Broadcast signals starting to be copy protected?

[duffy76]

I've had a strange and frustrating problem crop up in the last couple of weeks. I have AT&T U-Verse and the box is connected to my Panasonic DVD Recorder w/hard drive. I record a show on CBS every day that I like to save to DVD. I set my DVD recorder to record at that time on channel 3 and make sure the box is set to the channel. For the last 2 weeks, on Friday only, the show is copy protected and while it records to the hard drive and the DVR built into the box, I can't transfer it to DVD-R. Monday through Thursday the show is not protected and I can transfer it just fine.

I should be able to record a show off of broadcast tv for my own personal use. I can understand protecting movies and PPV events, but this is a soap opera for the love of Pete.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do?

[jman98]

I do have some suggestions, but they don't solve your problem. They just work around it. Perhaps others have ideas on how to fix this problem.
Unfortunately hard drive recording devices (DVRs and DVD recorders with hard drives) respect the no copy flag, so this kind of problem is becoming more and more common. It's always possible that it's an error on the part of your local cable company that is copy protecting it on Friday, but if you call and ask them about it, you do run the risk that it's not an error and it's actually an error to not protect it every day, which they will then do after you notify them that they are not. So you could make things worse by asking your cable company about it. Heck, even if it is an error, they honestly may not be smart enough to know how to fix it and turn it off on Friday. No joke. If you have good technical skills, it's probably possible to open up the recorder, remove the hard drive, attach it to a PC and manually copy the file and make a DVD from it on your PC, but if you have a DVD recorder that's probably because you really weren't interested in doing things that way. Anyway...

1) Sometimes TV shows are available on P2P networks (ie. Bit Torrent). Typically they are listed in this kind of naming format:
Show_S03E07
which means Season 3 and Episode 7 of a show called "Show". Use something like http://www.tv.com to figure out episode numbers or episode names.
2) Similarly TV shows might be available on Usenet servers. You'll have to pay to subscribe to a feed that offers the alt.* groups as these will almost certainly not be available from your ISP. I recommend
http://www.giganews.com
but there are others.

While anything is possible, I do have to warn you that technically proficient people who know enough to make TV shows available on P2P networks and Usenet aren't real likely to be interested in soap operas.
My suggestion would definitely work for something like, say, "The Sarah Connor Chronicles", but if you are a fan of something like "The Guiding Light", you may be out of luck.

[duffy76]

Thanks for the quick reply. I am definitely not technically savvy, so your suggestion of removing the hard drive and conncting to my PC won't work for me. I don't have a dvd burning drive in my pc either. I checked the Bit Toorent site you suggested, and you are right, they don't have soaps. I didn't bother to pay for the other site as I'm sure that's the case there as well.

Would a video filter like in the link below help?

http://www.qualitekindustries.com/noname.html

[jjeff]

Since the CP devices are line input only you'd probably want to first record the program to your DVR and then at a later time play the DVR with your filter between the DVR and your DVDR using line input, not channel 3. You could go to either your DVDRs HDD or I'd just go direct to its DVDR as long as that's where you want it anyway.
Note those filters seem awful cheap? Most I've seen are ~$100 so you might want to check around to see if they actually work for anything other than VHS tapes. I know WorldImport.com sells several legitimate CP filters and their >$100.
I suppose you could also record live from the line output of your DVR to the line input of your DVDR with the filter between the 2. That would be the closest to what you currently do, you just wouldn't be using CH3 which I wouldn't suggest anyway. Worse PQ and probably not stereo audio. I think all DVDRs allow scheduled recordings from line inputs, for sure the ones I've used allow that.

[DarrellS]

I was wondering the same thing. I've been capturing off PBS the last couple of months and have not had any problems till the 4th of July. I set up WinTV to capture a concert at 10:30 and when I came home around 10:35, the program failed to start capturing.

Luckily, they re-aired it a couple nights later so I manually recorded it and everything went fine. I used Virtualdub to convert the video to XviD/AC3 and everything seemed fine until I checked the specs and it said WAVE for audio so I played the AVI and around 5 minutes into the 55 minute video, the audio stopped. I had another concert that I had captured on the 4th and the XviD conversion on that was exactly the same. The specs said WAVE audio and the audio stopped around the 5 minute mark. Both of the MPEG2 Program Streams played fine, all the way through. Unfortunately, I deleted the captured streams since I thought the AVIs were good.

I have three or four other shows that I had captured in May and June that are fine. XviD AVI with AC3 audio.

This could just be a Virtualdub thing since VDub has had problems with AC3 before but I've never seen it do this. Usually you either get an error telling you that it can't handle the audio or you get a file that is out of sync but I've never had it encode an AVI with only 5 minutes of audio before.