When the announcement came that ATI would be releasing a new firmware for its
cable card devices which would properly support the Copy Freely protections of
shows, I got excited. For the past 2 years, I have been a dedicated cable card
user within my Vista Media Center to enjoy high definition recordings via
Comcast, even though it meant ditching my favorite (and I do mean favorite)
plugin, DVRMSToolbox, commonly referred to as DTB. Seeing people who have used the firmware already got
me thinking happy thoughts...
You see, DTB is what gave me the magical power to analyze television
recordings, find the commercials, and then skip instantly past them when I
watched. And with ShowAnalyzer, I was even able to start this process while the
recording was still going on! The original firmwares for the ATI tuners however
had a copy protection flag on all recordings--whether the broadcaster flagged
the show or not--which prevented the ShowAnalyzer from being able to scan the
file. According to reports, with this new firmware anything NOT flagged as Copy
Protected should be able to be scanned and thus allow me to use DTB and
ShowAnalyzer once again!
Since it has been several years since I used the applications and much has
changed, I decided to write up a little guide for those of you new to the scene
(or maybe you just forgot as I did). With the news that cable card OEM
restrictions will soon be dropped, I imagine there will be a lot more of you
cable card users out there to take advantage.
Now just as a preface, this new upcoming firmware does NOT mean that ALL of
your television recordings will work with this. This will strictly work for
recordings which were not flagged as "Copy Protected" by the broadcaster. How
can you tell such a thing you may ask?
Read the full guide at MissingRemote.com