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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."
Time for thanks for the DRI team, methinks.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
And resists such attempts to regulate its behaviour.
By the same token, producers will continue to try to force their consumers into certain directions.
It's just part of the grand evolutionary struggle between producers and consumers that has resulted in such wonderful things as P2P and the DCMA.
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Isn't this what competition is all about? I'm sure ATI will appreciate the extra business they gain from a gaffe by their main competitor.
1. People will get around it as fast as they bring it in.
2. Nvidia will sell a few less units because of this, (what a foolish business strategy). God, have they not heard of a successful strategy called "Ethics?, profit is prime"
3. Macrovision is a bit pointless when you can rip the dvd straight from the dvdrom drive. Having it there will save the film industry sum in total ZERO.
These obvious statements have been brought to you by another anonymous coward.
Of course, it only works if the DVD software tells it to use macrovision. Therefore the solution is simple, use DVD playing software that either does not enable macrovision or is hacked to play with macrovision disabled. This means either apply a patch to WinDVD or PowerDVD, or just use a DVD player based on libdvdcss. Fortunately, any linux based DVD player will not be affected as none of them will try to use macrovision or any other restriction system. For windows users, this will only encourage more people to hack around it, just like buggy copy protection (such as Safedisc 0.91 on Ultima IX) encourages people to crack the game because even the original game CDs will not work.
...I always buy whatever card gives me the most bang for the buck. I could care less about Macrovision since no DVD I watch ends up having it anyway regardless.
Based on what I'm hearing about NV40 (16 pipelines, MPEG encoding acceleration, etc.), it seems that Nvidia will be getting my business again this summer, and that hasn't happened for a couple of years now. I currently own a Radeon 9800 Pro.
I suppose it all depends on your application, but it seems silly to diss a card just because the rules that already exist are being enforced -albeit more stringently. Besides, do you really believe that the drivers are 'unhackable'?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
hmmm, do I feed the troll or mod him down? I guess I'll respond, or other people may be to dumb to understand why.
This guy is comparing a brand new card from ATI to one of the oldest cards ever made by nvidia. IF the story is even true, there are pleny of things that could have happened with the Riva TNT, the least of which being physical defects from the sheer age of the card.
Please, read a post and use common sense before modding mindless drivel like the parent post up.
Yeah, it seems my last NVIDIA card is the one I have installed (A GF4 ti4220).
:)
From now on, bye nvidia, hello ATI
Why do the great companies always end up like this?
The Content Trust(tm) has decreed that "the analog hole must be plugged." They must somehow enjoy this quixotic quest, chasing all over the countryside playing whack-a-mole with the work of so many individuals (and the products of so many companies so much bigger than they). And they've even showed up at nvidia's doorstep. "Look, you want to be in the video card business, not the lawsuit business. Are you sure you want to endanger your relationship with Mr. Capone?"
Meet our friend Mr. Macrovision. Phew, another glorious victory for the Content Trust(tm) over the Stupid/Evil Consumer(tm)!
What's positively hilarious about this is that no one gives a shit about copying content back to analog. Hello - it's 2004, people. This perfectly exemplifies the stuck-in-the-distantly-receeding-past mentality these guys have. Analog hole? What about the gaping digital hole? People who bother are copying straight to their computer! Fully 3/4 of the people reading this probably haven't used their VCRs since they last dusted off the video store's copy of Capricorn One.
Yet the Trust still races around showing everyone who's boss. That Macrovision protection is important! Ignore it at your peril! Hah.
All this will accomplish is that more people who use their computer with their TV are going to have a problem.
And those people will get angry. Who wouldn't? What an insult! They will soon learn about the foreign, boring field of intellectual property law - it's neither so foreign nor so boring anymore. They'll also learn about the messy campaign the Content Trust(tm) is running to hijack it.
They will find that, to watch their own videos, they need to go into the back alley, to meet the Dread Pirates(tm)... only, look how friendly and helpful they are. "I think I'll remember them - I'll probably be back again soon."
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Indeed, I mean why else read slashdot other than to watch a bunch of self-righteous nerds yammer on about trivial shit?
How can a signal be seen on a television clearly, but not on a VCR. Right.
Maybe you don't understand because you clearly don't know anything about VCRs, signal encoding and Macrovision? Right.
thankfully you can use DVD Idle to get around this.
Yes, thankfully we can spend money on software to re-enable functionality that was purposefully broken.
I am really just so thankful.
For those of us with older nvidia cards, this means we can't watch dvds anymore!
I was not aware that nvidia cards forced you to install every driver update.
There are alternatives to Nvidia. No one is forcing you to use Nvidia hardware.
WTF? Who needs this kind of preaching, guy? I doubt many that bought an Nvidia card were aware that this would happen, and I don't see anyone defending nvidia's specific decision here.
I won't be buying an nvidia card again but I'm not about to just throw away the $300 one I have and buy a new one because of shitty drivers. Your message was totally unhelpful and borderline trolling.
A year old and nobody's done a damned thing about it.
Drawing attention to this is constructive. Read the replies and you'll see that obviously it was not common knowledge.
There is no legitimate complaint here.
That sounds like the excuse people get when they protest about Bush taking away their freedoms. Nobody's forcing you to live here you know, you could move to Canada hippie. The fact of the matter is, in the desktop graphics world Nvidia and ATI cards are the only viable options. The rest of the stuff out there is crap hardware-wise. Unfortunately both of these platforms are encumbered with binary-only drivers.
Sure, there was a day when Matrox ruled the roost, but the days of 2D-only use are long gone by most people. Anyone hoping to play games will need to purchase an Nvidia or ATI card. Matrox is only good for spreadsheets, word processing, and CAD.
This actually, definately, 100% explains why my DVD player absolutely refuses to play certain DVDs.
My decoder doesn't honor Macrovision...but if the drivers do, it fucks up stuff.
Well, here's a idea.
Stop buying DVDs.
They're not water or air, they're fucking DVDs. The world will not end if you do not own the entire 12 season of the Simpsons in full digital with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. And they have made it crystal clear to me and I'd assume to you that they do not want our business. Why still give it to them?
Thank you Nvidia for making the decision easy! ATI, here I come! Of course, by the time I can AFFORD a 9800 Pro ATI might have a similar thing in place. 8^/
I was not aware that nvidia cards forced you to install every driver update.
This isn't insightful, just dickish. Driver updates do a lot more than just add copy protection - they increase performance and fix bugs, too.
Yes, you could keep running your detonator 40s without upgrading, and that's probably a great solution for people running old, integrated chipset or underpowered cards. But for the majority of nvidia driver users it's not useful advice at all. Good luck playing Far Cry, or any other new game on pre-41.09 drivers. Hamstringing a video card that costs twice as much or more than your average game console, so that it can't ably play games anymore, is not an acceptable solution.
There's no reason to play apologist here or to tell people to stop complaining. The complaint is just, and the situation fixable. If you don't have anything useful to contribute... don't contribute at all.
Macrovision's product is highly effective.
How have you determined that?
It serves to dissuade the majority of people from copying macrovision-"protected" (restricted) content, and that is good enough.
Again, how do you know this? Was there research? Are there statistics? Or is it just your guess cloaked as a factual assertion?
At college I saw a lot of $2 bike locks chaining bikes to the rack at my dorm. There were virtually no bike thefts in my 4 years there. May I then conclude that the $2 bike locks are highly effective at dissuading the majority of people from taking bikes illicitly?
ATI and NVIDIA open source drivers do not have the same capabilities. ATI, like NVIDIA, also releases binary only drivers for their recent hardware and no longer provides useful technical data for them to anyone, including OSS developers.
That said, yes, both NVIDIA and ATI have to be forced to release GPLed drivers. It's a GPL/copyright violation and I don't care what Linus says about it.
and I hadn't heard about this. If it's not a dupe, don't complain. I'm glad for the article and the discussion. I've seen several helpful links to software that works around this issue. I was planning on getting an Nvidia card with TV out soon, and now I know to watch out for this problem and what to do if I get hit by it.
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Breaks my heart! They too, like everyone else, have to obey copyrights and software licenses. That's what competition is all about. If they are willing to ditch 5-10% of their market, it's their choice. Someone like Matrox and other underdogs will pick it up from there.
AC + personal insults + cliches = you are not trying to argue or discuss. Good going, AC. Maybe I shouldn't have replied.
I have been thinking a lot about the /. article about a week or so ago that concerned what the world would be like without Microsoft. I saw another article elsewhere that was talking about business software, spreadsheets, and the like, and how the current crop of spreadsheets has affected the way business thinks about these kinds of things.
And I can relate to the "unpopular opinion" concept that the parent post has just talked about, because I was just feeling that way yesterday. I guess the best we can do is to try to present our opinions respectfully and honestly.
So here it is:
If you want to play a DVD, get a DVD player. That's what they are for.
Certainly, there are many other issues, and wouldn't it be nice if my computer could do this, or do that, and so on, but I have been thinking a LOT about what a computer is, what its place is in my life, and maybe just redefine a little bit what a computer really is, and what the most effective things to do with a computer are.
Personally, I would rather watch the DVD on a couch, with a plasma screen, with larger speakers and the surround sound. The entire thing of DVD on your computer, or music on your computer, or other things on your computer, which you had to purchase seperately before - it's a "something for nothing" proposition, kind of. Is watching DVDs on a computer just really cool or something, or is it just done just to do it, just for fun - of course there is nothing wrong with that, but I just see a DVD as something that belongs on a plasma with surround sound, with a nice couch. Of course, you may not be able to afford these things, but what I am trying to say is that "computers", as such, are (or should) be about more than just saving money because you can't afford nice things.
Would it be better that we turn computers into DVD players by crippling them and turning them into something that is no longer a computer? I would rather have a computer be a computer, "computer" still being something that we probably will keep redefining, and something that actually, lots of people don't really need as much as they think they do, or maybe it's more like they don't need it as bad as the big computer firms need them to buy millions of computers.
For instance, if there were small airborne transportation vehicles that you could buy, the sky would be all different. Setting up traffic lanes in the air, crashes in mid-air that come through your roof, things like that. Maybe it's better to not have everyone flying around in their personal aircraft, and to reserve aircraft for longer distances. There are many folks that feel that there are also too many cars, and that the focus has become one of car companies selling more of them, oil companies selling more fuel, "in the name of jobs". It's a stone age - it's a stone age.
It's one thing to say "I have the RIGHT to play DVDs on my PC" - that's something in and of itself. It's another to say "I NEED to play DVDs on my PC". Wouldn't it be better with a nice couch , a plasma screen, and a high-end surround sound setup? To some extent, the same thing can be said about mp3 files and crappy computer speakers, although listening to music while you study or surf the net or are doing some kind of boring work in the office IS a nice touch. But watching a DVD is a fairly all-encompassing experience - it pretty much takes up all your senses. You have to stop what you are doing, more or less, to watch a DVD.
I think that part of making computers integrate better with our lives is to not have one thing try to do everything. That's actually the whole Unix philosphy, GNU Coreutils, piping commands from simple building blocks, from one stdout to another stdin, instead of having one single monolithic application that takes an hour to just fire up. Split it up. DVD players cost $100 sometimes, sometimes even less. Who doesn't have a TV? I would rather that the manufacturers don't cripple the PC than go out of their way to bend the PC just so that you can p
That's more of an argument to purchase a system or a video card that will be fully supported on both OSes. As far as their cards, they don't have as large of an array to choose from but they are making a significant progress. I currently use NVIDIA, but next time I am in the market, I will definitely consider Matrox. And this is likely to happen a lot sooner if ATI and NVIDIA drivers crash X more often than they should, or they start shoving their DRM down my throat with their binary-only driver software.
Remember when ATI were underdogs playing catch-up not that long ago? It was perfectly feasible for them to try to gain every possible advantage they could, including "playing nice" to the OSS developers.
And I think a common reply to this is - how far do you take this? Until you have a kernel with a GPLed binary module loader, and all of the hardware drivers in binary? The system loses the value of being open source then.
Now, I'm not going to scrap the few nvidia cards I have. I'll just move them as needed to non-multimedia machines such as servers and workstation/gaming machines I build for family members.
Whether or not there are enough people like me to have an economic impact on nvidia's bottom line is another question. I don't really care as long as there are alternatives.
Cheers,
Craig
Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.