally used to use ffmpeg to record live ATSC broadcasts untranscoded to disk with batch scripts initiated by task manager to make scheduled recordings under Windows. And there are also, of course, GUI based software programs for making scheduled recordings from stream URLs. No need to be an ffmpeg "guru." (See
http://info.hdhomerun.com/info/http_api for the details of how simple all this really is under the hood.)
Meanwhile, for non-power users, there are of course many DVR hardware devices (beyond just TiVo) these days that let you schedule and losslessly record, exporting all your recordings losslessly to portable media as desired. So you don't need to "hack" your TiVo anymore with tools like pyTivo to extract untranscoded copies of recordings. Grandma can now have quality recordings, with a plain set top box and an external hard drive.
And all this dies if encryption becomes the norm. The non-power users get forced into the scenario
@tripinva outlined, and the power users lose their incredible world of novel viewing/scheduling/recording projects. They're reduced to making lower quality, hand-initiated MP4 recordings using grey market devices of uncertain future availability. Blah.
To end this little encryption rant, I really must emphasize that I want every one of the ATSC 3.0 features and improvements Scott mentioned. I consider them fantastic and desire them just as badly as all of you. They aren't negligible or trivial to me, and in a way, I consider ATSC 3.0 what ATSC 1.0 should have been from the beginning -- absent the crypto. But I simply can't and won't surrender the freedoms encryption would rob from me to get all those perks. If encryption ruins ATSC 3.0, I'll just stick with ATSC 1.0 for however long as it lasts, and then return to the high seas for whatever I want to "record." What's the difference between a grey market HDCP stripping dongle and a bittorrent client in a VPN, anyway?
