Flexible Content

A while back Michael Gartenberg wrote about a killer feature of Windows Media Center system: “I can copy my recorded to shows to my laptop for viewing when I’m on the road … and also arhive the shows to standard DVDs.”. At the time I wasn’t too impressed. But now with holiday travel looming I can appreciate his enthusiasm a little better.
I thought it would be nice to put a few of my daughter’s favorite shows on the laptop for watching during the various plane rides we’ll be taking. It turned out to be trivially easy moving them directly from the TiVo to my laptop over the home LAN, but I have a pretty unusual setup. For most TiVo owners, the best bet would be to get a video capture card and pipe the TiVo’s output to it, or perhaps invest in a DVD recorder.
Speaking of which, there’s a lot of talk about the evil broadcast flag that was recently approved by the FCC. In the new regime, content creators will have the right to prevent you from making portable digital recordings of their broadcasts. The MPAA’s Broadcast Flag FAQ sheet states that the intent is not to prevent digital copying at all, but rather to prohibit unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted content. I say the devil’s in the details. A collection of bits has no idea whether it’s authorized or not. This means that, to comply with the law, the video players and video formats will have to include extra layers of crud that lock the content to specific devices. The likely result is, intentionally or not, moving content around will get harder not easier.