Quadrature amplitude modulation and you
As everyone who came down to Indy knows, I love my new apartment. Unfortunately, until now that love came with a pretty steep price as I had to sacrifice the Chivo’s ability record HDTV, the very purpose for which it was built. Now, naturally the Chivo was more than happy to give this up for the greater good, but that’s just level of generosity the Chivo rolls with; it makes the giving tree look like a child molester. As for me, I’ve been far less accepting of circumstances and have been tirelessly scouring the interweb for another means to get my HDTV recordings back. Well, after a few spectacular failures, I think I may have finally found the solution I’ve been looking for: the HDhomerun. This sweet little product, in addition to being one of the craftiest devices I’ve seen in quite sometime, breaks though the one super-sized roadblock that’s been standing in my way for months.
While getting HDTV through cable worked great at my old apartment, my new cable company’s HDTV boxes are pieces of shit and don’t properly support firewire recording. Now, in a perfect world this wouldn’t be an issue, as pretty much every HDTV capture card has hardware that is capable of capturing digital cable. However, since media companies absolutely despise the idea the average consumers being able to record perfect digital copies of TV shows and movies, they’ve convinced Microsoft to not support it until they can figure out a way to DRM the hell out of it (read: Vista). The HDhomerun gets around this by being its own, standalone, network device that’s completely free of the restrictions imposed by Windows. This leaves the HDhomerun free to receive, decode, and stream digital cable in a format that Windows can already understand.
Now, it’s not a perfect solution as cable companies still have the right to encrypt their programming so that it can’t be viewed without their provided digital cable equipment, however, there are two exceptions that can get around this. First of all, any TV that is freely available over the air, such as local HD channels cannot be encrypted at all which means, despite what most cable companies say, they are included with even the most basic cable packages as long as you have the have the hardware to decode it: a QAM tuner. Secondly, having met many cable operators though my job I can say that 90% of them don’t give a crap about security and consider it to be a pain in the ass. Therefore there’s a good chance that, unless someone setup the channels with encryption when they were first installed, they are probably still in the clear. I ran a quick test in my apartment last night and it looks like I’m a little unlucky and pretty much everything except my local HD channels are encrypted, but aside from ESPN-HD, there really isn’t anything that i'm gonna miss that much. Looks like the Chivo might yet rise again.
While getting HDTV through cable worked great at my old apartment, my new cable company’s HDTV boxes are pieces of shit and don’t properly support firewire recording. Now, in a perfect world this wouldn’t be an issue, as pretty much every HDTV capture card has hardware that is capable of capturing digital cable. However, since media companies absolutely despise the idea the average consumers being able to record perfect digital copies of TV shows and movies, they’ve convinced Microsoft to not support it until they can figure out a way to DRM the hell out of it (read: Vista). The HDhomerun gets around this by being its own, standalone, network device that’s completely free of the restrictions imposed by Windows. This leaves the HDhomerun free to receive, decode, and stream digital cable in a format that Windows can already understand.
Now, it’s not a perfect solution as cable companies still have the right to encrypt their programming so that it can’t be viewed without their provided digital cable equipment, however, there are two exceptions that can get around this. First of all, any TV that is freely available over the air, such as local HD channels cannot be encrypted at all which means, despite what most cable companies say, they are included with even the most basic cable packages as long as you have the have the hardware to decode it: a QAM tuner. Secondly, having met many cable operators though my job I can say that 90% of them don’t give a crap about security and consider it to be a pain in the ass. Therefore there’s a good chance that, unless someone setup the channels with encryption when they were first installed, they are probably still in the clear. I ran a quick test in my apartment last night and it looks like I’m a little unlucky and pretty much everything except my local HD channels are encrypted, but aside from ESPN-HD, there really isn’t anything that i'm gonna miss that much. Looks like the Chivo might yet rise again.