Update: Missdona has provided a couple of useful links in the comments below. If you experience similar issues with select programs being incorrectly DRMed, check out these threads for advice on how to resolve the situation.
Here's what Dean experienced:
"This morning, my kids and I decided to watch a TiVo HD recording we made last night of The Making of John Adams. This is the new upcoming mini-series by Tom Hanks and others about the lives and accomplishments of John Adams. When we started watching it, I first found that the TiVo had flagged it for mandatory auto-deletion within a few hours of being deleted, due to 'copyright policies.' Hmm - never saw that one before.Randomly flagged programming has happened before with the Tivo—for example, a Fox Movie Channel broadcast in 2006 triggered Tivo's recording restrictions, but seems to have been an error on the broadcaster's part. Is the same thing happening with HBO? What's suspicious about this is that Dean discovered both the making of featurette and the miniseries were blocked, so more than one program was flagged.
After about 5 minutes watching, my oldest son came into the room, and we decided to start it over so he could enjoy it. What I found was something I've never seen before and has me pretty frosted. When I backed up to the beginning and attempted to watch it again, TiVo would not allow me to - again stating that it had violated copyright policies. After countless attempts at forward and reverse moves, we found that we could now not watch any portion of the show! I rebooted the TiVo, and found the same thing. No can do - the TiVo/HBO/Comcast programming had locked it from being viewed again! Then as promised at 11:29am EST, it deleted from my hard drive and there was nothing I could do about it.
In this Wired interview from November 2004, Tivo's general counsel assured the public that it was unlikely (ha!) that content providers would take advantage of the Macrovision technology to restrict recording of regular programming:
What if the higher-value content is just the beginning? This could be a Trojan horse.We don't know where Dean lives. Has anyone else tried to record this miniseries, and if so, was it flagged with DRM protection for you? (Note: it appears that Dean recorded it in HD, so if anyone who can test this with an HD Tivo, that would be even sweeter.)
That would be a violent blow to consumer flexibility. You could end up in a situation where different products by different manufacturers would have different rules. I don't think we would go along with it.
With the cable companies in bed with the studios, TiVo could be the last line of defense for the DVR as we know it.
Sometimes I feel that way. We're aware of the danger, and the slippery slope. The danger is that DRM can tilt the balance of copyright so that ultimately there's no concept of fair use, because the content owners dictate what the rules are. But I think content owners are beginning to recognize that if you make things too restrictive, then consumers will find nonlegal ways to achieve what they want.
"UPDATED: HBO's new miniseries IS locked down for TiVo recording" [The Culture of Ownership] (Thanks to Missdona!)
RELATED
"Has TiVo Forsaken Us?" [Wired]
(Photo: Culture of Ownership)
Likewise, no flagging here: Verizon FiosTV / TiVo Series 3. I've watched the first two episodes twice each without a problem. I restarted the first one a few times.
]]>@sleze69: Thanks and that's what I meant.. .the encrypted channels.
]]>Sasem has an external USB HDTV product that does very well recording HD content from OTA and unencrypted QAM. That gets you probably 20-25 digital channels (both SD and HD)from Comcast. The rest are scrambled.
Until someone comes out with an oem cablecard device for computers, we will all be at the mercy of Tivo, Comcast, etc.
]]>How do homebrewed DVRs record HD content? The Hauppauge thing above is promised for Q1, but are people recording HD today with their Myth/Beyond/whatever boxes?
]]>@MercuryPDX: Un-subbed Series 1s will work like a VCR. Un-subbed Series 2s will nag you to be subbed, and if they dial in, they'll stop working until they're subbed. I don't know about Series 3s/HDs.
]]>
Get your own DVR or build a DVR capable media PC. No monthly fees and no BS.
Any tips or site links where one can go and do this?
]]>@MercuryPDX: It can be on your home network. If you have an old TiVo that's un-subscribed, you can use it to set manual recordings, VCR style.
]]>Cablecard people. If you're not using a cablecard, there's no issues.
]]>Piracy is bad, but like it or not it is the most convenient way of getting the material you want.
]]>If its in HD, its likely that the local Comcast franchise has messed up the CCI bytes. Give them a call and try to work it out
Uh, this is Comcast we're talking about here, right? Your chances of calling into their 800- number, talking to a rep who is not even in your area, then your bit of technical information getting back to someone in your local headend who knows what you're talking about, without the message being totally screwed up, is practically nil.
I think you have a snowball's chance in hell of getting to talk to anyone who knows about CCI bytes and what it all means to you as a customer. Good luck with that. Talking to someone in charge of overseeing the franchise on your local government level is a better bet, and most of them do have numbers for people on the local level of Comcast.
On a weekend last year, Charter cable in our area had their 'emergency notifier' system stuck in the "on" mode for hours at a time, overlaying a test message on all basic channels and interrupting audio once every two minutes for 10 seconds with a shrill alarm tone. You would think that people calling into their tech support number could get that fixed in a hurry, no? Not a chance. It lasted for five hours on Saturday, then on Sunday at the same time, it started up all over again, ruining a Sunday afternoon of football viewing. The agents I spoke to four times that weekend said they had no way of calling anyone to tell them to shut it off, and had no access to internal phone numbers of people working at the headends. Two of the agents told me it was probably my fault somehow on my end, and the other two said they were required by FCC rules to run those test messages like that. Unbelievable, and to think that maybe Charter might have local employees watching at home who might have been able to see it and respond to it, and didn't, was the most amazing thing when it happened all over again on Sunday.
Interesting thing was that it didn't interrupt any movie channels or on-demand or pay per view, as if it didn't matter to those viewers that the world was about to come to an end.
]]>Betcha' John Adams (known never to be tongue-tied) would have used some colorful language as well!
]]>@bohemian: Let us know when we can purchase a tv-card capable of decoding encrypted digital signals.
Unless your cable company just broadcasts all its content un-encrypted, you CAN'T just build a computer to record this.
Luckily, there will be full HD, non-DRM versions available for download on bit-torrent. Isn't it great when the illegal versions of shows are easier to use and more convenient to access? Oh wait, no. That's just ironic.
]]>@toddvm: My parents had an Insight DVR for about a month. The software was buggy, they would have random re-starts and (what made my mom most-crazy) is when the cable was down, so was the DVR. They traded it twice with no better results, so they switched to TiVo.
]]>By the way...no problem
]]>I have Insight with the DVR. And for some strange reason it "randomly" will not record new popular TV shows. I set the recording to record a show on a weekly basis and then it just takes the scheduled recording off the list. It causes me to have to check every evening that my shows are going to be recorded. But the funny thing is, this ONLY happens with the newly broadcasted high-ranking TV shows. Repeats and shows that aren't as popular there is NEVER an issue. Has anyone else had this problem? I am thinking Insight is doing this on purpose and the reason why is I got a new DVR to try and fix the problem and same thing.
]]>This is a case of the CCI byte being set incorrectly at the cable head end, which does happen frequently.
]]>Personally, I'm not going to go HDTV until this issue is solved. If that means in 2011 (Yay for being Canadian) I have to use a downconverter, so be it. You can shove DRM down my throat once I'm dead. It's too bad the DRM only exists because people are willing to accept HDTV no matter how terrible their experience with it is.
]]>@missdona:
You shouldn't have to opt-out. It should be opt-in only. Next, the bank will be selling an aggregated, "anonymous" record of your purchases unless you opt-out.
]]>@loueloui: I understand what you mean, but you could opt-out of the viewing habits thing.
]]>This is a damn shame. I was one of the early adopters of Tivo. Although I loved the device, and still love the concept (I have a DVR), some of their corporate policies really disgusted me.
One thing in particular was their 'starred' advertisements, which could not be deleted. That really pissed me off. I was paying every month to swap one form of advertising for another -one that couldn't be avoided.
The final straw was when they said they would start selling your viewing habits to the highest bidder. I am a firm believer that my actions, and behaviors, are owned by me and not some third party. If I watch an artist paint a picture, and was able to recreate his exact moves to paint an identical copy of that picture, is that not infringement?
]]>Wow - This is one of the many reasons I am so happy that my original, 7-year-old TiVo is still in perfect working order, knock on wood!
]]>Lifehacker also did an article that details how to watch downloaded content on your Tivo for free, so go find a John Adams torrent. ;)
]]>Recorded it here in Baton Rouge, LA, from HBOHD, watched them, transfered to TivoToGo, and had no issues. Like others has said, this is a local provider problem, not a Tivo or HBO issue.
]]>Many years ago I bought a Sony mini-DV cam that refused to copy a home movie I'd made years prior on an old, full size VHS camcorder. The DRM built into my shiny new $1,000 videocamera detected "copy protection" and disabled itself any time I tried to move the old video through it. Stupid fucking worthless piece of shit. I've been adamantly anti-DRM since and vowed, "Never again." To the point that I won't touch even iTunes with a ten foot pole. Screw them. Stop treating your customers like criminals, we paid for it, right? So back the hell off.
Interesting that it's a lot less hassle to illegally download material than to put up with the various copy protection schemes that inevitably lock me out of the software I paid for. Can't tell you how many times I've legally bought video games, then had to illegally download a crack just to get the stupid thing to work right. Makes me wonder why I bothered to buy it in the first place.
]]>The fix was one of these or similar boxes:
and the problem went away. This box should also fix any copyright flagging if that's how you hook up your recorder. This of course won't fix the problem if you're recording direct off the cable via a cable card in the Tivo; this is only for those who can record indirectly off the cable box using video and audio cables. As always YMMV.
]]>The more I read on this, I think it might be a mis-code of the DRM.
I'm Tivo'ing the HD versions of John Adams tonight (Comcast, Northern NJ). I'll report back in the morning.
]]>Why pay and get crap for your money, when you can get crap-less recordings for free.
That's a great way to punish paying customers !
]]>I've had the same issue with Time Warner. I had no luck dealing with them directly, so I sent a request to the Public Utilities Commission, responsible for the video franchise.
Time Warner's response:
"TWC sets copy protection settings in accordance with applicable law and our programming agreements. The settings are correct."
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So, where's the link to vote for the Worst Company in America?
This looks a lot more like ignorance than malice.
]]>I was able to transfer both episodes to my computer without a problem.
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