[opendtv] Re: HDMI capture

No disagreement there, Jim.

NBC is in the process of upgrading all of its affiliates to new satellite modems.  (The existing units came from Tiernan.)  I could check with Tiernan, but I doubt that their legacy units permitted customizing waternarks for individual stations.

I also doubt that a watermark that simply enables one to say "this content was stolen from NBC" has much value.  On the other hand, being able to trace the leakage point to individual cable/satellite/IPTV/VOD customers would seem to have great utility.

Being able to trace the leakage to individual NBC stations would also seem to have negligible value, but that would require either station-specific bits coming out of the satellite modem, or anyway going into the transport stream encoder.

Come to think of it, a Chief Engineer at an NBC affiliate (and an OpenDTV lurker) told me in a meeting at NAB that the new units were going to be rolled out after the sweeps ended (which would be last Wednesday night).  I was thinking that the new satellite modems could account for this, but it's hard to imagine that they were put in service in the middle of a sweeps rating period.

I would really like to get a transport stream capture of a program segment where users couldn't save the content in Vista/MCE.  I'd like to get to the bottom of what system bits were present.  Wouldn't it be funny if this had nothing to do with the rc_descriptor (broadcast flag) and much to do with the compression layer?

John Willkie

-----Original Message-----
From: James Albro
Sent: May 25, 2008 11:00 AM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Re: HDMI capture

Watermarks can survive multiple re-encodings and could be applied at the source without anyone further down the chain being aware of them.

 

Jim Albro

 

----- Original Message -----

From: John Willkie

To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 1:56 PM

Subject: [opendtv] Re: HDMI capture

Richard;

In general, this is "possible."  However, the information you provided was either prospective, or relating to the IPTV market.  This was, simply, a broadcast situation.  NBC's content is encoded from 45 mb feeds at broadcast stations, and this is not a feature of broadcast encoders.  Yet.

John Willkie

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Hollandsworth
Sent: May 25, 2008 12:17 AM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Re: HDMI capture

Video programs are being "watermarked" at several steps in the
distribution chain so that when a video shows up as an
unauthorized BitTorrent release, the owner of the cable box can
be traced....also if it's an inside job at headend.  For example:
http://www.drmwatch.com/article.php/3680811
http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=431&doc_id=145886

holl_ands

==================================
ShLampen <shlampen@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Gefen does offer a box that converts to SDI with the HDCP turned off.  However, you have to sign a release that says all the content you intend to run through the box you OWN yourself.  Not sure how they would police that!!!

 

Steve Lampen

Belden

 

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