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Comment by kqr2 | Hacker News Reader

Every time I hear about VHS I like to bring up Marion Stokes : https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...

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It's so sad how back when Sony was an electronics company, it fought the content makers in court for the right for people to make recordings.

Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings.

With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together.

The future has been monetized.

It happened 20 years ago, so some folks around here might be too young to remember the Sony rootkit fiasco [1]. Sony decided it would be a good idea to put on their music CDs an auto-run program that would install a rootkit on your Windows computer, whose job it was to be a watchdog for Sony's copyrights.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

I have a non-smart budget TV. It doesn't have many features but it does let you record over the air digital TV to a USB stick. Unfortunately, the playback is incredibly janky.

I tried playing the recorded content on my laptop but I was really surprised to find that it had been encrypted. I don't get the business case for them implementing this. It's broadcast unencrypted and I can easily record it on my laptop using a dvb-t dongle.

Maybe it's a condition of using the FreeView brand in the UK? I don't know.

Anyway, it is very sad.

I will admit I haven't tried this, so I don't know if there's some encryption that would be problematic but there are definitely HDMI video capture devices that are very reasonably priced and would let you record content. BUt most all content is online so it seems there would be very little demand for the feature you are talking about. I can just go to my friends house and log in to whatever app and watch the same stuff I can at my house, or use something like a Chromecast.

> BUt most all content is online

Ha! Joking?

No, I mean, not in my experience, I haven't had any sort of TV situation that wasn't using online content for at least 6 years.

TVs in Japan let you do exactly this. You just plug in any sufficiently fast USB mass storage and can record tv to it. There’s some sort of encryption scheme bound to the tv though so it’s not portable. There may be someway to transfer the recordings to other tvs but it’s limited.

There’s even a companion app that will stream recordings on your tv to your phone.

I'm fond of the HDHomerun devices. They just expose a set of URLs over the local network corresponding to channels. You can point VLC to them or just download a chunk of the bitstream to process later.

I'm sure you could appliance that up to trigger an automatic recording on conditions like "card inserted".

That’s a wild story I’ve not heard before, thanks for sharing.

That's incredible - what a project!

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