I really have no idea what I am talking about. But I thought this would be a pretty good idea. What if the shows people recorded with MythTV were automatically made available as torrents or some other easily transferred file format? That way people with out a tv turner can still have shows cued to record and everyone who recorded a show will begin transferring their broadcast to everyone else. Even better if you had missed a show you could still go back maybe a week or two and still pick it up. I know there are probably legal issues with this but as long as the shows are in an uncut format it should be just as legal as if you recorded it yourself.

I don't know how the laws work in the states but in the UK this would be much worse than recording it yourself.

In UK law gaining copyrighted material without consent is frowned upon, but not much is done about it. E.g. buying a pirate DVD wont get you a jail sentence, but copying and distributing them will.

File sharing programs turn you into a distributor, and it's that piece of law that people like the MPAA, BPI, etc are using to get people fined/jailed.

Mephi

I see it as a thin line between recording it yourself and downloading it from others. To me the future of television is in an "on-demand" style where nothing has to be live and original airing dates will be replaced with release dates. The idea I had was the closest thing to that concept I could think of. Despite my love for DVRs, I really don't think recording TV will be a very long lived concept.

To your point about the content being unedited (ie commercials intact), I don't think that will quite cut it either. At one point in time, I was able to subscribe to the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) using my DirecTv subscription. I was able to get both East and West Coast feeds. Then a law was passed that required me to get a waiver from my local major network affiliates to be able to continue to get the East and West coast feeds. The local tv stations claimed that they were losing local ad revenue due to satellite customers watching someonelse's local ads instead of their ads. Perhaps that is true. What I'm trying to get at is that even if you don't cut the commercials, someone is still getting screwed (your local Mom & Pop store who's commercial you are not seeing).

Unless you have the rights to the programs that you want to distribute via bittorrent, you are breaking the law. Many people say it should be this way or that way, but only the rights owner has the authority to decide how their content is distributed.

I'm not saying that I like the way things are, but I am saying that downloading shows via torrents is not doing any good at prompting networks to come up with new shows. The facts are that it takes money to produce programming and someone has to pay for it.

Good call, I hadn't thought of local advertising. That really throws a shoe into the whole mix if you can't very well distribute an identical airing of an episode. Crap, people have to have an identical file to distribute to the rest of the users. So this is going to be far more trickier than I thought. But hey, someone out there should be able to think of something that might work.

something like this would have HUGE legal implications.
but azureus can be configured to do this automaticaly, so a somewhat savvy linux programmer should be able 2 impliment this.

azureus can subscribe to a show useing RSS (like myth tv uses the XML) but the RSS has the torrent location ad thats it.
what if mythtv could have azreus built in (az is open source, java tho so porting might be an issue) and you could record an entire season. like tivo. but if for some reason ur box couldnt record the episode (power outage, cpu to busy, out of space, recording another show....etc) then it would get the show via bittorrent.

so you get a complete season, and you dont have to worry about priority
so i think this would be a wonderfull feature to add. sometimes lifes more fun if you jaust say "FU*k the legal complications"

In Germany there is a Project about the http://linvdr.org/ to integrate this. It works, but the main Problem is the legal problem...

so if they integrate vdr everything you think about is integrated already

that is awesome. do you know if they plan to port it to english?

Under this URL is a german discription how ti integrate the VDR into MythTV instead of using the MythTV-TV application.

http://de.mythtvtalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=323

i will translate this pseudo Patch into english if somebody wants that...

And the VDR is Multilanguage, so where is the problem?

Using bittorrent it is already quite easy to download almost any show currently on the air, plus any show that has been released on DVD.

I have to admit to downloading a couple of shows. I only do this for certain channels which don't come in very well from my cable provider. After mythtv records the program from the channel with pour quality I download the episode and watch it. Then I deleate both copies.

Legaly I'm breaking the law. But since I'm playing for the cable channel I think I'm entitled to see the show with good quality. Yea the episodes ripped from the DVD are missing commercials but I would be skipping them through mythtv anyway.

*** disclaimer: The above only fiction. It is 100% theory and in no way is an admission of breaking the law in any way shape or form.

I like high-def programming. Downloading 8G for a one-hour show isn't too feasible with current infrastructure. Early next year I'm getting a fiber connection to the internet, so at least MY end could keep up with transfer rates I need.

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If you had a few houndred people automatically seeding prgrams they record 8 gigs over broadband shouldn't take that long. I am pretty sure that my idea is going to be real rough due to conflicting timing and comercails. But if that weren't a factor and you could really get a mass of users to fuel downloads. Maybe if the system could determine who had exact copies and use those as the seeders. There would need to be a massive amount of syncronization to get even 2 exact copies of the same show. But I am sure there have been bigger obsticals to overcome. Oh well, keep in mind that this is all coming out of the mind of only a moderately tech savy person. I really do not know enough about how this stuff works to really have a valid point on anything. I was just hoping that someone who is a guru to find my thoughts useful.

I'd like to see that!

I am insanely jealous...