Toshiba HD-DVD Player Planned to Enforce HDMI

CCat writes "Digital Spy reports that at a recent Toshiba road show in the U.S., Toshiba demonstrated their upcoming HD-DVD specification. The most interesting thing for people buying TVs at the moment is that Toshiba has stated that their HD-DVD Player will ONLY output high Def on the player's HDMI output (plus other digital connections) with the analog output downrezed to 480 lines. Prior slashdot disussion talks about the copy prevention angle and HDCP guidelines."

Comments

I already had a preview of what's to come

[netringer]

We have a Motorola HD cable DVR connected to a Sony HD TV using a DVI (DVR) to HDMI (TV) cable that doesn't pass the DRM signal. The only digital input the TV has is the HDMI input. The digital signal is visibly cleaner and sharper at 1080i than using Component video cables, but there are rare glitches. Occasionally the picture will get out of sync and you see two torn noisy SD images on the screen. You can fix that by simply changing channels and coming back. That gets the 1s and 0s in sync again.

Outside of that the DVR/TV connect is wont to have other head glitches once in while. During one of those the TV displayed a blue box over 2/3 of the screen with the message along the lines of "DEVICE NOT AUTHORIZED for digital connection. Please switch to analog inputs." Power cycles all around cleared that nonsense.

This what we have to look forward to - TVs that will decide if your other devices are authorized to be seen. Support the EFF to stop this madness...or vote with your wallet. Are you ready to pass on watching movies or other HQ content when the day comes soon that all devices work like this?

I'm willing to bet that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD

[multiplexo]

are going to go the way of DVD-Audio and SACD. Despite the fact that Sony has made almost every one of their DVD players capable of playing SACD and the large number of DVD-Audio players available most artists and labels are shunning these formats. One reason, despite their higher quality, has to be the onerous copy protection attached to each format, including such idiocy as disabling digital bass management at the player level thus requiring users to run six analog connections between their SACD/DVD players and their home theater receivers. Most consumers looked at this and said "fuck this higher quality multi-channel noise". And now labels are releasing their titles on the increasingly popular DualDisc format, which combines a standard CD with a DVD with Dolby 5.1 sound. Thus allowing you to play this in your car or on a home theater system and which doesn't require running a bunch of extra cables and purchasing an analog bass management system for those receivers that don't have analog bass management capabilities.

What does HD-DVD offer the average user? Most people like DVDs not only because they have better image quality than VHS, even if you connect to your TV with an RF cable or RCA composite jack and also because they're smaller than VHS tapes, more durable and easier to fast forward and frame by frame. Exactly what does HD-DVD add to this? Well, you get more data storage, so if you wanted to have a bunch of movies on one disc you could, but I don't think Hollywood is going to go for that. Or you can have super duper high definition movies, which most users don't have the equipment to take advantage of anyways. Cripple it with idiot DRM schemes and you make it even less attractive.

Re:Format war

[Temsi]

Are you kidding?
I don't even have one, and I have an HDTV!

I have a CRT Philips set, which uses component input.
So, basically, Toshiba expects me to buy a third piece of hardware (a video processor) in order to use their product? Dream on.
This should dramatically hurt their sales. This hyperparanoia with regard to copy protection has gotten out of hand.

Re:Format war

[timecop]

DTCP/5C has been around since 1998. One of the things they have us content protection over 1394. DTCP/5C protection supports renewability, copy control information, and content encryption. All the HDTV equipment with 1394 (DVHS vcr, monitors with 1394 input) are required to implement DTCP for copy control/encryption.

This system has not been broken as of today (2005), and the possibilities that a "box in the middle" attack can even be applied to this protection scheme are unlikely, because of how key exchange is implemented and because compromised hardware can be blacklisted easily.

Re:I'd never by it...

[Pollardito]

I don't replace my TV every 4 years, it's gotta be going on 8 and my VCR is still going strong at almost 14 years old, so I really don't feel pleased in needing to repair something like this this soon in the player's lifespan.

4 years is a joke for consumer electronics, so i'd be skeptical too. i had a 19" TV that kicked out a year or two ago that was about 14 years old at the time, and another that was passed down to me from a relative and must be even older than that (though i can't vouch for how much use it got). all my parents' TVs have had similar lifespans, as a matter of fact they decommissioned one a few years ago that was so old that [cordless] remote controls were uncommon when they bought it. i still have the VCR that i bought 10 years ago (which only was bought as a replacement because the first one was stolen), and when my brother gets bored he can fire up my old NES from more than 15 years ago or my N64 from 8 years ago. i'm not listing all this because i think our experiences are anything atypical, i'm listing them because i think we've seen the same longer lifespan across a breadth of electronics.

i wonder what the typical lifespan of a computer is, setting aside the fact that most people dispose of them faster just because they're outdated. if they do die faster than other electronics, i wonder which is the part that dies fastest on average (my guess would be hard drive?)