Linked by David Adams on Mon 27th Oct 2008 23:11 UTC
As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
In the US you can get cable boxes with Firewire output enabled. This is an FCC mandate. Don't take no from the cable company and complain until they give you one. They are legally required to. MythTV supports Firewire cable boxes. Firewire can come into the PC and be resent as Media Center type TV over Ethernet. Because of DRM is it random which channels this will work with, it is different on each cable system.
Plan B, DRM sucks. I have paid for this signal inside of my home and I want to do what I want with it. Get multiple cable boxes in the basement. Put a Slingbox on each one an redigitize the component outputs. Now you can switch this around on Ethernet inside your house. It is so stupid that you have to do something like this.
The idea here is that your video is unencrypted H.264 AVC inside the house.
Put a media center extender on each TV like a DSM-520. Now the TVs can show movies from the central hard drive, the rebroadcast TV signals, security camera (get IP based ones), etc. It is so cheap to build a Media Center Extender into an HDTV and put an Ethernet jack onto it, why don't the vendors do this? (they don't because all of the content is DRM'd).
I'm in a FIOS area but I think ATT Uverse is the closest to this vision. ATT Uverse is TV over IP.
The current analog model has all of the channels appearing at the TV and then the TV decides which one to watch. Instead, the TV should be tuned to a single channel and the remote server box decides which stream to feed it. Read about SDV - switched digital video.
To things to remember.
1) TV is simply a playlist you don't control.
2) The customer for TV is the advertisers, you are just a side effect.
I watch about one hour a week of cable TV. If the wife would let me I would disconnect it.