The VideoLAN Forums

I hope I'm not being redundant here, but I've searched the forums and haven't found the problem I'm about to describe... I have my Motorola DCT3412 cable box firewired to my computer. I'm running XP sp2, have a Radeon X800 XT display adapter, a 3.80GHz Pentium4 machine with Motorola AV/C Tuner Device drivers installed. My objective here is just to watch tv on my computer monitor. In VLC I go to File~Open Capture Device, click through the settings and it works! EXCEPT not on all channels. For example, I can get USA HD and Nat Geo HD, but I can't get TNT HD or HBO HD. If, when I open VLC, I go directly to HBO or TNT, nothing happens at all. The video window doesn't even open. If I'm on a station that works and go to one that doesn't, the video window just freezes on where I left the last station. Then VLC stops working altogether and I have to reboot my machine in order to get it to show even the channels that normally work. Thanks for any help...

Have you tried nightly builds?
http://nightlies.videolan.org/

Some channels have a flag set on them so that they will not be able to streamed over to your computer. This is the infamous 5C flag. It basically tells the Firewire hardwire if the content can be copied freely, once or never. You are able to watch the Copy freely on your computer via the Firewire cable but the Copy Once or Never will not work on your computer. Most local channels should be able to be watched over the Firewire cable but I have noticed that most other channels (at least when using Verision FIOS TV) will not work on the computer.

This is a hardware protection mechanism so there isn't much we can do about this.

Thanks,

mobbe

Thanks mobbe. I was afraid it was something like that. Seems a shame though, I'm just trying to watch some tv, live, while sitting at the 'puter.
I'm still open to suggestion if anybody out there has some ideas for me to try...