Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Flagged Channels For XBMC PVR? 328
Posted
by
timothy
from the you-want-everything dept.
from the you-want-everything dept.
AlphaWolf_HK writes "I own an HDHomeRun Prime tuner, and unfortunately I live in an area where the cable provider (Cox) blanket flags all channels to be copy restricted. I'm tired of using Windows Media Center due to bugs and other problems, but since the channels are flagged it is the only option. Satellite is of course not an option at all (no cablecard or similar standard.) I've already begun moving most of my content watching to XBMC in the form of using sickbeard and couchpotato, both of which do an amazing job even with torrents now that Usenet has been getting hit pretty hard. To match this, I've already dropped my cable tier to the lowest possible for some basic digital channels that people in my household still watch and aren't available over torrents. But ideally I'd like to cut the cord completely as the service is otherwise useless. Are there any options for obtaining this content without physically moving to Comcast territory where they don't do this? Or perhaps any workarounds for the CCI flag? Ideally, anything that allows XBMC with digital content and no transcoding."
Don't try it, it's illegal (Score:4, Interesting)
Write to your congress critter, whine online, nothing will happen. Cancel the service, you can live without cable-TV.
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Interesting)
hat's funny, but this naturally and frequently arises in casual conversations because most people do watch TV and many TV watchers insist on making this a prime topic of discussion.
Except that's not what happened here. Nobody was talking to him. Nobody asked him anything. Indeed, he could have simply clicked the back button in his browser and read the next slashdot story.
But instead, he had to take the time out to tell someone who had never approached him personally that he didn't have cable.
I've never watched an episode of "Seinfeld" but people have mentioned it to me innumerable times.
Understood. But if you hear two people "having a conversation at the watercooler" about Seinfeld do you sidle up, get their attention, look down your nose and say "I don't watch that show."? Because THAT is what people find annoying.
IMO, the reason people get annoyed when you tell them that you don't own or watch TV is that on some level, they also realize that it's wasting their time and polluting their brain.
For my part, I don't watch reality TV, and refuse to watch it out of principle. If someone engages me in conversation about a reality show I can either deflect it as something I didn't watch, or I can do the whole "I don't watch garbage like that routine." depending on whether I want to simply politely change the subject or whether I want to make the point that I think its stupid and that watching it is stupid. With my mother in law, for example, I tend to be the diplomat; "Oh, no, I haven't seen that." with others I'll take the shot.
In my experience few people are offended unless I take the effort to at least imply that I think the show they are talking about is not worth my time, or anyone else's.