New Computer Monitor

I’ve decided to upgrade to a new computer monitor:

That’s a picture of my computer, using my HTDV set as a monitor. You might ask – why would I do such a thing? For gaming, of course! There are some games that, sadly, don’t come out for the XBox 360 (Torchlight 2, I’m looking at you). This allows me to play PC games in my living room, on my TV set. I’ve got a wireless keyboard and mouse that works nicely, and the remote can effortlessly switch TV inputs between the PC (which is connected via HDMI cable) and the cable box.

What about getting things done? Well, most of my coding is done on my laptop. My laptop is plugged into a docking station and connected to a full-sized monitor and a split keyboard, so it’s comfortable to work on. Plus, thanks to VNC, I can remotely access my home computer from the laptop whenever I need to. So far it all seems to be working pretty well. Best of all, now that the desktop is out of my office, it’s a lot cooler in here. (The desktop was putting out a lot of heat.)

There was one tricky part that I hadn’t expected. Connecting the TV to the computer was easy; just plug an HDMI cable into the computer’s graphic card and you are set. The tricky part is getting the sound to work. In my case, the sound didn’t go over the HDMI cable automatically; to get that to work I have to connect the graphics card to the SPDIF pins on the motherboard via a cable that is almost impossible to find anywhere. (I’ve ordered it; it hasn’t come in yet.) That’s the only wrinkle I’ve found so far.

The next project will be turning the PC into a DVR. The DVR that Comcast hands out does work (usually), but it doesn’t let you copy TV shows and save them locally. It’s time to replace their DVR with something a bit more open.

You would think that replacing your DVR would be fairly simple, and it is – but there’s a catch. Cable providers encrypt their television streams. If you want to decrypt them you have to get something called a CableCARD, which your cable company will rent to you. However, those devices have lots of rules that they enforce. If Comcast flags a channel as “Don’t allow anyone to copy these shows”, then you can’t copy those shows, and that is that. You can stream them and watch them, but they are locked up tight – and CableCARD only works with software that honors its rules.

I think the rules are utterly insane. People who are paying for cable service, who have these cards, are given severely restricted access. But people who just download the shows from torrents don’t have that problem! Their access isn’t restricted at all – they can do as they please. The only people that DRM affects are the paying customers. Companies have invested millions of dollars into DRM solutions that do just one thing: give their paying customers a poorer, more limited experience. That is all DRM does: it hurts the people who are actually paying for the product. It’s a lot like finding grocery shoppers who actually paid for their groceries, and then throwing rocks at them as they try to leave the store.

You know those FBI piracy warnings that you see whenever you try to play a DVD? Guess what: only paying customers see those! Pirates don’t have to mess with those incredibly annoying, unskippable warnings. No, the only people who are forced to watch them are the people who ACTUALLY PURCHASED THE DVD. What a brilliant idea: let’s annoy people who aren’t pirating the movie and remind them that, if they had, they would already be watching the movie by now!

People who download movies are free to do as they please with them; people who pay for them are forced to deal with all kinds of restrictions. Companies have gone out of their way to make sure that customers who pay for their products are given a worse experience than people who just download them. Then they wonder why so many people go and download their stuff. It just boggles my mind.

I have no real idea what I’m going to discover when I try to turn my computer into a DVR. I don’t know what channels are flagged as copy freely and which ones aren’t. It will be an adventure, I think. We’ll see how it goes.