Wichita KS CableCard now has DRM
Hello,
I'm in the Wichita KS market and have used a CableCard with an HDHomerun prime for several years. Starting yesterday morning, I lost all non-local channels. After talking with Tech support...
Forum Discussion
You've misunderstood the issue. It's not that DRM prevents these devices from functioning, though the people with HDHomeRun cards may not realize that. DRM is the whole point of the cable card in the first place, and these devices should work with that DRM in place. There is no analog or non-DRM digital content anymore and hasn't been for several years, so older Hauppage cards won't get anything at all.
The root problem is that the Copy Flag is not set to Copy Freely, as it always has been in the past. (At least for non-premium channels. I've never had any premium channels, so I can't say about those.) See my link above to the Copy Flag info from Wikipedia.
I think you may be getting bogged down in semantics here. Users of the HDHomerun (of which I was one) would run a channel scan and receive a list of channels received, with some being flagged with a DRM identifier. Those flagged with the DRM flag would no longer work with their external DVR. Cox's change meant that most/all non local channels would now have this flag and subsequently no longer effectively be viewable. DRM in this case is a broad term that those in this group are using in the more specific case referring to the copy-xxx definition you're citing. So whatever change Cox is making is generating the DRM identifier, hence the use of that term in identifying the problem here.
On the issue of older Hauppauge products, the 2650 was one of the only cablecard units available and with Media Center was still able to receive and record these "DRM'd" channels, regardless of Cox's shenanigans with channel labels (at least it continued to work until we left Cox 2 months ago)
It is semantics, yes. But given the dearth of people who have ever even heard of the copy flag, on the customer side or Cox's side, I feel like the precise terminology is important if the issue is going to get past Cox's customer service's response of "All of our channels have DRM and have for many years. That's why you have a cable card - to decrypt the channels." But decrypting channels isn't the problem, and hardly anyone at Cox will understand that. (And many customers won't either.) Throwing a term at them they've never heard of ("Copy Flag") might tip them off that they don't understand the issue like they thought they did and need to pass it off to someone who does know what the term means. It's a tactic I've used many times with first-tier tech support who is missing the point.
BTW, the reason your Hauppauge 2650 worked is because it used a cable card and you were using the Media Center software it came with, which was certified that it honored the Copy Flag. So it was able to record while maintaining the "copy once" DRM through to the recorded file. If you had been trying to use a third-party app or tried to export content from that app, it would also not have worked for channels with the copy flag set.
Like I said, my TiVo continues to work fine for recording, just like your Hauppauge. Its space-shifting features, though, where I can download video to watch on other devices, is completely disabled. I'll miss that if this is indeed intended and permanent.
I can agree with everything you've said, although throwing additional terminology in may only make it harder for a customer to identify the problem they're having, especially if the only thing they see is 'DRM' next to the channels that they are now unable to access, and they're searching these forums for other 'DRM' problems.
The sad fact is that the days of being able to use a cablecard in order to lower the cost of accessing cable tv are likely nearing their end. My setup had been working for over a decade, but finally switched to streaming to avoid these regular issues (as well as the cost/fee increases) and haven't looked back.
