How-To: Broadcatching Part 1: History
Part 1: History
For people not living in the United States or temporarily traveling away, new domestic TV episodes are not broadcast regularly which makes it difficult for fans to keep up. The age old solution for those temporarily traveling away was to leave a VCR running at home to time-shift episodes on to low-quality VHS. The problem with this approach was that VHS tapes had very limited recording capacities and a single-tuner VCR could only record one show at a time. There had to be a solution short of having multiple VCRs and tapes. For many years, it has been possible to view and record television on computers via a host of add-in cards. It was only a matter of time until savvy computer users figured out how to record TV shows onto their computers through kludgy interfaces which littered the early TV tuner landscape. Quality wasn’t always great because MPEG encoding had to happen in software run over processors (i.e. Pentium 2 450Mhz in my case) choking on 720×480 streams which made it necessary to keep resolutions low. Although bigger hard drives solved the problem of limited storage, consumers were usually stuck with the ability to record only one show at a time due to a majority of the cards only being equipped with a single tuner. Then came the consumer TV tuners with hardware MPEG encoding and multiple tuners which allowed a bump in resolution, a loss of random pauses while recording, and allowed recording of more than one program at a time. These developments spurred the underground world of computer-based TV recording.
As most things in the digital world, people wanted to share their recordings with over fans but limited bandwidth outside of ISDN lines to the home or ethernet connections in college dorms still prevented widespread sharing. For the general public, P2P applications coupled with high-speed cable and DSL broadband internet connections finally made widespread sharing possible. Many iterations of P2P came about and legal pressure from various industry groups forced newer generations of P2P protocols to cope. BitTorrent ultimately was released which provided a revolutionary way of removing all the burden from a server (in a client-server relationship) to that of one where clients would share chunks of data with other clients. In other words, the single server bandwidth burden was now less crucial. Unfortunately, lazy users still had to specifically search for shows through a non-automated process. BitTorrent made this even harder because files called torrents had to be located which contained the necessary information to download the file in question. Finally, suggestions started flying around the internet that the subsciption capabilities of RSS could allow users to subscribe to trusted feeds of specific shows. The feeds would imbed a torrent file which would be automatically downloaded at a set interval and a BitTorrent client would then automatically queue the file for transfer. This marriage of RSS + BitTorrent was termed broadcatching. All of this meant that finally a distribution model existed akin to Tivo’s Season Pass functionality where users could watch television shows without manual intervention. Although there are many legal uses of RSS + BitTorrent, sharing of TV show content is generally considered to be copyright infringement in the United States but not necessarily in other countries around the world.
In the next few parts, I will outline how to use various pieces of software to acquire content from a variety of sources.
Note: If there are any errors, shoot me an email.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer so I’m going to forego the legal doubletalk and say this all directly. All the information provided is for educational and entertainment purposes. It is the responsibility of the reader of this information contained in this entry to verify that they are in compliance with all applicable laws. I cannot be held responsible for any damage or illegal usage of the information provided. I cannot and will not condone copyright infringement.
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Notebook Tech Still Lagging
I wrote this message back in May of 2004 on a forum that I used to be active on. Interestingly, we are only now seeing many of the ‘esoteric’ technologies I talked about in wide distribution. I’d like to speculate why but there seems to be a stubborn desire for companies and consumers to drag their feet due to reliance on relic technologies. For example, in the last 18 months there has been no real push towards wide adoption of the new ExpressCard or 6-channel audio standards in notebooks. Only recently has the Apple announcement of the Intel Core Duo-based MacBookPro’s use of only the ExpressCard/34 been of merit. Even then, Apple didn’t bother with 6-channel audio. It seems to me that notebook manufacturers have become comfortable with the status quo and has left consumers like me keeping our money in our pockets until something new comes out.
What about Firewire800? Many notebooks (let alone Desktop PCs) still do not come with a standard Firewire and Firewire800 is even rarer. Although add-on PC Card, PCI and PCI-Express cards are available it’s still a hassle to something that could be included on the chipset. Apple did include Firewire800 on it’s 17-inch G4 Powerbook but the new MacBookPro doesn’t offer it (yet). Although I understand why Intel hasn’t bothered with Firewire (largely due to the fact that they are in the USB camp which requires a host PC), it is still in the best interest of consumers to push for as many I/O options as possible. I mean how else will I connect my external desktop hard drive/DVD/CD enclosures or notebook hard drive enclosures? At least Firewire800 is backwards compatible with Firewire (400).
Anyway, that is enough complaining from me. I will continue to wait for the next notebook that includes support for Intel’s Core Duo processor, DDR2 or better memory, Intel’s VT technology, both Expresscard/34 and /54, Firewire800, Gigabit ethernet (that supports jumbo frames), 802.11n wireless networking, Bluetooth 2.0 (w/ full A2DP supported in the default Bluetooth stack), 15.4″ or larger WUXGA glossy screen, 512meg PCI-Express x16 video card (based on a standard interchangable/upgradable industry format!!!), illuminated keyboard, all the legacy ports (serial, parallel, IrDA), DVI out (w/ VGA adapter), external SATA connector, SP/DIF (coax NOT optical) 6-channel audio out, EV-DO/EDGE/UTMS/WiMAX connectivity options, HDTV/CableCARD, Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive options, full hardware-based H.264 (full bitrate) decoding support, and SATA hard drive support. The funny thing is that all the technology is available (or will be available shortly) to put 95% of the components I listed into a laptop. However, no manufacturer is willing to make this killer machine because they are too afraid of how successful it would be.
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MS Office SP2 Update Failures
I’ve switched over my computers to Microsoft Update which provides service releases for both Windows and Office instead of the plain old Windows Update. I’m also a heavy user of registry cleaners like WinASO, Registry Mechanic, and CCleaner. I’ve found that with regular computer maintenance that a Windows installation can last a very long time. However, one problem I’ve had is with failures of Microsoft Office Updates. Usually they fail with a message reading:
The update cannot be installed.
or
Installation Unsuccessful
Both of these messages can serve to be a huge annoyance not only because the only thing I hate more than wasting time waiting for non-automated updates to apply is to try to troubleshoot why updates didn’t apply in the first place. However, there is a solution!
The problem lies squarely on registry cleaners removing certain “Path” statements to where the update program can find the installation files. The solution is presented in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article #884298. In a nutshell, the fix is simply replacing Sting Keys that were originally removed in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SOFTWARE\
Microsoft\
Office\
Delivery\
SourceEngine\
Downloads\
“download_code”\ (series of numbers representing the Office install)
Sources\
“various IDs representing installed Office apps”\
Path (type: String Key) with a value of
“either D:\ (i.e. CD\DVD drive path) or C:\MSOCache\ALLUSE~1\”download_code” (if you copied the install to the hard drive)
That’s it, the updates should apply then without problems.
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