s3 extraction non-technical discussion

[tiver]

edit: these posts were split from the s3tots discussion in the s3 support forum - ronnythunder
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Well, now that the clarification is out of the way, I have two things to say:

1. This is HUGE. Prior to this, there has been NO reasonably efficient and/or user-friendly mechanism to do scheduled recordings of premium HD content in full resolution. Sure, there are nice OTA solutions with cap cards, and yes, there are some extremely arcane and expensive methods involving custom modifications to _very specific_ STBs. And even those methods had little or no automation capability (scheduling a PC macro to fire off a low-probability IR sequence ? Good luck...) and were extremely vulnerable to providers changing the environment and rendering days and weeks of tweaking totally useless.

I came to the conclusion that there were only two reasonable methods for automated, user-friendly recording of premium HD content, and those were: a deCSS-style break in the actual cablecards themselves, such that one could record directly off the cablecard with no STB, etc. OR the ability to offload HD/S3 tivo programs without DRM. And now it looks like we have one of those two.

2. Recognize, TIVO (and other companies)! Recognize that I would have paid any dollar amount for a box that did the above, but was unwilling to pay even one dollar for a box that didn't. The reason I don't have an S3 tivo isn't the price, or some feature issue, etc. - the reason was that the device was _worthless_ without the ability to move the shows off to an arbitrary device in full resolution.

Your product is "defective by design" and I will not pay for it unless I can remove that defect. Yesterday you could not get my money. Today you will. Wake up and realize that whatever money the industry _thinks_ it is saving with its lame (and now broken) DRM is a lesser amount than the amount it is losing by non-adopters.

How many people have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on alternative (myth, Sage, HTPC) setups just because they couldn't work with your locked up, broken systems ? How many of them would gladly have paid an extra 1 or 2 or 300 dollars for a Tivo that actually functioned instead of spending money and hundreds of hours on building their own ?

[Roger Dylan]

Your product is "defective by design" and I will not pay for it unless I can remove that defect. Yesterday you could not get my money. Today you will. Wake up and realize that whatever money the industry _thinks_ it is saving with its lame (and now broken) DRM is a lesser amount than the amount it is losing by non-adopters.

How many people have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on alternative (myth, Sage, HTPC) setups just because they couldn't work with your locked up, broken systems ? How many of them would gladly have paid an extra 1 or 2 or 300 dollars for a Tivo that actually functioned instead of spending money and hundreds of hours on building their own ?

You must understand that you (even in aggregate) are a miniscule market. Of no interest to Tivo. Zero. Further, you are the deadly enemy of the industry that Tivo is dependent on to find its little niche (hopefully). That industry would put you in jail for life if they could, in an instant, after they've taken away your home.

What people like you and me need to do is patch together our little home entertainment systems from what falls through the corporate cracks, benefitting from the largess of hobbiest/developers like B.C. who luckily have interests that produce useful toys for us.

And, I might suggest, the less noise about it, the better.

[rbreding]

And, I might suggest, the less noise about it, the better.

Nail, Head, Drove home (I hope).

[tiver]

Further, you are the deadly enemy of the industry that Tivo is dependent on to find its little niche (hopefully). That industry would put you in jail for life if they could, in an instant, after they've taken away your home.

Well, I pay for my content. I pay full price. I pay regularly, month after month on _their terms_. And I would gladly pay double or triple my monthly cable bill if that was the route that would get me non-DRM files on my Linux fileserver.

So I am not stealing, and there is no law breaking involved.

And at some point that industry will wake up (like some of the record companies recently have) and realize there is _more money_ to be made by un-breaking their products than by breaking them.

Obviously I am preaching to the choir here. Except for the fear - you CANNOT steal something you have paid full price for. The end.

[ronnythunder]

except you haven't paid full price for it. you're suggesting that your cable tv bill somehow entitles you to *ownership* of the content; far from it. you have been given permission for private use of a copyrighted program, and the copyright remains with someone other than you. the content providers do *not* want people to be able to extract hd content. they want you to view it on a secure device, and honestly, they'd prefer that you don't even timeshift (and some technologies are placing limits on that, btw).

bottom line: we do *not* hold the cards, and we don't get to decide how the content is used.

ronny

[tiver]

I disagree. You make purchasing decisions with your dollars, and I cannot think of more potent "cards" to hold.

I can't be the only one out there that hasn't bought an ipod or a single song off of itunes because I know they are broken, and the recent moves away from DRM that some record companies are taking are good indicators that they are starting to wake up ...

Never mind the _other_ "cards" you hold, cards in the form of deCSS and every other DRM break that has occurred in the last 10 years - every one of their schemes fails, and as that failure rate continues to run at 100% (someone please break cablecard protection, and fast) they will look to better places to deploy their capital....

So in summary, stop being a pawn and buying things you _know_ are broken, and continue to "fix" them.

Many, many thanks to the people that made this possible - I've always wanted to use a HD tivo, and now it looks like I can.

[bcc]

I don't want to get into an anti-DRM crusade, but here's a couple points:

• s3tots should just be thought of as a conversion tool that applies to content in general. Like mfs-utils. It is not some DRM defeating weapon.
• Hi-def extraction of premium content from tivos has been possible for years from the hr10-250. (Yes, these days that box is becoming of limited use due to it being orphaned by directv and with their mpeg4 rollout.) So it's not as if the s3 is the first tivo from which one can extract HD without DRM.
• The same chain-of-trust defeating methods that were applied to older tivo models apply to the s3/Tivo HD. Only the killhdinitrd hack has become invalid (ie prom mod is again required for newer models, as of some time in 2004).

Basically s3tots should not be spun as DRM news. Perhaps the news is that nothing has changed when the assumption was that s3s were locked down...