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Nvidia Drivers Enforce Macrovision's Rules
Ant writes "According to 'Nvidia Macrovision DVD-TV rules forced on consumers', Nvidia drivers 41.09 and onwards include 'stringent checks' to comply with Macrovision requirements. That could mean if you have a TV encoder that does not support Macrovision, you may well get an error message depending on what DVD software player you are using, the company has said."
For those of us with older nvidia cards, this means we can't watch dvds anymore! thankfully you can use DVD Idle to get around this.
it's a good thing, older Nvidia drivers are so easily found.
...using 44.09 drivers under 2000.
Then again, I am using TVTool to get my Nvidia card to go TV-out in full-screen and without macrovision. Not that I need the last one, never interested in copying DVD to VHS anyway.
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Somebody will keep hacking the reference drivers and put them online.
Right now I'm using a different tool to circumvent various dvd protections.
DVDIdle, no regions, no Macrovision, no nothing and it even lets me skip those annoying warnings "Thou shalt not reproduce this disc"
This is the sig that says NI (again)
The article is over an year old. (March 20, *2003*)
Current nVidia drivers are 56.xx series.
'News' indeed...
EFF
PayPal accepted, amongst other methods.
How about the good old EFF? They claim to be "defending freedom in the digital world" which is exactly what you wished for. You can join or just donate and choose paypal as payment method.
I have heard, that ATI somehow "supports" opensource communities - or at least gives them more information, than NVidia team.
Used to support the open source communities would be more like it. I've been using ATI cards for as long as I can remember.
There was a time when ATI did things for us like funding Precision Insight to develop the open source Radeon driver in the first place. They used to be very good about providing specifications, although under an NDA which for some bizarre reason they require developers to sign, but allow them to publish drivers based on their contents. At the time they were the underdog in the 3D graphics market though.
Now a days though, they don't fund any OSS development, and provide a binary driver instead. They will not give you specifications for any cards until they are close to their end-of-life. DRI and Gatos have done great work despite this, but ATI shouldn't be congratulated on today's treatment of the open source community.
They still do have specs available from the developer relations page under NDA. But I doubt you'll get anything from them that would be considered current hardware.
It requires player support, so no. I highly doubt Xine/Ogle/MPlayer will implement Macrovision.
I recently rebuilt the Linux kernel on my laptop, so I thought it would be worthwhile to get the latest Nvidia driver. Having done so, I found that their installer had deleted all copies of nvidea.o under /lib/modules, not just a previous copy for the kernel I was still testing. That means I lost the video driver for the stable kernel I wanted to use between tests. Ouch!
This has nothing to do with Macrovision, but it's another reason to dislike or distrust Nvidia.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats