[mythtv-users] Comcast Bay Area (95003) - 5c encryption on Firewire for PBS/Nova?

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday 17 September 2009 17:45:56 Chris Laplante wrote:
> Anyone else in the San Francisco Bay area noticed in the past month or
> so that it seems like 5c is turned on for "Nova" on PBS via Firewire?
> Is that legal?
>
> I am assuming that is the case, as all other recordings are fine, and
> I am getting errors in the logs and a 0 byte file. I've had this
> happen before but mainly for things like airings of brand new
> Simpson's episodes.
>
> Also myth does not seem to handle this too well, it seems to need a
> restart before it will even try to record anything after that. My only
> recourse seems to be a little cron watcher script to bounce it if no
> new files have come in recently.
>
> I'm pretty sure my firewire setup is otherwise solid, it otherwise
> records 10-20 shows daily flawlessly, and has recently only been
> getting hung up on "Nova".

Many Nova episodes are available on the PBS website. I use PlayOn to feed them 
to UPnP-capable renderers. PlayON has a PBS plugin that works quite well.

I'm not sure about the very latest ones, probably they want to "protect" those 
from *something*.

But since PBS is an off-air station, it could presumably be recorded by anyone 
with an ATSC-capable DVR system, so I can't see why encrypting them would 
make any difference to PBS.

But if it's only one program, it certainly sounds like it's intentional.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org