Modifying the output of a pay-per-view

I invited some folks over to watch a pay-per-view of the WWE Survivor Series last Sunday, only to discover that Comcast no longer offers pay-per-view on analog cable boxes, only digital ones. Crap. So I go to the WWE website and discover that they offer a webcast. “Woo-hoo! I can just hook my notebook up to the TV and rock!”

Except. When I do so, I can see the Windows desktop just fine, I can see Windows Media Player just fine, but where the PPV should be is just a black box. It’s playing perfectly on the notebook, mind, but it won’t show up on TV. I had a trailer for something downloaded, so I tried that, and it appeared just fine on TV, so it wasn’t a problem with the TV not being able to display video.

The consensus was that the streaming video was somehow coded to not appear on any kind of output channel. Seems weird, though. We even tried hooking up an external monitor, with identical results.

And yes, we ended up crowding around a 13.1 inch screen to watch the show. Sigh. Stupid Comcast.

Does anyone know if this is really a possibility, or did we miss something blindingly obvious?


Justin

      • Well, if you’re running Win98 or ME There’s at least three ways I can think of that you could capture such a broadcast and save it (tho I think you’d want a desktop for this sort of thing–laptop hard-drives run way slower), but the point here is that Comcast doesn’t want you to. It’s called “Digital Rights Management”, and it’s no accident that the WMP image wouldn’t export out the S-video port. It isn’t supposed to. WMP also doesn’t let you save it, I’d bet. Welcome to the future of Microsoft–“you can’t do that unless you paid for it this month”
        ~

Okay, I just couldn’t resist any longer.

It’s blindingly obvious that you shouldn’t watch PPV pro-wrestling.

OK, so such a thing is possible. What really threw me is that I couldn’t export out the VGA plug to another monitor, though. How can they differentiate between an external monitor plugged into a notebook computer, and the same exact monitor plugged into my desktop?


Justin

Cute. It’s blindingly obvious to me that one should not employ AOLesque screen names, but to each his own.

Anyway, you’ll note that several folks came over. Therefore, it was really pay-very-little-per-view. As to whether wrestling is watchable or not, I’ll just leave that as a matter of wide-ranging taste. I also enjoy, for example, Terry Pratchett, Orson Welles, and Miyamoto Musashi, for what it’s worth.


Justin

Eeek! This sounds like the bird in the Vatican…

There’s a stained-glass window on the back of the St. Peter’s Basilica. It is yellowish-orange with a white bird in the center. I took a picture of it, and twelve others from my group did as-well. We could see perfectly the metal-wire detail that held each piece of stained glass in-place on the mosaic, but the bird simply wouldn’t show up on anyone’s camera - digital or otherwise… weird stuff.