Or, One Person’s Experience with HDTV and the Superbowl
So, Brad is some guy from the EFF (the ACLU of cyberspace). I think he’s pretty important, but what’s more interesting is his story about using MythTV with a HDTV tuner card.
During one high-tech moment, it was also clear that the TV was really a computer display. After the buxom Godaddy censorship parody, somebody commented that Godaddy had a different ad that had gotten refused by Fox and it was on their web site. A few clicks and I had the Firefox browser on my screen. With my 6 megabit connection, I installed the latest Flash player in about 10 seconds and was quickly playing the refused ad. Then it was back to our regularly scheduled commercials.
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So all this high tech stuff is great, but there’s a catch. The tuner card that receives the signal from the TV station and lets the computer write it, in its transmitted form to the hard disk will be illegal to make or import after June of this year, 2005.
Yes, illegal. A card that simply takes an unencrypted stream of data from the public airwaves with a TV show in it, and copies it, unchanged to a disk file. Now, because I already have mine, that one won’t become illegal. If you get one now, you can keep it. But nobody will be able to make new ones in the USA after that date.
[source…]
I would love to go make that same setup (you can see he has one of those shuttle PC’s) … it actually looked like an old G4 Cube at first.
Also interesting is Brad’s look at WishTV, see also an example of a Buffy Episode configuration, so you can see what it looks like. Neat-o stuff will be happening in the future. Remember, drop the “TV-recording over the air” part and connect to a BitTorrent Satellite via RSS and see what happens. Remember, TV (especially now) is just bits on the wire or bits over the air. Very interesting.
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