Reliable Raid Vista Cable Card system...

AFAIK, NAS should be no different than local/direct access storage. But the decryption and decoding could only happen in the original PC and the V2 vista MCE extender.

sure...slap something on that raid box that offers an iSCSI target....then use the built in iSCSI suport in Vista to add the raid drives as "local" storage.

Except that it's all heavily DRM'd and as soon as your motherboard dies or something else fails that takes away your ability to play that media.

You will loose the ability to play every copy protected file at some point guaranteed.
Even analog...

No computer lasts forever, and just the OS being destroyed in a cable card system will completely screw you and none of it will ever play again. One virus, one registry loss, one failed motherboard, one cpu smoking, you name it and you'll never get access to another one of those files again.

All that work for nothing ...

Troy

no

Anything to backup that answer pcCinema?

I personally don't know the answer, but I would see no reason why replacing the motherboard with a dup would not work.

Chris

Then the content recorded by Niveus A should be playable by Niveus A clone? As long as someone could extract ACPI_SLIC table from the BIOS, they can build a clone(someone already did so).

How about DVR from cable telco? If the DVR fails, I think your recording is gone too.

Good point.

Chris

Ok with all of that in mind, how would you suggest that we record and store Encrypted cable and satellite programing?

http://www.nextcomwireless.com/r5000/home.htm

Can't you back up the license along with the actual content?

Great except:

Won't work with most cable systems as it requires the 5c flag to be turned off, and it only supports the Motorola DCT2000 boxes....not too many systems use that box any more. What do you do if your cable co is like mine and uses SA boxes?

The life span on DirecTv will be short lived. They do not support any of the new mpeg4 boxes on Direct....

As soon as the providers turn on the CIT flags and the DOT flag...this whole thing stops working....

Not the type of solution that I want to invest that type of money in. ($700 to $800 per tuner)

"Can't you back up the license along with the actual content?"

No, there is no license to back up.

As for replacing the motherboard yes I suppose if you can copy whatever data is on it to uniquely identify it to the drm then sure you could swap it out. Change a socketed chip or reprogram an eeprom or whatever they use. Or you could try to get it component level repaired too, good luck with that though unless it's just a bad cap or something.

If the cpu chip is swapped, well, there's no way to fix that one.

Maybe one day some genius hacker will give us a way to completely cripple this DRM too, but just don't count on it at least for a while. MCE2005 has been out a long time and the DRM on analog recordings still can't be removed that I know of. (it can be before recording, but not after.)

There is no *legal* way to get what anyone would want with a setup like this. Clearly you are going to all this trouble to create a collection that should last you, but it will only last as long as your hardware and software last without a re-install or any major upgrade. (better have a good backup of the OS and make sure it restores properly before recording a lot of stuff.)

If you want something permanently you are expected to buy the dvd.

"Ok with all of that in mind, how would you suggest that we record and store Encrypted cable and satellite programing?"

I suggest you record only what you intend to throw away, only what you expect to be temporary or just don't buy into this bs at all. Buy dvd's for things you want to keep, or become a netflix subscriber and you can rent and re-rent things as often as you like. Cable and sat become only good for live stuff or things you won't wait for the dvd to come out.

It is very much like the cable companies dvr as someone said earlier. You don't own the content on it, if it dies they have no obligation to even feel bad for you loosing your recordings and certainly won't do anything to help you recover access to them.

Troy

I know the cable co's (really the content providers) don't want us to permanently keep recordings, but with cablecard support it seems like we are agonizingly close to having a solution to archive premium HD content.

I currently have both a Motorola 6412 and the HR20 and am upset at how quickly I fill them with movies from StarzHD and HDNet movies.

So, assuming they don't implement any "Delete after 30 days" DRM (which would make this all a moot point), what is the easiest way to get virtually unlimited storage for premium HD content?

It's far from perfect, but I don't have the DRM virus on my recordings. So I can transfer my HD movies to a 500GB usb drive and play it on my linux laptop in the RV connected to my projector via RGB while on vacation.

CINERAMAX - Now that is what I call a Home Theater PC. That's exactly what I had in mind for being able to easily archive premium HD content. Of course, it's way out of my price range, but since we are dreaming do you have any more details on it such as:

- Can you get both an HD DVD & Blu-Ray drive (like you can with some of their other HTPC's)
- Would this work Sony or Niveaus DVD changer?
- To really maximize being able to archive premium HD content, I suppose you would limit saving only the software and TV content to the 5.25 TB drives and all other content (music, videos, photos, etc) to a NAS.

This looks like it is really getting close to being an all-in solution, especially with their Karoake support. So outside of wanting to play a DVD-A, SACD, or video game, you could really use this as your one component and connect it directly to an amp and skip the receiver/pre-amp.

One final note, since we are talking about a Raid system, is there any update on managed copy for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray or could we hope for a HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray changer from Niveaus. I know changer's are old-school technology, but the cost of a Raid system to store 200 HD discs has still got to be more expansive than a changer (and much easier from a DRM perspective).