It requires all major cable operators to give up cable boxes that they lease to subscribers at a significant profit and replace them with ones that will accept a CableCard…an decoder that plugs into their box or any other equipment that will accept it. Customers will be able to use the CableCard, which they must provide, into equipment from any company. Cable companies have delayed on this decision because most subscribers have paid the cost of their box many times over.

Currently, the options for hardware are limited. Few televisions include CableCard slots…no computer cards sold commercially do…and the only company that has supported it and promises to support the new generation of cards is Tivo.

Once the technology is more mainstreamed…consumers could purchase cable-ready devices that could do much more than a box from the local cable provider. Features could include the integration of internet data onto the screen with the television signal, boxes that also act as media servers for media stored on computers, etc.

The accusation of companies like Comcast is that the requirement amounts to a tax…as they will not absorb the cost, but pass it along to use as the consumers…Conversely, since this mandate has been delayed so long….cable companies had plenty of time to phase in the technology over time and devote proper resources to it.

Our issue is this…you go out and buy a television. It includes a tuner you can’t use because you have to rent a $10 a month box from the cable company. What is the point of a tuner in the TV anymore?

Try vixy.net – it will allow you to download Youtube videos directly as a standard video file or even audio-only. It is somewhat limited in the formats though. We’d prefer an Xvid option. Xvid is an open-source alternative to DivX. 

For a free program you can install on a computer and run…try Super…

Finally, if you want to put them on a DVD, Amit offers a bit more advice(Although we generally go the Linux route) and instruction.

“Last week I came to the realization that with Netflix and iTunes, I would be able to cut out the $50 portion of my cable TV bill and ditch the 80 or so channels I never watch, including 3 shopping channels, 3 sports channels, 6 family channels, numerous foreign language channels, and one Lifetime Channel for Women that my fiance tortures me with.”

The FCC has long tried to push cable and satellite companies to provide ala carte purchasing…allowing people to purchase only the channels they wish to, instead of being forced to pay for dozens of stations they don’t. While most seem to think that ala carte pricing being forced on the cable companies would increase costs for a large percentage of customers, we think that it would be a good idea to explore alternative packaging schemes. Our local cable company offers a value set of channels, a standard package, then a premium pack. They could offer more ways of saving money by forgoing programming.

But that brings us to the question that Alan Graham raised? What about places like Itunes? They offer per show purchasing. If you combine that with Netflix, which allows you access to any movie for a monthly rate…including DVD box sets when they come out…you can achieve almost the same effect. Channel surfing will be missed though…sometimes you find something unexpected.

We’ve been working on our own method. We built ourselves a Digital Video REcorder and have been recording old movies and runs of TV shows off of television in the wee hours. Before long, we’ll have so much in terms of old movies and other programming we won’t need beyond broadcast stations. Of course, if we get rid of cable…we will have to get a better antenna.

A good tip though…if you can’t check out the competition every so often(our cable company has no competitors)…check them out. They may change their offerings and you can benefit and save money. We check all our utility service bills every few months.

The VCR would likely die completely if not for the difficulty in using DVD recorders for temporary video recording.  This market is held by the Digital Video Recorders(DVR). Most DVR packages do not allow for archiving of recorded programs to backup media. Until that changes, which is unlikely considering the video industry’s lobbying on the subject…VCRs will continue to linger as a backup TV recording device.

People don’t want a large amount of inconvenient restrictions on their music. Most people are willing to pay for music, but the music industry, to protect their profits…has limited what you can do with that music. More people prefer to buy CDs and rip the music to digital formats for use in music players.

However, this is annoying. No matter what the recording industry does…people will find ways to steal music. All they do by putting in inconvenient restrictions is discourage the impulse buying of singles that they desire. People will burn their DRM(Digital Rights Management) encoded music to CD, then back to an MP3 without DRM.

In the end…we have never purchased a song from an online music site…it seems more trouble than it is worth.

To summarize the results, the best media is manufactured by Pioneer, Mitsubishi, Taiyo Yuden, Hitachi Maxwell, Sony, and TDK. Our advice, consult the guide, and take the advice, and don’t buy something that is likely to fail.