With only half a year left until the FCC criminalizes watching television without DRM (thanks to the loathsome Broadcast Flag), it's time to start stocking up on open hardware that can tune, record and manipulate digital TV signals without Hollywood's irrational, paranoid shackles.
If you've got a Mac, that means scoring one of El Gato's new EyeTV 500s, a device that can move digital TV shows form your rabbit ears or your cable wire to your Mac in glorious high-def, as plan-jane MPEGs that you can manipulate, share, rip, mix and burn till the cows come home.
My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann, EFF's Senior Intellectual Property Lawyer, is also a certified hi-fi nut, gearhead, and gadget freak. He scored a review-unit of the EyeTV 500 and wrote up a review of its freedom-enhancing capabilities.
As a demo of those capabilities, EFF is hosting a five minute high-def clip from Fellowship of the Rings (Torrent Link), which occupies a thunderous 500MB of hard-drive (!). The studios argued that the Broadcast Flag was necessary to keep viewers from sharing high-def movies over the Internet — at 500MB per five minutes, that seems a little far-fetched.
The tiny silver lining here is that if you can get an open, freedom-loving digital television tuner between now and the summer, you'll be able to go on doing practically anything you like with the digital television you receive over the air and with your unencrypted cable signal. If you choose to do this by plugging a DTV tuner into your computer, you'll be able to archive your shows on your hard-drive, manipulate them with your favorite editing software, and email clips to your friends.
