General opining on various topics, but particularly:
News
Bumped into PVRblog recently - worth keeping an eye on for news and views.
Politics
Some essays on how this all may pan out, what do the content producers want and expect, how will people behave, will you be able to lend a video to your neighbour, who is your neighbour anyway?
Other questions:
- What constitutes reasonable sharing? There is plainly a line somewhere, at the extremes some of the content producers claim any sharing is illegal, which pretty much rules out so much as lending a tape to a friend. Others claim that since it's popular it becomes a 'right' (Stallman, '... right to redistribute copies...'), which is no less bonkers; or that once it is available in any digital form there should be some great free-for-all. What is the distinction - if any - between recording something from free-to-air broadcast and ripping a DVD? Does that change if it is a subscription channel or pay-per-view? What's the sane middle ground?
- Will it be illegal in your country to use, own, sell or distribute hardware or software that doesn't 'support' some set of digital rights management? Personally I think this would make very bad legislation indeed, it's just too imbalanced and doesn't cater for a huge slice of developing even toy implementations. That doesn't mean it isn't on the cards though, see Campaign for Digital Rights (UK) or the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more commentary. What will this mean for choosing to watch a movie in a system of your choosing?
- 'Digital Video Recorders Give Advertisers Pause', New York Times article (free registration required)
- Fortune article by Stewart Alsop [they borked the link, alas] on a possible future for 'file-served television'. (Alsop is a director of TiVo).
File sharing
There are various networks kicking around, videdot hopes to support as many as people can be bothered to write wrappers of plugins for. There's a simple interface to implement and you're done.
- eDonkey - have a curious attitude to releasing details of how it works (i.e. don't release details of the protocol to avoid people building selfish clients). Unfortunately that sort of obscurity-based restriction is bound to fail, but is less effort than building a complicated reputation-based system. Irrespective of technical niggles eDonkey does have an impressive store of media files. A BeOS port is possible, and I'm putting a bit of effort in to port the i4min library.
- Gnutella
- Napster, through Wrapster et al
- BeShare
- Others...
Depending on how well these networks support rich and live queries, it may also
be worthwhile building a videdot/metadata-centric layer on top of, or
alongside, these networks. By controlling both ends of the
communication we should be able to support better searches than 'would
you grub around for the string 'foo' please?'. Of course this would all be
using a well-specified query language, so any other client could make
good use of them too. I expect videdot boxes to provide a useful first
port of call in searching for missed shows, but certainly not the last.
The previous few paragraphs have aged a lot, and were written before networks like BitTorrent really emerged. The basic plan remains, but the peer-to-peer framework will need some adjustment to cater for networks where the discovery happens outside. In particular, with our RSS library we are well placed to make a simple interface to just slurping down the content you want with little user-effort.
Similar projects
To follow. Needs to consider both commercial and hobbyist offerings. In principle other projects ought to help, not hinder, videdot. We should be able to create a rich heterogenous network of peers providing useful resources (in the form of shared programmes or knowledge).
Notables:
- ReplayTV, plus related free projects for sharing video
- Freevo
- MythTV
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