Fair use. If I buy something, I should be able to enjoy it.

I buy CDs. I buy thousands of CDs. I play them. I rip them to my hard drive and ipod. I enjoy them.

I buy DVDs (currently have almost 1000). I play them. I rip the full disc images to my hard drive (via a hack), and encode them for my ipod. I enjoy them.

Digital Cable. Umm…I watch it. That’s it! That is unacceptable!

I have a Moxi box (alt.TiVo). After much fighting with the cable company, citing FCC mandates that the FireWire port on the back of the box MUST be active, I obtained a FireWire (IEEE-1394) enabled box. Cool.

I went to archive my Moxi recorded shows (via the FireWire) to my Mac. Nope. Nothing. 5C/DRM nailed me.

5C. Copy protection. Basically, I can pay $100+ a month for digital cable, and I can record my digital TV with my Moxi box (which is a buggy piece of crap, that reboots on it’s own every few minutes to every few hours). If I want to archive the shows I recorded with the DVR (Moxi), I have to go analog out. It’s digital cable. Why the hell would I want to downgrade the quality to analog? It’s MY TV! It’s my show! I want it, in the quality I recorded it, on a DVD! Fair fucking use! But, alas, the movie and TV companies want their content protected.

Now, let’s look at my viewing habits. On my Moxi are dozens of Jools Holland, Top Gear, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, and many HDNet music specials, along with other various items. MOST of these will NEVER be on DVD. Some others, like South Park, get on DVD rather fast. In fact, when the last DVD season set came out, I happily hit “delete” on all of that season’s shows on my Moxi! See that? I *bought* the DVD set. I am that rare animal. I do not live my life on BitTorrent sites, scouting out commercially available material. If I want it, and it is available to buy, I buy it.

Top Gear, and many other shows I tape, will never be on DVD, for various reasons (music licensing, et cetera). What am I, an honest consumer, supposed to do when I want to enable “fair use”, and archive my own TV recordings for my own personal use? Well, if you know me, you know the answer. I will simply hack!

After weeks of frustration, I set forth with one thought: fuck the DRM that is being forced down my throat. There has to be a way around this. And, do you know what? There is!

Tools used:
Moxi box with FireWire/IEEE1394 port enabled
FireWire cable (duh)
12″ PowerBook
AVCVideoCap (free in the Apple FireWire Developers SDK), though a highly modified version I hacked together
VLC (for playback)

In the Apple FireWire SDK, they supply an “as-is” app called AVCVideoCap. AVCVideoCap *does* record any “copy freely” (non-copy/DRM protected) video from a Moxi box. Sadly, that leaves very little programming. Not only are all the good channels set as “copy once” (meaning you can’t record it to your Mac), even some of the standard OTA (over the air) channels, which are SUPPOSED to be free, aren’t. Don’t believe me? Google search for “american gladiators” and “5c flag”. Yeah - American Gladiators is protected. I know I will sleep better at night now, knowing that pirates can’t bootleg that.

Not only does Apple supply the AVCVideoCap application, but they supply the source code for the app as well. A few days of hacking the hell out of the source code, and RESULT! I can now get my digital TV files, as the Moxi recorded them!

I have the small internal Moxi drive, packed with recordings. I also have a Western Digital 1TB hard drive filled with a LOT more recordings. I want those streams…and I am getting them!

Click the images for the full versions, in a new window (the captures are too big to use the LightBox effect):

Encore (SD):

ESPN (HD):

Mythbusters (HD):

Showtime (HD):

BBC America (Top Gear) (SD):

Ugly Betty (HD):

I do not want to hear any US government person, or studio employee, dare to tell me that I am not allowed to make perfect copies of something I am honestly paying for. How dare you! Why force honest citizens to have to resort to hacking, to get what should legally be theirs in the first place.

All DRM does is piss off honest people. Hackers can get around the DRM, anyway. Instead of trying to protect your content, why not try improving the quality!

Honor fair use! Because if you don’t, your DRM will be cracked. Hell, I’m not even that big of a hacker, and *I* cracked your DRM!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go watch my butchered DVD copies of Top Gear (screw you BBC America for editing these shows to hell and back)! Broadcast the full versions of Top Gear!

Elbow. Avalon. $20 tickets. Sweet.

This was how I felt, until the “TicketMaster” experience.

Let’s look over the final bill..

* Yeah, $20 each for the tickets. Nice.

* $6.50 “Convenience Charge”…TIMES FUCKING TWO! Who the fuck came up with that shit? It surely doesn’t cost TicketMaster $13.00 to serve up the page that I am ordering from. If it does, wow, please let me redesign your web site. I would love to be in on some of that dirty corporate money!

* Delivery. Here’s a mindfuck. To print out the tickets (using MY own printer, ink, and paper), I would have to pay $2.50 for that honor. To have TicketMaster print out the tickets, with their own ink and paper, and have them waiting for me at the box office, is FREE!?! Isn’t that a bit backwards?

* Order processing. Another fucking $5.15. Where does that price come from, exactly? That “.15″ shows there is some sort of method to the absolute corporate madness. Please explain it to me. You can use big words. I is smartz.

Now, the real head spinner. After getting hammered $18.15 (keeping in mind that I bought two tickets, at $20 each - that’s almost another fucking ticket!), I get an email telling me that because of my purchase, I am entitled to two free music downloads at iTunes. Without ranting on how iTunes AAC files are absolute shit compared to a proper CD copy of a song (if you even dare to battle me on that, I will smack you so hard that - hopefully for you - your hearing might actually return, since you obviously have the hearing range of Pete Townsend), let’s reflect on my two free songs. How should we label this…

* Two cubes of ice after giving me a hard kick to the scrotum?
* Two cotton balls after punching me in the nose?
* Two dabs of vaseline *after* fucking me in the ass?
* Two licks off of your ice cream cone after you dropped it in doggy doo?
* Two votes for McCain after I voted for Obama?

I could go on, but I need to prepare my dinner. Two helpings of “you can’t do shit”, on a new shiny plate of “deal with it”.

Fuck TicketMaster.

I can’t believe I’m making a third one of these.

EMI: LEARN HOW TO SHIP PROPERLY!

The mail delivery person sheepishly knocked, and then ran. By the time I grabbed my camera, hit record, and made it to the door, she was gone. I wanted her, on video, explaining why these blue bags keep coming to me.

Enjoy (???) the video of me sifting through the remains of postal packaging.

Dave Gahan fans. More giveaways coming soon! And…good news…they are all in one piece!

Recoil fans. Well…I can’t officially give away a Recoil t shirt on a Depeche Mode web site (should be obvious why), so the first person to leave a comment on this specific blog post gets the Recoil promo shirt!

A Tale Of Mail - 3

Hourglass Remixes vinyl. Another Hourglass Remixes test pressing to give away (yay for you all!), and some shirts to give away. No jewel cases to shatter this time, but since the package was open, who knows what else was SUPPOSED to be in that box, before the Belgium Post Office threw it in a nasty blue burlap bag.

After months of writing code, then writing more code, then deleting all of the code and starting again, Pillage is born!

You’ll never want to rip another CD again using iTunes after you use Pillage!

Go download version 1.0 of Pillage - NOW!

I can not possibly stress how necessary it is to go see Iron Man. I almost forgot what it was like to go to the theater, and actually witness a good movie!

I have a horrible cold. I feel like crap. I am on many drugs. I piled on the cough suppressants, and went with the little woman to ArcLight Hollywood today (2:30pm showing, in the dome). Essential movie watching! Stay until the credits finish. You will thank me.

At the ArcLight, for the opening weekend, they had a special Iron Man display, consisting of Tony Stark’s drool-inducing Audi R8, as well as the actual Iron Man outfit used in the movie.

Enjoy the images. They are odd sizes, but only because most are panoramic shots. My little Fuji F40 does not do panoramics natually, but Photoshop does. I am addicted to creating panoramics now.

I dont know what I want more. The car, or the GUI used in the movie. Drool….