Is fair use really all that fair? It depends on who you ask I suppose.

I have a column (/var/opinion) in an upcoming issue that deals with my struggles to get a MythTV system working. The column ends with a tease about yet another column on Linux standards. I don’t want to spoil either, so I’ll leave it at that. However, I have another beef about the way my MythTV system is shaping up, or more accurately, falling apart. I suspect the problem is that our fair use rights are being denied and we are deliberately prevented from capturing high quality content.

First, let me bring you up to date. My television fried, so I replaced it with a great deal on an Samsung HDTV. I have an old TiVo unit that simply doesn’t do justice to the new picture quality. So I swapped my old cable box with an HDTV-capable cable box. This particular cable box has a PVR in it, but it stinks. So I figured I’d put together a MythTV system to replace the PVR capability in the cable box.

Here’s a point I didn’t make clear in the upcoming column, which will probably lead to a number of unfortunate “you dummy” letters:

I’m using a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500MCE as my TV Tuner card for MythTV. I know that the Hauppauge unit does not do HDTV, and I didn’t expect it to. The plan was to tune the Hauppauge card to channel 3 (or just connect to the unit via the AVI or S-Video) and use an IR blaster to make my Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000HD cable box do the actual channel surfing. I assumed (and I still haven’t found out if this assumption is right or wrong) that when I watch regular SDTV, I can set it up to expand the resolution of SDTV to one of the better resolutions of the HDTV. This is, after all, how the cable box itself works.

If I want to watch real HDTV, however, I’ll have to change the source at the TV from the PC back to the cable box. I have no problem with that…. Source: Linux Jounal

[tags]television,hdtv,mythtv,fair use,fair play[/tags]