It is no secret that I really detest DRM and find it reprehensible.  I don't like it in our products that require PIDS to install them, and I don't like DRM when it stops me from doing a perfectly reasonable thing.

It makes makes no sense that the music I buy from iTunes is DRM'd, but a higher quality file I get off of the CD I have isn't. 

My latest venture into this was deciding to try to take my house "All Microsoft" and give up my Tivo Series 3 for a Windows Vista Media Center PC that costs 4 times as much.  Yeah, I know, but I'm trying to be a good guy and I felt I could have one system where all of my content comes in and I could then get to it from every tv in the house as well as dump shows to my iPod (nee, Zune) and such.  So after a week of fighting with comcast and getting some great help from the MCE team, I got my nice system with cable card readers all working.

So pretty cool, right?  Well, not exactly.  I then went this morning to dump a few shows to my iPod.  Hmmm, the video convert isn't working.

Want to know why?

DRM.  Turns out that Microsoft bent over for the cablecard people and wrapped every file in DRM even if the show itself isn't DRM'd.  So as an example, if I record something off of KCTS, a PUBLIC station over clear QAM in beautiful HD -- that is fine.  No problem. But if I record the exact same show over the cablecard reader, no dice. We encrypt it and you can't touch it. 

Note that Tivo Series 3, which also uses cablecards, does not have this limitation.  So, once again, my attempt to embrace the Microsoft ecosystem bites me in the butt.  Now I have to implement some other tuner hack to just get unencrypted recordings so that I can put them on a device for the kids to watch on long trips.

Really, I don't understand why we embrace Hollywood's deep desires around DRM more than any other company on the planet.  If Tivo was able to ship with the ability to download and share unprotected content, why wasn't Microsoft allowed the same thing?

I hope the MCE thing works out long term. Otherwise, it was an interesting experiment. 

Note to the Tivo lovers: if Tivo had been smart and implemented multiroom viewing via streaming, I would have just bought a second TivoHD and called it a day.  It would have cost me $300 (a lot cheaper than an MCE pc) and I could still download content to my computer and save to my devices.  But they don't do the smart thing here either.

*sigh*