Now the hacker community will really roll up its sleeves and take care of that SOC switch with code tailored for every platform.
All I have to do is wait for mine to appear....

I used to get angry over news like this one. But since I have ditched cable TV (and antenna, never had satellite), I can actually laugh about the FCC. As long as there are people PAYING for TV, there will be news like this one, and I can enjoy it. Folks, please pay MORE for your TV, PLEASE!

Ha ha ha!!!

Are you joking 'arthur'? Didn't you hear about how they 'accidentally' turned on the broadcast protection bit a short while ago and nobody could record the TV show on their media PC because, even though the FCC shot down the concept, for some reason MS made all systems listen for it and disable recording if detected.
The technology is there, and built into vista/WinMCE already, not just in PVR's., and all they need is approval to hit the switch and they can enable it for most anything, hell it's even part of all computer hardware audio codecs and part of the HD audio specs to have hardware DRM in the damn things and they just need to enable that too to make every computer made the last 18 months lock down.

If it's a newly released movie then it's obviously not going to be playing on a standard tv station with commercials. It would be recorded off of an on demand service.

All this will do is force users who only want to placeshift (or do some other "fair use" usage of the content) to go to open source solutions for DVR software.

Snapstream, MythTV are both great solutions and both companies allow us to actually utilize our fair use rights where the cable Co. and Microsoft DVR devices/software infringe on our rights and take them away from us.

I respect the MPAA and content owners rights as well, but just because I "could" rip and distribute the media does not mean that I "would." However the MPAA seems to want to make that decision for me and that flat out sucks.

Well im glad media pcs wont be affected

I don't see the point of recording TV any more, anyway... A person has to sit through commercials when they record, instead of simply getting the DVD.