Broadcast flag

[nitrogen]

Okay, I'm out here out of touch with the world, but I heard that in June it
will no longer be possible to buy a DTV card in the US. I have a few questions:

[list=1]
How will this affect the PCHDTV and Air2PC card availability?
Should I have someone buy a card or two for me before November, when I was planning on getting stuff for Christmas time?
Will there still be interest in developing the MyHD driver at that time?
What does this mean for existing card owners?
[/list=1]

Thanks. If I should buy a card before June, which card should I buy?

[CityK]

I heard that in June it will no longer be possible to buy a DTV card in the US.No. The FCC set a July-something date for the implementation of the Broadcast Flag. Any card manufactured after this date must use the BF. Cards manufactured prior to this date can still be sold.

The BF issue is currently before the courts - specifically, the legality of the FCC mandating the use of BF. The point being, the BF may never even come to pass...then again, maybe it will .

How will this affect the PCHDTV and Air2PC card availability? No idea. The (revised) Air2PC is currently not scheduled to be in stock again until late May/early June.

Should I have someone buy a card or two for me before November, when I was planning on getting stuff for Christmas time? With no clear indication, its completely up to you.....personally I would wait for a clearer indication.

Will there still be interest in developing the MyHD driver at that time? I imagine there will be.

What does this mean for existing card owners? Likely nothing...although others aren't so sure (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=523329)

You might want to read this one (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=529083) too.

If I should buy a card before June, which card should I buy? Keep in mind the current unavailability of the Air2PC

[b3b0p]

Originally posted by CityK
Keep in mind the current unavailability of the Air2PC

This can imply a few things:

1. The air2pc is much better then the pcHDTV
2. The air2pc has less supply then pcHDTV
3. The air2pc is more widely known then pcHDTV
4. Any combination of the above

I'm not sure which it is. Or if it may be another reason. These are possible reaons I thought of in just a few seconds.

Chris

[scowl]

It means the Air2PC is unavailable at this time.

[trbarry]

If there are QAM hardware limitations of either card they may be fixed and released before July or it is possible that after that point they never will be fixed. That is sort of a narrow window and bothers me.

- Tom

[Kon]

Someone purchased all their cards. They had little stock. They are making another manufacturing run with a supposedly new card.

Broadband Technologies, Inc., ("BBTI") is pleased to announce the next generation Air2PC-PCI receiver for ATSC/QAM DTV/HDTV/datacast reception will be on active display at NAB 2005 in the Triveni Digital booth (SU11411) and also at the ATSC DTV Hotspot (LVCC South Hall Upper Lobby).

BBTI's new Air2PC-PCI utilizes the latest 5th-generation ATSC NIM technology from LG Electronics.

Production quantities of this latest Air2PC-PCI are scheduled for shipment starting in late May.

[trbarry]

BBTI's new Air2PC-PCI utilizes the latest 5th-generation ATSC NIM technology from LG Electronics.

But as you know from the OpenDTV list, just a 5th gen tuner does necessarily mean the best reception if the other componenents are not all in place. Anyway, I also want QAM recording and while the first Air2PC was supposed to do that it reportedly turned out to have problems in that area. Hopefully the 2nd one will work at that. But I'm going to wait for reports.

- Tom

[Kon]

Exactly. Maybe its time for folks here to look at the VBox cards then. They support QAM/VSB and are always putting new frontends on their boards.

[CityK]

Originally posted by trbarry
Hopefully the 2nd one will work at that. But I'm going to wait for reports.My thoughts exactly. Positioning oneself ahead of the curve is a recipe for frustration. Yet, as you noted earlier, there is rather narrow window involved here (if BF comes to pass).

[trbarry]

there is rather narrow window involved here (if BF comes to pass).

I have not yet started to build my dream Linux box and I'm sort of awaiting Opteron developments anyway. But if I can't get the legal QAM card before the BF date then I guess I'll just have to improvise after that date. ;)

- Tom

[eskin]

Here's what I posted on the other thread, I think in particular Linux based systems are really going to be in trouble after the BF law kicks in:

The current crop of PCI based ATSC cards, without out any form of encryption or authentication hardware are unsellable in the USA if manufactured after July. What's worse is that there is no infrastructure yet in place in the Windows OS to provide the robust authentication requirements of the FCC mandate. Remember that the FCC specifically forbids transport of the Hi-Def MPEG-2 TS in the clear over a user-accessible bus, including PCI, and before releasing the stream the receiver has to be authenticated and data encrypted via one of the FCC approved technologies.

My advice is to buy as many raw streaming ATSC boards as you can find and use them on the current versions of the OS as long as you can.

It will be some time before OS providers will deliver the services to enable both the authentication and meet the FCC robustness requirements, and board vendors can rev their reference designs to provide new hardware capable of running the required crypto algorithms for authentication, key exchange, and stream encryption. Your CX23880 or Bt878A based card can't meet the FCC mandate. In any case, the new crop of ATSC receiver cards won't be simple raw data streamer as is the case today, and since many of these devices are firmware based, with embedded processors, they won't be so simple to hack and probably will be more expensive.

The encryption has to happen on chip, well before it hits the PCI bus, and that encryption won't even be allowed to occur until the microcontroller in our device and the host authenticate each other using some robust crypto algorithms. You can't intercept the stream with a filter driver, software encryption isn't an option because of the FCC not allowing unencrypted streaming across the bus.

Its a very bad situation and (my opinion, not that of my employer) I think y'all should start encouraging the board vendors from which you buy your cards to let the FCC know the impact that this will have on their ability to ship HTPC hidef solutions.

Cheers,

Michael Eskin
Principal Software Engineer

[trbarry]

Its a very bad situation and (my opinion, not that of my employer) I think y'all should start encouraging the board vendors from which you buy your cards to let the FCC know the impact that this will have on their ability to ship HTPC hidef solutions.


I'd guess most of the board vendors will have been sqawking and/or leaving the market since before the original FCC comment period for the BS flag, with little effect. I'm somewhat doubtful any USA vendor will be able to make any sort of cost effective replacement for current cards that actually passes robustness requirements.

But we will figure out something.

- Tom

[scowl]

I can only hope that this ends up something like CSS: it will be a temporary pain in the ass until someone finds a board and a program that together are stupid enough to reveal how a board's authentication and encryption can be tricked. Then that company will suddenly have the most popular ATSC board on the market. The CSS thing was blown because a poorly-written DVD player had a key that was easily discovered by stepping through its code. As far as I know, the author of the program was not fined or jailed even though the obvious key in his program did break the terms of an agreement.

If the broadcast flag is hacked, will anyone care more than when CSS was hacked? There are tens of thousands of ATSC boards ignoring the broadcast flag right now. What's a few more? I have two of them and I have committed no crimes with them. Even though the broadcast flag hardware and software requirements are more robust than CSS was, I have a feeling it will be less of a shock when we start seeing libraries that get around it.

[scowl]

Does anyone have a link to what values the broadcast flag (i.e. the Redistribution Control Descriptor) mean? The only link I have is the March 2003 atsc.org document (http://www.atsc.org/standards/a_65b.pdf) but it doesn't really define it. It says that if it's there, it means that "technological control of consumer redistribution is signaled." OK fine, but then it says that "it is out of the scope of this standard to assert how any receiving device reacts when the rc_descriptor is present."

Come on guys. I need to know why one station is sending me 0x00 and two others are sending 0xFF. I might be breaking laws I don't know about.

[Kon]

Originally posted by trbarry
I'm somewhat doubtful any USA vendor will be able to make any sort of cost effective replacement for current cards that actually passes robustness requirements.

For boards that go into a PC you're right. For everything else (like minipci receivers on STB chipset designs) you're wrong. All the big players already have secure bus lines, decryption capability in hardware, CAM interfaces and secure execution memory.

[trbarry]

Yep. You could almost say the BS flag was targeted at getting rid of PCHD cards. ;)

- Tom

[scowl]

I can't guess what the target of the BS flag is until someone can tell me what the heck 0x00 and 0xFF mean! For all I know, 0xFF means I can legally make 255 copies. :D

The fall of CSS has given me hope that no matter what kind of twisted copyright protection system the industry comes up with, eventually someone with honorable intentions will find a way around it and we can go back to doing what we were legally doing before.

[trbarry]

I think member dr1394 (Ron) posted some example streams with and without the BF here in one of the HD forums recently. But I'm not sure what you'd search for.

- Tom

[CityK]

One clicks here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?postid=5377162#post5377162) or searches the first link I presented in this thread :p

[scowl]

I read that thread. I even commented in that thread. But I didn't see anything that tells me what the BS flag means when it's set to 0xFF or 0x00. I can't tell if my TV stations are being nice to me or are trying to boss me around. :D

[CityK]

I read that thread. I even commented in that thread. But I didn't see anything that tells me what the BS flag means when it's set to 0xFF or 0x00.Sorry scowl, didn't mean to imply that the info was in there (because, as you rightly note, it isn't).

I was just poking a little Friday afternoon fun at trbarry for his comment -- which I had interpreted as him indicating he didn't know how to search for Ron's stream samples. :)

[trbarry]

Nah, I was just being lazy and implying I couldn't remember either the title or original topic.

Apparently I didn't really remember the content either. But my intention was good. ;)

- Tom

[scowl]

Well, I guess I'll just have to assume that 0xFF means I can legally make 255 copies. I'm sure if I'm mistaken, I'll be getting some threatening email shortly. :)

[Kon]

Its a one-way broadcast. Who is going to know? Well, unless they are using watermarking encoders ;-) ...

[Valnar]

Can anyone tell me a good etailer to keep an eye on for the availability of the new Air2PC-PCI ? Based on this thread alone, I'll pick one up in June when it comes available again. I may need a second MDP-130 too while I'm at it. :)

Thanks,
Robert

[tallecks]

From the online Wall Street Journal today:

A federal appellate court Friday invalidated federal regulations that require makers of TV sets to equip them with technology that prevents digital broadcast signals from being redistributed.

Ruling in a case brought by the American Library Association, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the Federal Communications Commission had overstepped its authority in trying to regulate how consumers can use their TV sets after they receive broadcasts.

<text deleted>

Friday's ruling was no real surprise. During courtroom arguments, U.S. Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards told the FCC it had "crossed the line'' by requiring the new anti-piracy technology for next-generation television devices and rhetorically asked the FCC whether it also intended to regulate household appliances. "You've gone too far," Judge Edwards told the FCC's lawyer. "Are washing machines next?''

[tallecks]

I realized that some of the text I deleted pertained to the relevance to this string. So, here's a bit more from the article...

The case involves something called the "broadcast flag," a slight digital modification to a broadcast digital TV signal, one that wouldn't affect picture quality but would prevent a recording of the show from being uploaded to the Internet.

The FCC ordered it into place two years ago and said that by July 1 all video-recording equipment sold in the U.S. -- for instance DVD players and digital video recorders, including those on PCs -- must support the flag.

[scowl]

So I guess 0xFF now means "copy freely" and 0X00 also means "copy freely". :)