i'm seeing people here complaining it didn't tape who said they're doing hdhomerun/qam though.  that's why i'm puzzled it worked for me. 

The flags still make it through with an HDHR.

It must have been certain regions... both my cablecard and my OTA (on a different machine) were able to record medium without a problem.

superswiss:

Is it really a bug? Frankly, I doubt it. From comments made, the behavior is intentional. It is my understanding, that the DRM spec contains a "do not record" flag among other restrictions that the broadcaster can put on the broadcast. It appears that many DVRs out there including cable provider's DVRs (ironically) do not obey some or all of these flags. Media Center does obey them. The result is that if some bonehead at NBC flips the wrong switch (which most likely happened Monday night) our recordings are getting blocked. The question is, is Microsoft going to follow those other DVR vendors and start ignoring these restrictions?  Remember: DRM is not about fighting piracy, it's about the broadcasters controlling how we consume their content.  It's just sold to congress and the FCC under the piracy umbrella, but our lovely politicians are not seeing it.

Well, this really doesn't help them at all if this is their intention.  I'm recording the show either because I'm not at home to watch it, and want to when I get home, or I'm watching something else and will watch the show later.  In either case, I never end up watching their show, so they have 1 less viewer.  And since first run episodes aren't typically rerun in that timeslot anytime soon, I probably never get around to seeing the episode on their station.  How does this help them? 

Meanwhile, a higher quality video than what Media Center can provide is available for download on the internet, and only about 150-300 mb instead of 1gb, plus it has the commercials edited out.  So what will viewers do given these options?  They're not attracting an audience, their pushing them away from watching their channel during prime time commercials.  In addition, MS is pushing people away from using Media Center to record and play their shows since it's not reliable and doesn't work as advertised for recording.

This is clearly a "feature of Vista"

Please see the 18th page or so of the following file:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/MED038_WH06.ppt


Has anyone tried using AnyDVD or AnyDVD HD as described by Paul Thurrot. He was able to bypass the bluray copy protection with anydvd. It is likely that the Vista DRM model has a final common pathway and AnyDVD will break that too?


 

AnyDVD will rip (or just mount) Blu-Ray discs sans-AACS protection, the .iso output of which I use in MyMovies in conjunction with Daemon Tools to mount the iso.  Works flawlessly.

dlawson12:

It must have been certain regions... both my cablecard and my OTA (on a different machine) were able to record medium without a problem.

It is not quite clear. It appears that the restriciton was removed at some point as well. I was actually able to record it on my HDHomeRun. I happened to be watching something when the error popped up on screen. I have Medium scheduled on my ATI tuners normally. When I saw the error I brought up the guide and started recording Medium on the HDHomeRun channel, which worked fine. Go figure.

I just saw the story about NBC activating the broadcast flag on slashdot and got worried that Medium didnt record (i would get an earful from the wife) but it looks likes i was able to record using my Saber2020 and directv

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Marvin on Disapproving Rabbits

After reading through the link to the Vista Protected Path details, once again it is clear that Microsoft is really missing out on the most essential part of product development - and that is providing products, technology and content to end users that meet the end users wants and needs.

Everything I've ever read from MS about content protection is 100% focused on the content owner.  Nothing is focused on what the user wants and this is totally ridiculous when it is the end user that ultimately pays for product development, pays for future products and ends up breaking DRM measures to get what they want.

Why the heck don't these DRM documents focus on bringing premium content to users seamlessly, emphasise managed copies of premium content (on-line storage), and making the end user happy.  From Microsoft's position DRM should be leveraged and discussed as a mechanism to bring premium content to their customers, enhance their product's functionality, and ultimately improve the bottom line through increased sales.

It is difficult to imagine a large company developing a product that is focused so strongly on limiting functionality to the consumer and then expecting the consumer to pay top dollar without considering either switching to competing products or doing what they can to break DRM.

This CGMS-A fiasco is a perfect example of not looking at what the customer wants.  With CGMS-A compliance being a voluntary requirement for all other PVRs, Microsoft should surely be in a position to argue they require flexibility in dealing with CGMS-A content protection too.  Instead they rammed it down our throats, even in countries where CGMS-A isn't even used, and caused their product to fail to perform anywhere near as well as all other PVRs out there.  To make matters worse, even after 1.5 years with essentially a broken product they haven't even released a single patch to attempt to fix the problem.

I don't know if this mess with Microsoft and DRM will ever be sorted out, but until MS starts focusing on the customer, the customer will always resort to DRM breaking methods (CGMS-A strippers, AnyDVD HD, etc.) and MS will continue to wast millions of dollars unsuccessfully implementing more and more DRM.  Without focusing on the customer, DRM will always fail and will always be a financial loss to Microsoft.

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

While DRM didn't create the pirates, it is pushing more users/customers to use pirate tools and techniques to use their purchased content. 

I was checking my guide in Vista Media Center and noticed that NBC is rebroadcasting Mondays episode of American Gladiators tomorrow night at 7:00 PM Central. This time, I'm going to record it through my Hauppauge WINTV-PVR500 and see if it fails just like it did using QAM and my HDHomerun.

I've got it scheduled to record again and lets hope that it actually does.

Here's a copy of what I emailed to NBC about the Broadcast Flag.

My wife and I were not available to watch American Gladiators live Monday night, so we decided to record it using our Vista Media Center PC. Later that evening, we both decided to sit down and watch the show together and guess what the show didn't record. The following error code was logged and displayed "American Gladiators was not recorded. Recording of this content is prohibited by the content provider."

I don't understand your reasoning behind this. I'm starting to see this more and more and I'm starting to wish that digital TV and DVR's would just go away completely so we could return to the good old days of analog and the VCR. At least I knew the program I scheduled to record would be there to watch when it was convenient for us and not decided by the network. I guess that's another show I can cross off my list to watch.

I don't agree with the use of the Broadcast Flag and thought thats why Vista Media Center contained all this DRM. So I could actually record and watch the shows only on my Media Center PC and extenders throughout my home.

If you would like to send them a comment here's the link: http://www.nbc.com/Footer/Contact_Us/ click on Other from the popup under Questions not found on FAQ page about NBC Entertainment programming? Email us using the pulldown menu below.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping us now to get to the bottom of this. See story on CNET:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9946050-7.html?tag=nefd.riv

This basically says that the "flag" can be ignored, yet our good friends at MS continue to "honor" it.  This is despite that fact that it is almost always an error.  As I have said several times, MS has little or no interest in Media Center and this problem will have no effect on the MS hierarchy.

It is nice to know, however, that all other parties seem to care.

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dnr
edelan

There is no such thing as a Broadcast Flag that limits recording of the content.  The Broadcast Flag, by definition, limits distribution of content but is not supposed to stop you from making a 1st generation copy.  This was clearly a bug, and I'm interested to know any other issues people have had recording OTA broadcasts.

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator