CableLabs, the independent consortium of cable operators which creates specifications for cable television compatible products has approved two measures that will permit Home Theater PCs running Linux to take advantage of some U.S. cable television content.
Cable providers can set copy control information for their content to specify how the content can be duplicated, setting it to Copy Once, Copy Never, or Copy Freely. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, specified that all broadcast television channels must be set as Copy Freely. Non-premium subscription programming has to be set to at least Copy Once, but of course can be set to Copy Freely. This is where cable providers vary, as some tend to set all programs as Copy Once and others tend to set all programs as Copy Freely.
CableLabs has approved the passing of content coded as Copy Free without Digital Rights Management, or DRM. DRM allows a content provider to restrict what you can do with content once downloaded or recorded. No current Linux based software has licensed or been approved to carry content with DRM, and the decision by CableLabs means that users of MythTV, will be able to decrypt and record some content. CableLabs is charged with approving all CableCard compatible devices.
A CableCard is a PCMCIA card which a carrier is legally obligated to offer on request, which can be added to a tuner to decrypt content. However, until recently, PC CableCard peripherals were extremely limited. Two manufacturers have worked hard to open up the PC market to this hardware and have advocated for Linux support. Ceton, just recently launched its InfiniTV4 PCI-Express card, and Silicondust, creators of the popular and Linux compatible HDHomerun networked digital tuner are set to release a cablecard enabled version later this year.  Jeremy Hammer, VP of Systems integration for Ceton, and a Fedora user, advised that the Ceton product will fully support Linux and MythTV to the extent they are able.
Unfortunately for us, our service provider, Time Warner Cable, sets nearly everything to Copy Once, this rendering the device pretty much useless unless they change their ways. Comcast, however, apparently is much more open(surprising, isn’t it?), setting most of its non-premium content to Copy Freely. Being as you need to rent the cable card from the cable company anyway, we do not see the point of restricted content they know you’ve paid for.
However, we’ve never quite gotten the point of DRM in general. It more often restricts legitimate usage over actually stopping piracy. And as we’ve been reminded recently, fair use for recorded content is not to keep it on your hard drive forever. If you really like something enough to keep, you probably should buy it. You’ll get a better quality version…and if you’re lucky…extras.
