Lewis Black blocked on my Media Center
What kind of horseshit is this?
My girlfriend asked me today if I could do her a favor and record the Lewis Black special on Comedy Central because she was going to be out at a movie with a friend when it came on. Silly me, I said no problem, because my media center is set up for exactly this sort of situation.
When the show came on at 9, I flipped over to the media center to make sure everything was A-OK. This is what I saw:
[Image: restricted]
Everything is very much NOT A-OK.
I don’t know if this is because Comedy Central is blocking recordings. I don’t know if it’s because Comcast want you to buy their DVR. I don’t know if it’s an HDCP compliance issue (yeah, like I’m going to buy a multi-thousand dollar projector when I’ve got one that works just fine).
I do know that it is complete horseshit. I’ve spend hundreds of dollars putting together a Media Center that lets me play my music, browse my pictures, call up my DVDs on demand, AND RECORD TV SHOWS.
Allow me to repeat: I’ve been sold hundreds of dollars of hardware designed SPECIFICALLY FOR ONE PURPOSE, which has then been arbitrarily shut off BECAUSE I BOUGHT SAID HARDWARE AS OPPOSED TO OTHER HARDWARE.
It is their right to do that, yes. Technically. But then why the f*&k do they sell shit on the market that doesn’t work?
I probably wouldn’t have bought a $200 tuner card and a copy of Vista if I thought that they would just sit there and refuse to record TV. I might as well have bought that useless piece of crap AppleTV (oh, snap!)
This is the kind of crap that hardware companies and content delivery companies pull all the time, and I’m getting really tired of it.
Yeah, I get it, some people are stealing your shows. But everyone who is stealing this show is stealing it anyway. The only thing that this does it make it so honest consumers like myself can’t record the damn show so they can watch it later.
Oh, and coincidentally, it makes:
a) Windows Media Center a worthless piece of crap
b) Consumers spend more money on proprietary cable company “services” because WMC is a worthless piece of crap
Microsoft? You should be upset about this.
So now that I’ve literally paid hundreds of dollars (thousands if you count past and recurring monthly cable bill fees) to get access to this content, I’m being arbitrarily blocked.
Up yours. If I had a blank tape in the house, I’d be recording it on my VCR. As soon as the show is over and the special is up all over BitTorrent and YouTube and everywhere else, I’m going to link to as many of those sites as I can.
[ Update: I found a tape and am valiantly trying to get the last half hour of the show onto it. ]
[ Update 2: If you’re like me, with a DVR that wouldn’t record it, and you want to download the video of Lewis Black: Red, White, and Screwed, you can try the torrents at either of these two links:
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