· nerf (nur·f) v. – to make soft or useless something that was once useful.
Nerfing items comes from online gaming and specifically MMORPGs.
Macrovision seems to have ‘nerfed’ my Windows Media Center Edition 2005 PC by making me unable to record a show and watch it later.
Worse yet, FOX has been reported to randomly fire Digital Rights Management Signals into it’s shows without the required licence to do so. It is usually the content creator’s decision to set a show to ‘copy always’, ‘copy once’ (sometimes meaning delete soon), and ‘copy never’ protection schemes.
Try to set your PVR of any kind that supports Macrovision (TiVo included) to record some shows on FOX and it will fail about 5 or 6 minutes into the show. Even if you legitemately want to watch a show later, now you can’t.
I think I’ll try installing an Ubuntu MCE system and see if I can avoid this mess and enjoy the MCE PC experience the way it was meant to be enjoyed. I don’t watch much TV but the shows I do watch should be viewable when I want them.
