So, we're considering dropping DishNetwork and just purchasing TV shows on a per-show basis in the future. We already have two Apple TVs and have been quite happy with them (even if they have some annoyances and still feel like "toy" products from Apple's perspective).

Basically, at this point I feel like we can download or buy and rip all the TV shows we watch for cheaper than we are paying monthly for our DVR + satellite, and then we'll own them permanently. There may be better deals out there than what we are paying for satellite (I think $75 a month), and I realize there are probably cheaper options if I hook a computer up to our TV, but the convenience of the Apple TV added to the fact my wife gets a LOT of reply value out of the stuff we own (I've lost count of the number of times she's re-watched Buffy, Angel, Charmed, Firefly, SatC, and Friends) makes this option pretty compelling. I'm not a big fan of re-watching TV shows/movies, but she is, and she watches a lot due to her back disability and having to be down a lot.

I really do think in the end this would be cheaper. We'll probably drop $100-$150 in the fall to buy some season passes, but other than that I think our monthly costs will be much lower (I expect to get a lot of mileage out of all the DVDs we already own, thanks to my wife's viewing habits).

Anyway, has anyone else considered doing something similar yet? This feels a lot like the time when I got and empeg and boxed up my CDs (I'm now boxing up DVDs as we rip them), but the empeg was a lot better product than the Apple TV. Also, have I sold my soul to satan (er, Steve Jobbs), but owning multiple Apple TVs?

I have thought about it but I tend to just have the TV on playing something I like and only about half watch it. I suppose I could do that with hulu or netflix but it wouldn't be as easy. Also I like the documentary type shows on discovery health, A&E, etc and those are not really on the on-demand services so much.

I have been thinking about switching from cable to Dish because Dish sounds cheaper. Can you say what you are paying for fees on top of the package price for Dish ? Cable has tons of little fees and things. Dish should be cheaper if there isn't a ton of that kind of stuff.

My stance on this idea has always been the same, no matter what technology has come along: I freaking LOVE the idea, but I personally watch far too much TV to make it feasible for myself.

So essentially, it all comes down to how much TV you watch, and how much it's worth to you to have more discovery (not the channel). For example, when someone says "oh, you should check out ____." With a DVR you can just set that up for no additional fee. But with pay-per-watch, you might be extra hesitant to watch something new if you know that it'll cost you a few bucks.

If it works for your specific use case, I say go for it. For me, I want the DVR for all the shows I watch, and for live events.

*edit*
Plus, we only pay around $50 for the basic Verizon FIOS package, which includes a very decent number of channels (90% of which we'll never watch, of course).

The discovery thing is definitely an issue. Not for me, but for my wife. I pretty much go by word of mouth for discovering new shows, and I don't mind spending two bucks on an episode if it's been recommended by someone I trust. My wife, OTOH, is always discovering new shows through the DVR- and I don't know how she's found them, tbh.

At any rate, atm iTunes is offering a LOT of pilot episodes for free downloads- if they keep doing stuff like that it answers the "discovery" question for us pretty well. Just this weekend I downloaded a ton of episodes of shows I hadn't seen just to try them out.

Also, we watch close to NO live events- so that helps.

There's another option, one I never would have considered a year ago: Do without.

I have cable TV at my house, and the only reason it is there is for the 6 Mb/sec internet connection, the fastest that is available in this part of Mexico. Of the 77 channels I can receive, there is not one that interests me since they dropped the English language Discovery Channel. I watch an occasional DVD (rental cost: 10 pesos, about 80 cents) but my TV set has not actually been turned on in weeks.

You cannot imagine how incredibly liberating it is to not be tied to the idiot box, to not worry about missing an episode of [fill in favorite program name here], to not get upset because the cretins responsible for production made a complete hash of the programming continuity in "Heroes". [I know about that because I read it here on the bbs! ]

A year ago I was watching 40 hours of television a week and I'd spend another hour or so tweaking my TiVo so I'd be sure not to miss anything. God, what a waste. And you know what? I don't miss it. Not the slightest bit. When I read the threads on this bbs about the current TV shows, and the debates about what the plot line(s) in "Lost" really mean, I have an almost irresistible temptation to chime in and say "Look, guys, it isn't real!". It's hard to express how much more full my life is without TV.

It's ironic that I'm retired and supposedly have all this free time, and now is when I have left television out of my life. It's better without it.

tanstaafl.

I lived four years of college with zero television. In grad school, I found myself making regular visits to a dorm with a TV set and realized, you know, I can afford my own TV set, so I bought one. Back then, I carefully juggled VHS tapes to make sure I could get my weekly fix of the handful of shows I cared about.

Now, with the TiVo, it's all so much easier. I don't think I watch any more TV than before, but when I do watch, it's so much more satisfying to zap the commercials and otherwise control the experience.

As to specific hardware, my AppleTV is flaking out. At this stage, it will run maybe an hour with an ice pack on the top, much less otherwise. (Apple had the idea of thermally connecting the Intel chip to the case, and avoiding any fans. Sadly, they also never provisioned sufficient surface area to radiate all the heat it generates.) There's some temptation to replace the AppleTV with a new Mac mini, but then I think you don't get the full spectrum of content you can get on the AppleTV. I'm not clear on exactly how this has evolved.

Of course, there are other vendors, such as Amazon, offering content through an Internet-connected TiVo. (And, via pyTivo and other such services, TiVo can painlessly play content you download on your computer via BitTorrent in whatever format.) I'll be particularly intrigued this fall when the Boxee Box finally ships, as Boxee is frantically working out content distribution deals. Maybe they'll accomplish what Apple has not. Likewise, there's the forthcoming Google box.

Suffice it to say that there will be a variety of technologies competing for your ala carte TV watching dollars in time for this year's Christmas season. It's presently unclear who the real winner will be, if any.

I agree. If cable/sat was $10 a month, I'd buy it, but as it's what I consider way overpriced, I watch over the air. It seems there's never a shortage of stuff to watch.

And, no offense, that would have been a little annoying.

Would you make the same comment if we were discussing a novel?

Sorry, that just got under my skin a little. I'm happy that you're happy without TV, but I thoroughly enjoy it and consider it a hobby in which I get very invested. Also, I have two tuners that prevent me from having to spend those hours you mentioned plotting out the week's recordings, so there's no pain or hassle for me.

It can definitely do that, though I question how painless it is. It was painful enough for me to be on my second $100+ media streaming box, and ready to drop $200 on the Boxee Box.

But, if it's all you have, you are correct that pyTivo will most certainly do the job if you have a computer fast enough to do the transcoding.

As much as I would love this option, it isn't one. There was a time about 8 or so years ago where we didn't have cable after a move and didn't ever watch DVDs- we hardly turned on the TV at all. It was a good time in our marriage. Sadly, our situation has changed.

With my wife's back troubles, TV is really the only option for her when waiting for medication to take effect. The pain makes focusing on reading difficult, so there really isn't much to do in bed except watch TV. This is a situation she finds herself in 3 times a day (on most days) for about an hour each time, and more on days where the pain keeps her in bed longer. Unfortunately, this isn't something that will ever improve save medical advances that will allow her to someday replace the parts of her back that are causing this pain.

In fact, this was the entire justification for buying the first Apple TV- it allows her to watch any movie we own without having to get up out of bed and switch discs. I'm certain you can see the benefits there.

The reason we don't watch any live events is that I more or less could do without TV- I don't watch sports, and TV is mostly about watching stuff with my wife because that's the past time she can enjoy the most. For a while we tried playing WoW together, but even computer games become difficult to focus on when her pain level is high.

I think I pay about $80-$90 per month for pretty much everything they offer. I haven't had cable in forever, but with DirecTV the same package cost about $140 per month. If I remember, I'll get a price breakdown when I get home.

I'm so sorry to hear about that, Jeff. That sounds just awful. I really hope something can be done about that one day...

I'm relatively new to the game, so I don't know what it used to be like. I just installed the PyTivoX image on my Mac and it just worked, right out of the box. Okay, the "transfer" option insisted on downcoding everything from HD to SD, but the streaming option seems to work fine. Maybe it helps that I've got a top-end Mac Pro...

You could supplement that (in a BIG way), by hooking up a modest antenna to your digital TV, and exploring the 20-30 local HD channels in your market. For FREE.

Cheers

It does, and it also helps that you have a Mac at all, so you didn't have to install Python.

I also haven't played with pyTivoX. The pain I think of with pyTivo is really only up to and including installation. I was working with just plain pyTivo, and it was always incredibly confusing figuring out which files I had to download, as there were different forks of the project, and the people who worked on it, frankly, were a-holes who expected everyone who used it to be a programmer. Man, those guys pissed me off.

Once I had it installed, it took a little setting up and some time to get all the settings correct, but after that it almost always worked just fine. I just needed to have a computer fast enough to do the transcoding. Once I upgraded my PC I was able to do HD video transfers (well, compressed HD MKV's) in nearly real time.

Darn, I forgot to suggest that! That's a good enough excuse to get a Tivo HD, though that would be a little added monthly cost. Still, for as little as $12-13 a month you'd get a lot of OTA programming. It might be worth it if you figure out how many shows you'd be watching through iTunes are major network shows. It would lessen the replay aspect, though with Tivo to Go, you can get those recordings off the Tivo pretty easily.

Plus, OTA HD quality would beat out iTunes...

Shouldn't the quality be about the same (iTunes HD that is?)

I think our network shows would be House, CSI, and Chuck, with possibly the addition of new shows if anything else good shows up. My guess is OTA + tivo would be cheaper, and of the three only Chuck is something I'd want to own for replay value.

Good thought and something I'll definitely be looking at.

Another hindrance I just discovered that apparently only seasons 1-6 of "King of the Hill" are available for purchase- this might be a deal killer as it's one of my wife's top shows and she is always DVR recording syndicated episodes for playback later.

Just as a comparison... The OTA broadcast of Lord of the Rings is apparently superior to the BluRay release.

The stuff on iTunes is tiny compared to broadcast and BluRay. It's also not available in 1080, while some broadcast stuff is.

OTA gets me most of what we watch. I really can't see paying TiVo $12 a month for a little box with practically no HD space though. OTA broadcasts are quite huge and I have 1.5TB of recording space that I still have to prune (or leave it set up for auto-deleting episodes).

Well, like I said, you can always take the recordings off of the Tivo and free up space that way. You could even leave them, un-transcoded, on your Tivo Desktop computer and they'd be available any time you wanted.

As for built-in storage, I agree that there's far too little space on the basic models. However, at least three times now I've seen the Tivo HD XL on Woot for about $180, and that has 150 hours of HD recording. Plus you could add that branded Western Digital drive and get a ton more.

20-30?!?

I can get, maybe, four (notably, neither CBS or FOX), and then only with the largest directional antenna available. At least according to AntennaWeb. Real-world experience with a smaller interior antenna would seem to confirm that. (Yes, there are subchannels, but very little additional programming on them. It's mostly SD copies of the main subchannel and then news/weather.)

And I'm hardly in the boonies. Raleigh is like the 50th largest MSA in the country (out of something like 1000 total). And I'm inside the city limits.

OTA antennae work remarkably well in the city here in Houston, but then I'm only ~11 miles away from most of the transmission towers and they're all in the same compass direction. This worked exceptionally well for me back when I had the DirecTV HD TiVo (HD10-250) that used satellite for national channels and OTA for locals. Now I'm just using my local Comcast and paying scandalous monthly fees for the standard digital service. If and when I can get a decent DVR from an alternate content provider (and by "decent", I require content extraction, so I can move my TV shows onto my phone prior to going on business travel), I'll happily switch away from Comcast.

As to the various current TiVo models, there are several tricks:

- Pony up for the "lifetime" service, rather than paying the monthly fees. Assuming you keep your box over two years or so, it pays off, and it also increases the resale value. If they won't sell you lifetime service directly, find somebody who already has a TiVo, and they may be able to buy it for a new box when then goes in your name. (I've never understood TiVo's policies on this.)

- Consider getting the newer TiVo Premiere or Premiere XL. You get a physically smaller box that draws less power and has 100Mbit Ethernet (versus 10Mbit on the TiVo HD). In practice, I'm seeing 30-40 Mbit/sec when doing content extraction. I think they're selling the Premiere for much less than the XL, since most upgraders (like me) want the extra capacity without needing an external HD.

There's way more than 100 OTA channels (including subs) in the Los Angeles area... Only Fox is duplicating it's transmissions, and only three channels worth.

Tivo is hilarious with this stuff. Back in around 2005 I was moving and couldn't have Tivo service at my new place. I was going to call Tivo and cancel my service so that I could give my friend my old Tivo and he could sign up for it himself.

Well, I called them up and was forwarded to a retention guy. He came back with the offer of $6 a month for Tivo service. At this point I'd finally figured out how to log into my Tivo account and noticed I could simply change every bit of information, from my billing address and credit card info to my login name (email address), and decided to say "oh, okay, you got me. I'll take the $6/month service." So I did, and my friend ended up with a super cheap Tivo service.

OTA should beat the quality of just about any source other than perhaps some bluray discs. See.. they've got 19mbits/sec to play with on an OTA physical channel, far more than cable or satellite, and definitely way better than standard DVD or most kinds of legal downloads.

Rather than pay a monthly Tivo fee for free OTA, just dedicate a PC with one or more ATSC tuners to the task, and install SageTV or a free equivalent (BeyondTV, MythTV, GBPVR, etc..). A modern (though low-end, eg. Nvidia GT210) PCIe video card is required for this method, though.

Go to tvfool.com, enter your zip code (or better yet, street address), and see what it says. It will give a pretty reasonable indication of how much OTA you can expect to get from your (almost) exact location.

Cheers

19mbit of MPEG 2 bitrate != 19mbit MPEG 4 Part 10 (h.264) bitrate.

OTA HD broadcasts use MPEG 2 compression. Most BluRay discs and most streaming/download services like iTunes use H.264. OTA is also capped at 1080i, BluRay and other services go to the full 1080p.

So direct comparisons aren't really easy here. Add in complications with source differences, and it becomes a really mixed bag. At the end of the day, it's possible for an iTunes download to beat out the quality of a BluRay or OTA broadcast just as easily as an OTA broadcast could put iTunes or BluRay to shame.

Sure. Optimistically, h.264 might do as well with merely half the bitrate. But how many download services are there that provide 8-9mbits/sec streaming?

Cheers

Amendment: PyTiVoX / StreamBaby completely failed to deal with 1080i ".ts" files (containing h.264 within) that I recently downloaded. Am now fetching 720p MKV files to see whether they work any better. Grrr.

I have some HD files I've purchased from iTunes. Is there a way I can tell the quality? I will fully admit I am ignorant in this area. We don't even own a BR player, but we have some HD movies purchased through iTunes and they've always looked good to me on our 32".

I don't know about "quality" but it's straightforward to measure the bitrate. Just look at the file size divided by the length of the show. From what I've seen, Apple iTunes HD downloads tend to clock in near 5 Mbits/sec, and look reasonably good. Apple's SD downloads, for contrast, are much worse than terrestrial SD broadcasts.

Ditto for MythTV, xine, and mplayer here. Or at least with the versions I have of those programs. No problemos with the MKV files, though.

Cheers

Yeah, I never had problems with MKV files on pyTivo. It should work fine.


I'll admit, I've become a little less snobbish about video quality lately. I say it if looks good to you, just enjoy it! You'd probably need to get to far larger screen sizes to notice any difference in quality, though I've seen HD content on an Apple TV connected to a 60" display, and I thought it look fine.

I'm with you I don't care about the quality much. Right now I am watching How it's made and I don't think I would enjoy it more if the snow blower building robots were in HD.

Actually, How It's Made in HD is kinda awesome.

I mostly get fussy about HD playback when watching fast-motion shows, specifically ice-hockey. It's taken a bit of fuss to get that to be watchable, but it looks great here now.

Dunno if football (soccer) requires the same fussiness or not, but Spain looked really sharp today on our tweaked system.

-ml

Sometimes I've seen playback apps/devices do better if you rename the file extension to something it knows how to parse. Did you try that?

If I renamed the .ts extension, it just flat out failed. Downloading the MKV files, however, made everything work almost smoothly. TiVo's streaming app seems to do 15-minute read-ahead to fill its buffer, and then drains the buffer until it's empty. After this, it freezes the video and lets you know it's refilling the buffer. How nice. Might be even nicer if they streamed data the whole time.

Ok, done and done. We are now cable/satellite free and solely relying on iTunes and purchased DVDs for viewing TV. Our library is sitting at about 1300 episodes for various TV shows and I'm STILL ripping down stuff we've had or I've gotten cheaply used.

Next question is whether to get one of the new apple TVs for $99. If it's really an upgrade, that's a nice price point. I'll kind of hate losing the local hard drive, though.

Anyway- we'll see how it ends up going. We haven't turned on our satellite in the last two months though, so I don't think it's going to be a great loss.

Do you really have a choice if you're relying on iTunes? Isn't that the point of the walled garden? You can't get anything BUT the Apple TV if you want to get your media through iTunes.

On the other hand, Amazon has similar selection (and Netflix is pretty good for TV), and you can access that through the cheaper Roku boxes.

I can stick with the older models I already have.

And yeah- it sucks being so limited in options- but everything plays together so nicely it was easy to get suckered in. I suppose I'm still feeling the sting of the Rio Karma- it was the superior product but it never got the love from its creators that the iPod did. On the whole, once I finally got an iPod the overall ownership experience is better than with the Karma, even though the Karma had better features. I suppose I just enjoy the comfort of working within the same family of products produced by a company that is going to be around for a while, even though in the back of my mind I know I'm committing myself deeper and deeper every time I take the convenient route and buy something off iTunes (non-music that is, since the music doesn't have drm anymore).

Don't get me wrong, it's certainly attractive, and I love how well everything works in the Apple universe. I just wish they'd let other people play, but I understand why they don't and I don't blame them for that. It's just not something I want to get into because I want to have my options open, and at least these days there are other options like Amazon/Roku or Netflix on, well, everything.

Matt, how is the Apple way so significantly different here as far as your other options? He either buys a new Apple TV to access bought iTunes content and Netflix streams, or a Roku to access bought Amazon content and Netflix streams. Either way, he's in a "walled garden" with Amazon and their store, or Apple and their store.

Jeff, I would recommend looking into the selection on Netflix though. I passed it up in the early days myself when I dropped satellite, but I now subscribed this weekend. The streaming selection is quite good, and the service is working great off my iPad, PS3, and Mac.

I'm also going to be dropping Hulu Plus. The selection there is ok, but the commercial interruptions are just too annoying. Even before I left "traditional" TV, I had a Replay with automatic commercial skip, so commercials haven't been part of my viewing experience for a good 8 years or so now. It's hard to go back, especially when paying for a service.

Tom, for material your sourced from Hulu Plus where are you now sourcing it from?

I second the Netflix streaming, particularly given that the lowest tired Netflix account, one DVD at a time, is $8.99 and comes with unlimited instant watching.

I was mostly trying out Hulu Plus and hadn't really integrated it much. Most of what I was watching on the service were older shows, and so far all have been in Netflix too. I've been out of the habit of watching new shows for so long now, the new episodes of an unfinished series just weren't pulling me in on Hulu. I'm willing to at least wait for a season to wrap up, and by then Netflix will likely have it on DVD at a minimum.

I don't strictly define Amazon and Netflix as walled gardens because unlike Apple, who controls the content AND the hardware, they only control the content. While that's not ideal at least you have FAR more choice of hardware (Netflix lists 33 devices, mostly bluray players and TVs). I'm fine if you want to have a different definition, but that's just how I see it.


For a while there, NBC was letting Netflix stream new stuff too, though a day or two behind. I think the last two seasons of Heroes were handled that way, but NBC may have considered that a failed experiment (whether it was or not). The process of getting these companies to let us see their content is like pulling teeth. Worse, because sometimes these teeth have to be pulled repeatedly.

Netflix is definitely the horse I'm betting on and rooting for in this race.

We are definitely going to be looking into Netflix- that would be a reason to upgrade to the newest Apple TV. However, first stop will be getting a trial account and using our Wii to see how the selection works with our viewing habits.

They recently added a good deal of TV content. Somehow they seem to be accelerating in their content acquisition after languishing for years with a very sub-par selection. They still have almost zero recent movies, so hopefully that will get better.

Thats fair, and Amazon is going a similar route of trying to get their service on as many hardware devices as possible too. For me though, walled garden tends to hint at lock-in, and I seem similar lock-in if I were to choose Amazon, even though I have choice in hardware. I personally have stayed away from any digital only service including iTunes for any video content I wish to own. For The Daily Show, or for rentals, I've been fine with iTunes, since it's not content I'm keeping around.

What does that leave? Those digital files you get with DVDs?

Even those turn into iTunes DRM locked files for me, as I'm not even going near the alternate version that uses Windows Media. Basically I still buy movies I like on DVD or BluRay, then rip them to my NAS. If I want to play them back at home, I just play the raw files via DVD Player or Front Row. If I'm going on a trip, I use Handbrake to transcode them to standard h.264 files that the iPad will play. The Mac Pro lets me transcode a full movie in usually 20 minutes, so in the time it takes me to pack, I have a few movies ready too.

I'm just not convinced any of the current DRM locked video solutions will provide me the flexibility I want for the next 10 years. Looking back 10 years, I had a growing DVD collection (all still playable today), and was a mildly annoyed Windows user. I can't predict how things will end up in 10 years down the road, but I have a higher confidence in my ability to play back DVDs then then I do in playing back DRM locked files in 2020.

Same reason I still buy physical CDs.

Okay, well I thought we were talking about legal options. Of course there's that route, but that's a different discussion entirely. There's no walled garden when you climb over the wall and take the flowers

? It's not legal to buy DVDs now? Because it's most certainly legal to circumvent the copy protection on a DVD you own to be able to play back its contents in the US.

There's no such thing as DRM-free commercial video right now, so I suppose it's all a matter of how you want to play back what you buy. At the moment, DVD and BluRay offer the best quality SD and HD image and sound, potentially at comparable prices to download-only options.

MOST of our content is ripped from DVD (and recently Blu Ray). The only shows that we are downloading for purchase now are new shows as they come out- and it still is ending up cheaper than we were paying for satellite to do it that way. I figure that we may not get to play this content in 20 years- but with cable/satellite we wouldn't be able to anyway. At least this way we get to play the content multiple times for the next few years.

The real value we've found is purchasing older TV shows used on DVDs- you can get entire seasons of Family Guy, King of the Hill, Buffy, Friends, etc. on DVD for ~$10 including shipping if you buy used.

Where did I say that? What is with you, dude?


From what I understood of those rules passed by the LOC, that is still not the case. I think you're mistaken. Link.


I know there's not, which is why I was asking Tom what his alternative to the current services available were, because there were none that I knew of. If you count the illegal practice of ripping DVDs, then of course there's an alternative that will let you do whatever you want with your digital movie files, but I contend that that doesn't count in this conversation. I'm not going to say that I've never done it myself, but I don't have any delusions about what I'm doing, and in many cases if it's available on Netflix, it's just easier to stream it for $9-10 a month.

I'm 100% ethically comfortable with ripping DVDs that I own, whatever the law states, even though I'm generally in favor of protecting intellectual property. I'd say there is a large difference between ripping a DVD I own and downloading protected content I have never payed for. Of course, I know there are tons of people who have no ethical difficult with the latter either, so at that point I guess it all comes down to what your conscious allows. That certainly does cloud the question of what the best options are in a general discussion though.

So, how's life breaking the law by using your Tivo (or betamax before it to be specific)? They do after all break copyright law though the case 464 U.S. 417 (1984) clarified fair use to allow it.

For me, copying my personally bought discs to a NAS is fair use. Now I'm not a lawyer, and indeed could face legal action for this, but I'm willing to wade into grey territory here, just as betamax owners did. I've come down hard here in the past on torrents due to their nature to attract lawsuits that the defendants don't win. But copying what I legally own, and keeping ownership of the original media remains pretty much towards the white side of the grey area. If I turn around and sell my DVDs, then yes, you can start accusing me of illegal actions. Call my side of it a delusion if you want, but legally this is an unclear area either way, with precedent favoring fair use.

Matt, the LoC "interpretation" of the DMCA rules are not applicable here. The laws, as backed up by case-law/precedent, allow fair-use. Ripping your own legally purchased DVDs is non-commercial fair-use.

Maybe you're confusing this with selling ripping software - that's commercial and where some companies have gotten themselves in hot water.

It's also possible to copy DVD movies to HDD without removing the protection, so as long as you have something suitable to do that and to play them back, you can be even more at peace than the rest of us.

Also, with regards to downloading, has anyone in the US ever been prosecuted for that yet? As far as I know, while illegal, defendants have only ever been charged with distribution/uploading. It's an easier case to make because there's no fair-use scenario that covers distribution.

Anyway, I don't buy media from Apple for a number of reasons, and they don't center around only being able to play the content back on Apple hardware.

The music while now DRM free, isn't at a high enough quality for me. And the price is too high. The same pretty much goes for movies and TV shows. It's also the same reason I don't buy download-only media from anyone else either.

The DMCA explicitly requires the Library of Congress to "make the determination" for fair-use exemptions. The DMCA says "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." The Library of Congress's exemptions do not include copying for personal use; in fact, proposals as simple as requesting access to circumvention of CSS for operating systems where "legal" decrypting is not available have been dismissed three times.

That said, this is about bypassing encryption. If you perform a bit-for-bit rip of the DVD and play it back with licensed software, you should be okay. But I bet most people are using mplayer or VLC, which are not licensed.

With regards to DVDs, the DMCA covers specifically the circumvention of copy protection. It seems to me that fair use still applies for simply making a "copy." Someone in the US could always send out their DVD to another country where it can be decrypted and copied, receiving both the original and copy back. Now you'll have your fair use copy without ever having touched the copyrighted encryption. Just make sure you don't pay for the service.

Ugh- just got my first Blu Ray with a digital copy. I had no idea the digital copies were not HD- looks like I have to rip the Blu Ray anyway

You would think if you shell out for a Blu Ray, the digital copy would be a high copy too . . .

The idea behind digital copy is that it allows people to have the HD experience on the big screen with the disc, and also the on the go experience with a portable version. By keeping the resolution down at normal DVD sizes, and combine with H.264 compression, they can keep file size down to make it portable friendly. If they made the digital copy full HD, then they run the risk of it not playing on a portable. It would also have a much larger file size, potentially requiring a second BluRay disc just to hold it, and thus requiring a BluRay drive in the PC to make use of it.

The thing is, it just downloaded it from iTunes anyway- and normally you get both the HD and the regular when you download from iTunes, so I don't see why they just didn't do that. It is so close to a perfect solution that it's frustrating that it doesn't quite do what I want.

Are you sure it downloaded it? The Digital copy discs I've gotten had an encrypted version that iTunes decrypted and bound to my Apple account. I haven't come across one that downloaded the movie directly, but I've also not bought a new movie with DC in a little while.

Hmmm- I ASSUMED it downloaded it because it came up in the same download list as other stuff I was downloading at the time (Fringe and CSI). That being said, it required the DVD to be in the drive, so perhaps it was just "downloading" it from the DVD. This (Iron Man 2) was my first Blu Ray purchase with a digital copy so I have no idea how it usually works.

Anyway- ripping the Blu Ray isn't so bad. In my head I swear the Blu Ray rips are better than the iTunes HD downloads anyway The only annoying thing is that I have to remove the digital copy from my library or the movie ends up showing up twice on my Apple TV. That isn't the case for HD movies I download from iTunes- I get both versions, but collapsed together. Anyway, at least it's nice to have the iTunes artwork and to be able to have a version I can put on my iPhone.

Yeah, there is a big difference between iTunes HD and BluRay HD. I'm showing around 4.4mbit for the 1280x720 HD version of Warehouse 13 I got from iTunes using H.264. Avatar off BluRay is 1920x1080 and runs VBR, with it maxing out around 40mbit, and usually averaging somewhere in the high 20s to mid 30s, also using H.264. I can easily spot some compression artifacts and blocking in the iTunes video when played back full screen (2560x1440), but nothing really stands out when watching Avatar. If a digital copy came in HD for Avatar, it would at most have around 7mbit to work with to also still fit on a dual layer DVD.

This is why I could care less about most streaming services for HD right now when I want a full cinematic experience at home. Sure, the Roku and others can output at 1080p, but I highly doubt any of them actually deliver a good enough bitrate to come close to BluRay quality. Hopefully faster broadband options start rolling out over the next few years to allow the streaming services to improve quality. It's pretty good now, but could be great once they stop worrying about people on sub 10mbit lines.

Because I'm playing everything through my Apple TV, I'm having to rip my Blu Rays lower- but I'm OK with that. I'm not a big cinematic experience guy. Convenience is more important to me that quality- which is not to say I'm OK with crummy looking video. But the downloaded HD is good enough (especially Fringe- something about that show just looks amazing in HD).

Even at that, though, the Blu Rays appear to be clearer to me and I cannot see any artifacts. I just wish they didn't take so long to rip (currently ripping down Firefly- Blu Ray TV shows take forever!)

Amazon Prime (their all-you-can-eat 2-day shipping subscription) has just been upgraded to include free streaming of some movies and TV shows.

Right now, the TV shows seem to be just BBC and classic US TV, but hopefully that will improve. That said, it seems to include all of Doctor Who, back to the 60s. That's a lot of stuff on its own.

Dude, does Amazon Prime include the Matt Smith Christmas special that we missed?! (checks)

Cool. Thanks Bitt.

It's a really nice addition, especially if you already pay for the service (which I do and I like it). It comes out cheaper than Netflix, though the selection isn't even as good as theirs.

Here's a good comparison chart. Netflix is really doing well in bringing TV to their streaming service. I'd say the ratio of good to bad in their TV selection is much better than the movies, and they have a good amount of TV in HD, including Dollhouse.

I keep meaning to check of Amazon's new service will work with devices like the Tivo. I just do not like watching TV or movies at my computer, despite having a very nice and cushy office chair

It does work on the Roku, though I've not used it as we currently get Prime for free through Amazon Mom and therefore are not entitled to this new feature.

I don't think Amazon are trying to go head to head with Netflix, rather they are trying to increase awareness of there video offerings, but more so to increase the number of Prime subscribers.

We're down to just having basic cable $15, and I'm planning on going OTA to replace that come spring. Netflix Instant Streaming $9.99, Hulu Plus $8, the odd Amazon VOD, and some Roku channels eg Nowhere TV in particular. This is compared with spending ~$70 on DirecTV and $16 on Netflix this time last year.

We're currently trying out Sezmi as a OTA DVR, but so far it has not met minimum WAF levels.

How do you know it works? Is there a special section on your Roku under the Amazon app? Just curious...

I'm assuming it works based on this thread
Amazon also lists it under the compatible devices - thought they also list the Tivo Premier which I though didn't currently support it...

Cool, I'll have to check it out.

That seems to be a list of all devices that support the Amazon VOD service, and not necessarily able to stream the free videos, but I'm still not sure if those are separate things...

That list seems to be of devices you can currently buy from Amazon. I'm pretty sure my Tivo S3, not listed, has Amazon VOD... after double checking, I see it does.

Turns out this isn't accurate. I made a bad assumption.

There are select serials from a lot, though not all, of the seasons, back to season 1. (Yes, I know "season" isn't the correct term for British TV, but when I try to use "series", I feel like I'm being ambiguous.)

They did have the Matt Smith Christmas Special though. For three bucks. We watched it, but the frame rate had some interesting playback issues. Could have been the laptop that it was being played back on, not sure.

The Sezmi went back to Amazon within the 30 day return window.

I wanted a OTA capable DVR, of which there are a few options:
* Roll you own. I didn't look into this, Mark and others (Bruno?) have got this route.
* The DTVPal/CM7000Pal DRV for $300 and no subscriptions costs, but not sure of it's future if any.
* TiVo

Initially I was ignoring the TiVo option as I didn't want to be paying $13 to $20 per month for it, but the upsides were; known high WAF - we had one with DirecTV for years, and portability - it could work with Comcast or Verizon, if OTA didn't workout, made it warrant another look.
Ebay has used Series 3 TiVos with Lifetime subscriptions for roughly $400, though sometimes as low as $350. However I was able, through a friendly existing TiVo customer, to get a deal on a Series4 Premiere with Lifetime.

The TiVo is being feed by a 4-bay bowtie antenna. I'd been advised by folks on the TV fools forum based on the output of my TV Signal Analysis tool to get a 4bay, and borrowed one from a friend - I'll spend the $50 on the recommended CM4221HD later. The channels I am receiving are mostly the ones at 140 degrees, which is the group of antennas just west of Boston, and about 23 miles from me.
Currently we are receiving about 25 channels, mostly the ones in green and yellow in the above report, with a few more that should be get-able with some tuning, plus some Spanish that I'm not counting as I don't speak the language.

Setup was easy enough, but then I'm only feeding one TV and it's a single story building. I acknowledge that I'm lucky to be able to get OTA with such ease, and that not everything that one might want to watch is on the available channels. But OTA and a Roku works for us.

I've been pretty happy with our Premiere XL. I occasionally toy with the thought of cutting the cable, but there are a handful of shows that I just can't (legally) get any other way.

Probably the biggest bonus relative to our earlier (dead) TiVo HD is having 100Mbit Ethernet, which means that content extraction now consistently runs at 30-40Mbits. It used to be interminably slow for HD content.