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The Great HDCP Fiasco
Toasty16 writes "According to an article on Firingsquad, our shiny new Radeon and Geforce cards won't be able to play HDCP-encrypted content, even though they have been advertising HDCP support as a feature for a few generations. Want to watch that new Blu-ray movie on your custom built PC at full resolution? Sorry, retail graphics cards won't be able to do that; only OEM-built computers from Dell, Sony, HP and the like will have that functionality built in."
Many people saw this coming, but I never expected it to arrive so soon. If people accept this and bow to the content providers, then the DRM world is upon us.
Guess I will just have to go to P2P for my high-res movies instead of actually PAYING for them...
I don't actually know anything about HDCP, but I assume it is an "end to end" system, where every component in the stream must support each other.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Well... we know the answer. But its either "jeez lets screw the consumer, raise prices a shit ton" or "lets restrict the shit... and raise prices a shit ton." FUCK YOU MEDIA MAKERS - I'm stealing your shit until you "go out of business from piracy."
This is a load of crap. Of course, this assumes that you actually want to watch Blu-Ray content on your PC. Personally, I'm not planning on doing so, and I haven't bothered to play a video DVD in any of my machines yet either. Does anyone have an idea as to how hard it would be to break the encryption scheme being placed on the next gen technology?
The content providers, hardware and software people, everyone involved would have a lot more to gain if they'd simply make things easier for people. These kinds of roadblocks will only frustrate the average consumer more. For the rest of us, they'll be bittorrent or something else.
The 'fair use' doctrine really needs to be looked at more closely.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I can't remember the last movie I really enjoyed enough to want it on a DVD player anyway; and creative commons licensed moves like The Perkinning are really no worse than the expensive stuff these days.
I'm certainly not going to upgrade my graphics card just for DRM any more than I would downgrade my OS to windows (which'd probably also be required)
Now over here in the UK I we have a phrase for this sorta thing: "false advertising".
And I'm pretty sure we have laws against it too...
But when has vendor lock-in ever enhanced the propogation of a certain technology? Isn't that why Betamax wasn't adopted? Also, Sony's AC3 format comes to mind. Say hello to HDDVD
Lawyers rejoice!!!
Looks like we need you again. Hope you haven't let those hacking skills get rusty.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
So, rather than trying to make it easy for the masses to accept Blu-ray they're actually making it harder. Granted that's just for those wanting to watch it on their pc, but that group does include people like me - people who will now be eagerly awaiting the breaking of the encryption, and who will by necessity be using programs that enable (if not encourage) the piracy of their work.
And that kids is how I met your mother.
Ok, so Windows Vista will need HDCP to play HD-DVD and Blu-ray. But will Linux be able to avoid it because it controls the hardware? Or will the DRM need to be hacked first? Or is this nearly unhackable?
What Hollywood appologist crap.
"Hollywood gave you ample they were going to rape you, and yet you didn't bend over."
Sorry, no. I'm extremely glad that companies are in direct opposition to HDCP. We'll find out, once and for all, if the computer industry needs Hollywood, or if Hollywood needs the computer industry...
It's a ridiculous restriction anyhow. It's not like DVI-capture cards are a dime a dozen (or even possible with current hardware for that matter). It's not like anyone would WANT to capture the uncompressed digital stream and waste their time recompressing that back to it's original size. It's just another insane move by Hollywood.
Stick to bittorrent, and/or standard DVDs, if they don't change their tune.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I thought the principle of a working HDCP system was the combination of a valid display adapter and a valid graphics card (Feel free to let me know what I'm missing). One of the requirements for valid display adapters is that they are DVI. This probably excludes a very large portion of the market so I wouldn't expect HDCP to become a reality for quite a while. I don't think many people would accept having to purchase a new monitor as an acceptable cost.
ah...one more reason why I won't be supporting the Blu-Ray format.
The statement that retail cards will not be able to play Blu-ray movies at full resolution is potentially misleading. The article says that retail cards available at present(and already sold in the past) cannot. It would not make sense for graphics card manufacturers to not build support for HDCP in the future, especially since licensing only costs half a cent per card(plus an annual $15K fee).
;-)
That said, it is obvious that buyers of cards advertised as "HDCP-compliant" have been had. But I guess not many people will naturally empathise(much less sympathise) with someone who "just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs"
Finally, since this is a hardware-based requirement, are we Linux users going to sit out the era of Blu-ray movies on computers?
As a result, pirated content (with the protection removed and recoded in h.264) will run at a higher resolution on your PC than content you bought.
Anybody want to guess the effect of that on sales?
come on guys.... did you really expect the goverment & the RIAA to let you get away with downloading all of their workds for free?
If nobody can use it, then using blue-ray without it will be the standard.
I dont see everyone going out and buying all new systems for this artifical mandatory key authorization crap.
What isnt clear, so hardware H.264 wont support DRM'ed media either? Huh?! I thought that was just mpeg4 standards.
This gives me the impression that not one custom built computer on the market can even RUN windows vista. This is not only disorenting but confusing. Perhaps Microsoft and DRM Gods believe the majority of 'hackers' that break their encryption are on custom machines and this is a quick method to lock some of them out. Furthermore, its much easier to track someone who buys a prebuilt computer than someone who buys parts and assembles them.
Either way, I agree with previous quotes that a class action lawsuit might be in place.
This HD stuff (Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, HDCP) is already for a niche market, and it will get a very bad name with all the built-in downsampling. Consumers have enough troubles plugging in AV cables, let alone setting up HD with so many paths of failure. It may be downsampling it without them even knowing it, and people will see their setup and say "that doesn't look any better than mine", why should I replace my DVD player, TV, Surround sound and DVD collection for this? What is the point of downsampling if there isn't a totally protected path, I think there's proof now that people will put up with lower quality if they don't want to pay for it anyway, eg. Cam rips - so people aren't going to care if it's been downsampled - THEY WILL STILL PIRATE IT, SO WHY DOWNSAMPLE? Don't punish your customers just because they didn't buy a Dell.
Is this really true? Game manufacturers cannot realistically expect much market penetration of Vista before 2007 at the earliest, and they'll probably want to satisfy the XP crowd for another couple of years and make sure their games work with the older OS too. After all, a guy with a $2000 blazing gaming PC will probably hesitate to buy a $250 Vista license just to play an MS game. Might as well buy a used XBox360 at that price.
Overall, unless MS makes some co-marketing deals with game publishers and pays them to make Vista-only games, I don't see game publishers abandoning XP that easily.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
The requirement of HDCP via DVI/HDMI is also a major issue for those who bought the first few generations of HDTVs equiped with component inputs, or in some cases, DVI without HDCP support.
Cases in point, I know of several major HDTV purchases made about 2 years ago, late 2003 / early 2004. All of these were CRT or CRT projection based and have the ability to do full 1080i resolution, in fact most are currently being used with DVHS D-Theater, Dish Network HD, and XBOX360 at full 1080i, 720p or similar HD resolutions. Mostly via 3x RCA component input, but plain computer style DVI in a few cases. But since none of these TVs support HDCP, they will most likely be unable to display full HD resolution material from BluRay or HDDVD.
Many Dell 20" LCD monitor users are in the same boat. They love their sweet pivoting DVI monitors. But without HDCP support, they will never be useful as, say, a bedroom TV connected to a BluRay player or a future Comcast HD cable receiver.
HDCP is to protect the world from the pirates... who will work around this limitation somehow anyway.
It used to be that one had to buy an illegal converter/filter in order to make copies of Macrovision protected DVDs and VHS tapes. Now we're going to need to buy illegal converters/filters just to *use* our older HDTVs to their full resolution potential.
Why would Intel spin-off what could potentially be a massive profit maker?
???
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Retail video cards do not support HDCP != Retail video cards cannot support HDCP. The graphics card you own now most likely does not support it, but that doesn't mean the next one won't.
http://www.macfergus.com/niels/dmca/cia.html
How there is some huge security hole in hdcp. I really don't think we have much to worry about, as people will break this, publish the results, and we can get all the movies pirated.
I'd much rather download movies and have the risk of being caught then paying a ton of money for movies that won't even play at full resolution on the computer I already own.
HDCP's absence from retail cards and it's presence on the Sony cards makes you wonder if Apple got it right and has HDCP on the MacBook's just released?
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
What does HDCP encrypted mean, DRMed or just encoded for Blueray or whatever the next format is?
If it is the actual encodeing of the next media, then so much for ever getting software on the media. If it is DRM locked... then well people will find away around it. Odds are this will pass and this post means nothing, heck the standered is not even hammered out, let alone the DRM.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
How many other people are having trouble typing HDCP? ;)
My fingers automatically type DHCP instead
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
"If you compare that to licensing fees for HDMI, you'll see that while both have the same $15,000 annual fee, HDMI licensing is 4 cents/per unit (if you use the maximum discount as an example)."
"What about NVIDIA? Personally, I think they have the least blood on their hand for two reasons. One, they aren't a board manufacturer. That excuse alone wouldn't be good enough for me though.
What really gets them off the hook is that NVIDIA has been offering their board manufacturing partners designs with HDCP support since May 2005. Likewise, NVIDIA has actually shipped HDCP-enabled GeForce 6200 and 6600's in Sony Media Center PCs. Those boards just aren't manufactured at retail. In retrospect, they did their part. It was the board manufacturers who failed us. I don't need to name names, because they ALL failed us."
I may be stating the obvious, but the sooner you release your copy protection scheme to the general public, the sooner they will get around to cracking it. Now what would Hollywood say after fretting for months on the AACP copy protection scheme, if there was a crack that would unlock the digital content before blu-ray drives even became widely available? Isn't this just security through obscurity? They're making a gigantic effort to get end-to-end security, and it really does seem that movie piracy is way too easy on DVD's. IMHO. Hypothetically, I would design a workaround where I would play the protected content on a GPU that could decode it, one that had the HDCP decryption key, and since all my software can run with administrative privileges, I would just run another program with a shader that hijacked the frame buffer where the decrypted video was streaming through. That's just one way of doing it...
My 2c says this was unintentional on the part of the graphics board makers, but intentional on the part of Digital Content Protection, LLC, the spin-off from Intel that makes the chips with the decryption key on them.
A comparison of DVI, HDCP, and HDMI, leaves me wondering, is this just another format war?
Yeah, until just one person out of the millions with PCs cracks an HDCP disc and uploads it. Is there any cost:benefit*risk analysis for this copy protection that isn't produced by the DRM industry and the CYA execs who promote it?
--
make install -not war
We're all going to have to rely on dvd john to break the HDCP code so we can watch HDCP movies on our computers... even if we bought the movies.
That or wait for movie pirates to bring it to us unprotected.
GJ ATI/Nvidia/Microsoft/MPAA, you just shot yourself in the foot...
HanDiCaP
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
...those bastards!
***points and laughs*** That's what you get for compromising with the enemy.
/me rests his pointing finger for later use when Alito overturns abortion laws.
Pwnt.
It looks like I won't be purchasing HDCP movies then, or upgrading any of my equipment. Why would I want to?
The more I hear, the more I think both of these formats are toast.
The move from tape to optical had a lot of obvious advantages for end users. By comparison, the only real advantages to either Blu-ray or HD-DVD are 1) resolution, and 2) disc capacity. That's really not much to start with.
Capacity is only particularly relevant as A) the means to provide said higher res, and B) for people using these discs for their own personal data, which won't likely be effected by all these 'protection' racketsschemes. For raw data storage, BD or HD-DVD will take off when the drives are comodity items with decent burn times, and the discs have a comparable $/GB to DVDs.
As for resolution, here's the thing: didn't I read a while back on slashdot that some study found that only 50% of US households with "Hi-def" capable TVs had their systems set up properly to view anything in hi-def, and from the sound of it most of them were oblivious?
Now tell me... if the only really notable advantage of Blu-ray or HD-DVD over normal DVDs, when it comes to renting or buying videos, is resolution... and half the population can't even tell if their systems are set up to display hi-def content... and the DRM is such that nobody who's bought 'hi-def' hardware yet is going to actually get hi-def (my understanding is that if you don't have a fully HDCP compliant system, you get a degraded image, ie, lower res)... is it just me, or is most of the population going to buy a new optical drive, rent one BD or HD-DVD, not notice anything impressive cause their system isn't set up right, and go back to DVDs cause they're cheaper rentals?
$40 will get you a DVD drive you can stick in any vaguely recent desktop computer. A stand-alone DVD player that can hook up to pretty much any TV is probably cheaper than that. A new format that offers basically nothing but higher res, and requires thousands (in the next year) or several hundreds (any time remotely soon) of dollars of upfront expense on hardware upgrades to get that one advantage, which you also have to re-purchace all your media to get... I'm just not seeing it.
Fortunately, all the companies involved have put way too much into this to let it drop that easy, so hopefully they'll stick it out long enough to produce comodity priced products for those of us who are really just interested in the higher capacity optical media.
I don't actually know anything about HDCP, but I assume it is an "end to end" system, where every component in the stream must support each other.
Until this point HDCP was just from the video output to the display device.
This new standard is basically the OS saying that in-between the protected drive and the video card, there must now be a protected path to enable the full resolution of the HD source. The video cards will still work with HDCP equipment, it's just that HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback will not deliver full resolution on that setup.
To be brutally honest, this is horribly depressing for those of us that know better but just acceptable enough for most users (720p being a higher res source than they were used to anyway) that few outside the technical realm will really raise much of a stink. Most will live with reduced resolution output without even knowing it; full path HDCP support will be another checkbox to move people at Best Buy to look at a higher end system (video or PC).
Stuff like the broadcast flag which does affect a wide range of viewers in a very annoying way would raise a lot more ire.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
that only OEM computers will be truely HDCP compatible? TFA only states that current topnotch graphic cards lack the chips with crypto keys and advise to hold off purchasing a shiny new video card. Nowhere did it say that future cards won't have that chip built in.
...that stops degenerate American cultural products from infecting your computer.
HDCP is to protect the world from the pirates... who will work around this limitation somehow anyway.
Pirates don't need to break things like HDCP or DECSS.
If you want to large scale pritate a disc, you just get the equipment to make a bit for bit copy.
HDCP, just like DECSS is all about controlling consumers.
Life is too short to proofread.
...but this will be cracked so fast that it'll be like it wasn't even protected at all. This will be an absolute priority in the minds of high IQ, anti-social parents' basement dwellers everywhere who want to take revenge on a society that puts profit ahead of human progress, and seeks to limit information in a sociopathic bid for their own, personal monetary gain. The notion that information can be controlled, packaged into little products, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, HD-DVDs, 0s and 1s that are only accessible to those who have exchanged money with someone who wishes to make a profit rather than contribute to artistic or technological development will be defeated. In the looming new age of technological freedom created by the absolute chaos of the Internet in all its unfettered glory, only those who want to: 1) Create actual art, not created for the mere purpose of profit or 2) Advance mankind by providing new and improved tools will be able to realize their goals when it comes to publishing art or software. The newest generation of kids was raised on P2P, and they EXPECT the free flow of information, no matter how complex it is. I'd get to work on improving your open source projects, for the good of humanity, people, because we EXPECT free software. We don't agree with the notion of payment, as far as we're concerned, its all 0s and 1s. And I don't mean to demean anti-social basement dwellers. I'm in their ranks, and anti-social basement dwellers with high IQs have done more to free information from the shackles of DRM than anyone else. To my brethren: Hail thy mom for not kicking thyself out onto the streets, she has done a service to humanity!
I for one am taken by complete surprise. Having been using Linux exclusively for the last several years, I have not been keeping up to date with Microsoft developments.
The only major digitial viewing development I've heard about is the broadcast flag being killed and its zombie-like properties, but that's tv, not computer. I should have never put it past a for-profit entity to act as it has though.
But no, Sony had to get involved...
http://outcampaign.org/
fuck you!
you fucking bastards....
how dare you cut off blu ray movies from the pc....
you will not get a penny from me.
It's better to have pc's output without hdcp, then lcds/tvs/monitors will have continue to have pressure to support unencrypted "PC" signal. HanDiCaP is bad.
The alternative:
Past: video signal is RGB. It is formatted in a standard way, in a specification approved by the government.
Future: video signal is encrypted. It is formated in a proprietary way, the format only known by the 2 media companies left.
I noticed all the listed companies are Wintel outfits. As such will Apple cave into this too? Might Apple and Microsoft team up to support HD-DVD instead? If Apple and Microsoft team up does that mean I can expect snowball fights in hell?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Not if the player software pops up a nice friendly dialog that says, "Your graphics card does not support HDCP, and cannot play movies in High Definition. Please contact Best Buy sales staff for a replacement." I imagine that would focus most consumer's attention on the real problem.
If you're faced with the choice of buying a new graphics card & monitor to go with your new BD-ROM drive & copy of Vista (not to mention $39.95 for the movie itself), or to just download the movie instead, what would you do? I fully expect HD movie piracy to be rampant, at least until people get around to upgrading their equipment for other reasons.
OTOH, there's probably still a decent-sized market of people who'll buy a standalone HD player, plug it into their 50" non-HDCP TV & say, "Wow! HiDef!" They'll probably connect it using a $20 "digital" S-Video cable too.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
That's my problem exactly. Dropped $7400 on a 42" plasma 18 months ago -- component inputs only. 3 weeks later I read that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD would only output HD to HDCP compliant devices.
Well, fuck 'em - I'm just not going to buy either of the new discs.
-- Your mother uses Emacs.
So, they want me to "upgrade" my monitor which doesn't support HDCP, my video card which doesn't support HDCP, and my TV which doesn't support HDCP.. just so I can watch video in higher resolution?
Sorry, to my eyes DVDs look just fine.. and none of my hardware needs replacing for any other reason. If it ain't broke..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
At first I thought the studios were incredibly stupid. The only thing they'll accomplish with their asinine HDCP requirement is eliminate the market for HD content on PCs.
Then I realized it was probably intentional.
Hollywood wants their content as far from your computer as possible.
But I'll offer you a few bucks for it.
How many days will it take before someone files a class-action lawsuit?
...and now you know why Sony came up with that whole "irrevocably bind individual PS3 game discs with individual machines" idea!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
... on your "old" HDTV. ... even if only few stations are making it available and that tomorrow fuel now looks like diesel and biodiesel and not LPG.
Actually, TV manufacturer told you for ages that you really need that HDTV set because "in the future, you'll get HDTV content". But they just forgot that they don't own the content and that its owners will add a last layer of protection/technical requirement at the very last minute (2 years actually).
This is like car manufacturer promoting LPG as tomorrow fuel
My solution? Don't be an early adopter.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
It's CSS (Content Scrambling System). DeCSS removes CSS.
http://outcampaign.org/
The easy way for ATI and Nvidia to prefend lawsuits and refunds is to leak some interesting information to DVD John.
When there is a free player available, customers can not complain.
What's up with Matrox as regards this? We always hear about nvidia and ati, but there's still matrox out there, and always the most linux friendly. Shouldn't they be getting more support?
Take an expensive Sanyo projector with DVI in, an expensive Denon DVD player with DVI out, and what do you get? A waste of $20,000.
Some HDCP issue is preventing the devices from working together. Six months later there are some unhappy people, not least of whom are the vendors who still hasn't been paid.
Will they ever learn ?
Delete all trace of slashdot from your system. By a couple graphics cards. File lawsuit, free hardware. Commercial speech isn't quite so free if they don't live up to their end of the bargain.
Again, another limitation which is only causing problems for legit users. This arms race will be won by the pirates until MPAA/RIAA starts to deal with Analog Reconversion. None of this DRM stuff is preventing anyone determined from bootlegging....
If Microsoft or Sony can remotely brick your hardware, what do you want to bet that the security on their "bricking" system will be less strict than the security on your HDCP content?
What happens when some Russian mafia hacker breaks into the "brick hardware at will" system? I can't wait to see the class action lawsuit.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
When do we see the first one for false advertising?
According to HotHardware ATI 9700 Pro was suppoused to support HDCP. And now we learn that they don't? I don't know about you, but in Finland it is illegal to market a product with false statements.
Let the law suites begin!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
As if any .com would give away the keys to the digital kingdom.
You want the next generation you will have to pay for it again and again.
Everybody wants in on this upgrade cycle.
In capatalist West new card will not let you to watch tv.
In Soviet Union repaired Ubin TV lets KGB watch you.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'm crossing my fingers for massive consumer backlash. A bonus plus would be a final round of chapter 7 liquidation of company assets after all is said and done. No Blu-ray for me.
The entire point of DRM is to forbid copying, saving, manipulating the content ... which is what a PC is for. The whole reason to jump from paper to PC was that it made it easy to save, copy, repeatedly print, and manipulate information.
If all you can do is watch on your PC, what have you got? A $2000 19" TV! Big deal; most people will be doing their watching on the new 42" in the living room with the cable-company-supplied HD DVR.
HDCP, in short, will kill any sales of PC equipment and content, save to enthusiasts like slashdotters, and to content makers - including everybody with home cameras. But nin Blu-Ray disks out of ten will be put into consumer boxes rather than PCs because the PC won't do anything special with it.
This outcome is fine, for Hollywood; they don't see "available on PC" as a big selling point for their product. They're happy to just keep their content off the platform altogether.
I had a years subscription to CinemaNow. It was a hundred bucks for a great selection of poor quality porn and and B- movies. I had 700 crappy movies to choose from that I could start watching in a few seconds.
The good - 700 available movies right from my computer with a slowly changing selection. No massive hard drive, no piles of disks, no evidence of how much porn I watch, and no time wasted organizing all those movies. I could get bored and in under a minute be watching a new movie. The DRM was barely noticable when watching streaming. I would never buy/download a movie from them though because of the DRM.
The bad - Movies sucked. Quality at 700kbp sucked. No 5.1+ sound.
I hear about this new Vongo service where not only do you get streamed movies but the starz channel streamed also. The quality looks as crappy as CinemaNow at about the same 700kbs quality.
I guess my point is, by the time these new HD discs really start taking off and they have a selection worth investing money into watching them, will streaming movies already be here and good enough. Since DRM requires a connection anyway, why not just watch them streaming. I don't think the current 700kbs or even 1500kps is going to cut it, but I live in a rural nowhere and already have access to 5000kps for under $50/month. In 3 years I could easily have a connection of 10,000kbs and with better compression could be watching streaming >DVD quality movies in 5.1 surround over the internet.
If I could find a service that offered HBO/Showtime movies, pc games, and a few TV channels (all in streaming >DVD quality) I would be more than willing to shell out $50/month for the service. As long as the service meant having the DRM in the background unnoticed. After testing the waters with CinemaNow, I don't think I want to go back to shovelling out $25 here and there to build another throw-away collection of plastic discs that will inevidately be outdated or resold in special editions 4 or 5 years down the road again anyway.
Streaming should also mean that it doesn't matter what plugs or O/S I am using. As long as they get their money and can keep tabs on how many computers I am streaming movies from simultaniously then they won't need some grand copyright protection scheme (hopefully). If I had thousands of movies and programs remotely stored and organized for me that I could watch at the click of a button, then why in the hell would I waste my time trying to record them or steal them? KISS
I'll just wait till some pirates in Hong Kong find a way around it. Be it a hacked firmware, a hacked driver, or a modchip for my motherboard.
They swore up and down that [Insert random encryption here, be it the XBox's software key system, DeCSS, etc] would be uncrackable too. It'll happen, the system -- that is, the PC architecture -- is just too open for them to lock it down with any success.
Well, I won't bother buying one of those media then. Why do I need insanely high resolution? I mean, the difference between a good dvd rip compared to a dvd is quite marginal.
Oh yeah, be sure to tell your friends who is really responsible for putting in that restriction if they thought their card could have played these new "better quality" content.
Please direct all bug reports to
SuperAudio (it had some other names too) were a Sony technology for higher quality sound than CDs, basically, a DVD where all the capacity were used for high quality sound.
... which died a quiet death after a couple years.
Never took off - CDs are "good enough", nobody bothered to upgrade. No customers meant that record companies outside of Sony didn't bother releasing content on the format
The same will happen to these high definition video disks. You'll see.
If it doesn't work well, people get upset and eventually complain by _not_ buying products. It's the best thing that could happen you know.
Me personally would be happy with a shiny disc that can only be played in stand alone players (not computers) and without quality loss show on a Flatscreen/Projector, as long as I get to pay less. I refuse to go along on a scheme only to make certain peopler richer after all. Cut their wages and lower prices if you want to get to the piracy, make things affordable.
I was just over at Fry's in Palo Alto today, and more than half the supposedly "HTDV-capable" screens playing the "HDTV demo" were actually showing the house HDTV signal. Many of them were actually running off good old composite NTSC, coming in through an RCA phono plug. Not even S-Video. All that blurring and ringing on a big $4000 plasma panel. Why bother?
If you were sold a car with brake pads, drums, and shoes but no brake line, pedal, and master cylinder and the ads read "Comes with brakes!" . . . But you couldn't use the brakes because the system is incomplete, wouldn't you have potential for a lawsuit?
In other words, what is a brake? is it the shoes, the cylinders, or is it the complete and functioning system? What does HDCP support mean? If it means a functional and useful system then the given example may be false advertising. If it means extra transisters that don't add any tangible value or real functionality, then the next generation of video cards should include extra transistors and manufacturers should advertise "Makes Coffee Too!" When you realize that it doesn't come with the hardware (carafe, filter, water heater, etc.) to make coffee, then the video card people can just say . . . ohh, that's not what we meant; however, the processor logic of a coffee maker is included.
The reason they are implementing a new format is simple - profit margins. How large a profit margin do you think there is on a sub-$40 DVD-ROM system? Or on a $30 dvd-rom drive? Almost none. Same with the media - the only media they make any kind of money on is the dual-layer media, and even that isn't stellar. Their market model requires that the release a new technology at $300+ per unit to mantain profits. Ugh.
Sounds like the only hope for watching hidef content for most of us is going to be praying for a crypto breakthrough. And it is just that sort of high demand that pushes a lot of breaks.
Democrat delenda est
There's no way I can go out and pay for a HD drive, a new monitor and then watch retail purchases HD content.
It's going to be downloading rips for me it would seem.
*shrugs*
I remember stumping up for a DVD decoder card back in the day - seemed a fair wad of cash, but I did like the picture. Basically it would seem the cost of entry to the new HD DRM future is going to be astronomical - nobody is going to bother...
For the average joe who watches movies on say a player in the lounge, a desktop and a laptop when out and about - exactly how much is it going to cost to upgrade from DVD to HD? How much do they possibly think I'm going to pay extra to replace my equipment that currently meets most of the specs with NEW - JUST TO GET ROUND THEIR F'IN DRM *slams head into desk* That's it - I'm sitting the next gen out.
... before they will try to stop more than one person watching the content at the same time.
cue dr. Vosnocker, bringing us the V-chip. Directly implanted in the brain, it will supply the viewers that haven't paid for the movie with a small electric shock. YEAAARGH!!!
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
So pirated movies will only play on pre-HDCP monitors. It doesn't matter if the encryption is broken if nothing will play the thing.
Turn and face Canada, to your right is lots of water, on the other side of the water is a little island where Harry Potter lives.
Tell me, how's even DVD Jon supposed to circumvent encryption that's embedded in the hardware?
Yea, becouse Macrovision REALLY worked right?
http://securityportal.com.ar
No, I'm well aware that J.K. Rowling lives in Great Britain (although I'm not sure which particular kingdom).
However, that's irrelevant. All creative works originating in other countries are Public Domain too; it's only international treaties which extend [the U.S.'s, not whatever other country's] copyright terms to them.
In other words, J.K Rowling only gets the same privilage of lease as a native author, and that's only because her country negotiated a bargain with us for it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Considering how the pirate market supposedly is in the billions of dollars, allegedly funding the mafia or terrorism or something, surely there's at least one or two black boxes already sitting around in the hands of people waiting to capitalize on this.
They'll probably connect it using a $20 "digital" S-Video cable too.
That's why I bought the $189.95 digital enhanced S-Video broadband cable with gold connectors and OO-gauge double-shielded oxygen free wire for my 50" hi-def set. (According to the package, unlike normal cables, this one prevents the common waveguide harmonic interference that shears the digital encoding algorithm of the cable's colorspace.)
I got mine for a pretty big discount -- for this kind of performance you would probably end up paying more like $240, but for some reason the salesman was in a really good mood the day that I came in. He even threw in an extended warranty on the cable for half price -- a $69.95 value!
There's no point in dropping $6K on a tv if you don't have a good digital cable between it and the VCR.
Maybe Stallman is pretty smart to insist that DRM not be a part of GPL III after all. Do we really want to go down this path with Linux? A firm stand now might (I did say might) send the industry a wake up call that not everyone will accept intentionally crippled hardware.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
If it costs $15,000/year to join the club many small companies who put PCs together are not going to be able to afford it.
If M$ Vista needs HDCP, the small guys are not going to sell boxes with M$ Vista.
A few years down the line the small guys go out of business.
The big guys clean up - can charge 'proper' prices for PCs since they don't have to compete against the small guys, only against each other - and they are all greedy.
MS then gets the big guys to implement their part of the deal: only boot trusted operating systems -- whoops, what do you mean Linux/BSD no longer works on those boxes ? Well, buy a different box .... errm, where from there are no independent PC manufacturers any more?
M$ gains. All the big guys are now happy & we all need to run virus ridden s/ware.
Tell me, how's even DVD Jon supposed to circumvent encryption that's embedded in the hardware?
The same way people got around locked clock multipliers or front side bus speed restrictions: some enterprising company in China will see a market of a product that allows x modification (but not out-of-the-box, some work on the purchaser's part will be required). Sell said part, homebrew comminutity will perform said action and get around restriction.
For example, only certain equipment is allowed to play HDCP content. Manufacturer makes motherboard that has everything needed to support HDCP, except it also includes port to output unencrypted content, and it has no valid licence to play HDCP, this would make it worthless to people who use it right out of the box. But, wait! Identifier chip where HDCP license is usually stored on motherboard is flashable ROM! And, what ho, someone figures out how to clone a license from an OEM board that is properly approved to display content. License is flashed to our Chinese motherboard, HDCP content now believes it is playing on Dell HD-MCE edition and shows in glorious full res, but is output unencrypted. The End.
HDCP license board cannot revoke license of device, otherwise people who bought the Real McCoy will be P.O.ed in a "call the lawyers" sense when they can no longer play HDCP content.
Chinese company says "We're in China, take your DMCA and stuff it." or "We don't allow this functionality in our product, you need to sue American consumer who cloned the license of real HDCP device, they're the one haxx0ring our motherboard!"
Are the shiny new Imacs and Macbooks (that name groan) going to support HDCP out, or have Mac users been suxored or well? Well yet another reason to hang on to the old reliable ibook and G5 tower and not jump at the revision 1 macs.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Most folks with (any, not necessarily geeky) skills don't like to work/live on the fringes of the law... unless they think they are fighting an immoral law.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
"But everyone has broadband or at least an Internet connection, blah blah". No, they don't. And what if the servers are down?
Clever signature text goes here.
the USofA is not the only good place to live. And there are countries with sane copyright legislations.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
When will the CEO's of these companies with infinite incomes, realise that the rest of us on finite incomes, only have finite amounts of money to spend on the essentials of life:-
- such as over-inflated housing (well here in Sydney anyway)
- over-inflated petrol (GAS to those in the US) prices
- over-inflated food prices (that are blamed on over-inflated petrol prices)
- over-inflated toll road prices (well here in Sydney anyway)
- over-inflated Pay TV prices, that have just as many over-inflated ads as Free to Air
- still expect us to spend money on their DRM'ed over-inflated crap that they call entertainment
- and find extra money to spend on new over-inflated equipment to view the same crap on over-inflated screen, when we all thought that we had bought equipment that would allow us to view what very few movies that are worth purchasing.
I choose to spend my very sparse, very precious extra money left over after the essentials getting out in the world, driving through Australia's beautiful bush in my 4WD, taking photographs on my Digital SLR, and seeing real music played live by local artist (and purchasing my music direct from the artist, at the gig), rather than give that sparse, very precious money to fund some over-inflated wanker, so that he can have another mansion overlooking the harbour within which he can snort another fat line of cocaine, using a rolled up $100 note, that came out of MY pocket.
To those wankers I say PHARK YOU.
Three of Nine.
"Discabled"? or maybe even "Differently Cabled"? Or are you intellectually crippled?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Bluray has B+ (in addition to AACS) which is basicly pr-disk programmable DRM and the ability to mess with your players firmware.
HDDVD doesn't have B+ only AACS.
AACS is bad enough, but it's not programmable in the same way as B+.
With HDDVD we will be able to play the movie with only the title key or a player key, either can be obtained from a hacked player, if only the title keys are being distributed then They(tm) cannot determine what player has been cracked and they can't disable it.
We'd need to keep cracking players to get at the player keys because there is a risk that the cracked players are exposed and their keys disabled for new disks.
Once the player key is disabled the player key can be released and all old title keys can be deleted.
All in all HDDVD(AACS) will be slightly harder to play than standard DVD(CSS) and there will be more work involved in distributing the (player/title) keys to decode the movies, but it's all doable.
Bluyray on the other hand is a nightmare where every single disk could demand special workarounds.
Hopefully the format curse of Sony will kill bluray.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
If HDCP compliant equipment can reconize the watermarks, then a ripper program can be made to do the same, and remove them.
Clever signature text goes here.
Your card fails because it has an unencrypted output on the back, not because the chip can't do it.
No sig today...
...the $15,000 (and 0.005c per unit) is paid by the Graphics Card manufacturers (e.g. BFG, XFX, Asus etc. etc. etc.), the initial yearly payment to "join the club" and the 0.005c per unit for the crypto keys. True, that cost may be passed along the chain as higher prices, but I would wager it will be a couple of dollars at most.
As a white-box PC manufacturer, as long as you purchase a graphics card with full HDCP support, from a company who has paid the fee, you'll be fine.
I am NaN
They have more than one king now?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Is there anything to prevent HD-DVD from adding this firmware-disabling feature? If Blu-Ray has it, and HD-DVD does not, I can imagine that content producers would boycott HD-DVD until it did. In short, I don't think anything is truly final about how these formats will work. Personally, I hope they both fail.
... and then they built the supercollider.
No thanks, I'll just wait for the pirated version.
Vista won't be out until the end of the year. So I don't see the problem. This new standard is not going to be supported by anything else than vista. Aside from a bunch of tweakers, the only way people will get Vista is by buying a new PC. That's why nvidia and ati are not bothering to put useless hardware on their current boards. I'm sure that if there is any market demand for this standard, there will be some compatible hardware by the time Vista launches.
Of course the big question is weather this standard will work at all. If you take a step back and look at what the industry is doing, you see a lot of vertical stacks of technology with none of them well positioned for long term success. IMHO neither blue ray or hddvd is going to have any long term relevance. The HDCP standard will add to this problem since it will complicate and slow adoption of the new technology. That in turn means lower demand for HD content.
If you look at the long term, the only relevant distribution channel for any digital content is online distribution. Once the industry decides that online distribution is the way forward, the whole mess of vertical technology will more or less automatically ensure that any technology which restricts market share will be extemely unpopular with consumers and, ironically, content distributers. Why sell onlince content to only 1% of the market with compliant hardware when you can sell to 100% of the market with good enough hardware?
The first company who gets this right will make lots of money real fast.
Jilles
No, I'm well aware that J.K. Rowling lives in Great Britain (although I'm not sure which particular kingdom).
There is only one Kingdom, ruled by a queen. And if you dont know, in wich country she lives, it is England. England is part of Great Britain. Great Britain describes the combination of England, Scotland, and Wales and is part of the Commonwealth, together with Canada and Australia, amongst others.
However, that's irrelevant. All creative works originating in other countries are Public Domain too; it's only international treaties which extend [the U.S.'s, not whatever other country's] copyright terms to them.
Can you come up with relevant law texts, treaty texts and such, to support your thesis?
In other words, J.K Rowling only gets the same privilage of lease as a native author, and that's only because her country negotiated a bargain with us for it.
Please send me where this is written. I want to see where my intellectual property is already not mine but yours
According to prophecy
<plagiarise victim="self">
The average eye with 20/20 vision is capable of resolving one minute of arc, a sixtieth of a degree. This equates to roughly 300 dpi, when viewed at a distance of one foot. Let's say the average distance from a couch to a TV is 7 to 10 feet. At 7 feet, you can resolve 300/7 = 43 dpi, at 10 feet it's 30 dpi.
So in order to fully resolve a 720p picture (1469 pixels diagonally) at 7 feet, the TV would have to be at least 34 inches diagonally to make out all the detail. At 10 feet you'd need a rather large 50 incher. For true 1080p, even at 7 feet, anything under 50 inches and you're missing out - and at 10 feet you'd have to get a whopping 74 inch TV! At 10 feet, you need a 30" screen even to make out plain old standard-definition DVDs properly.
</plagiarise>
So unless you've got a particularly large TV or a particularly small loungeroom - or a projector - you may find investing in a high-definition TV to be entirely pointless. You simply can't see the extra detail. Of course, watching high-def movies on a computer monitor is different; we sit much closer to them, say around 18 inches away. At that distance, you'd want a 200 dpi screen (at 24", that's an impressive 4183 x 2353). Or you could get one of these - except it doesn't support HDCP...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Currently DVDs are 720 x 576 (PAL), which is good enough for me, at least for the next 5 to 10 years.
... DVD was a natural replacement and solved all of those issues.
VHS degraded over time, was awkward to use, bulky, hard to navigate exactly, low resolution
Unless you have a 60" TV and can see the DVD encoding blocks and resolution. This is a niche market though - most people (especially in the UK and Europe) simply do not have massive TVs.
So unless DVDs suddenly start shipping with poor encoding, thus trying to make HiDef discs look better in comparison, no one is going to care. I'm going to buy £20 BluRays - I only watch most films a couple of times anyway - rental seems a better option even for DVDs, TV series are worth buying, but they're less likely to be in HD anyway, or not as worthy of HD. High BluRay prices will simply mean less sales to consumers of content, and more rentals.
A good film that's worth owning is like a good book. It doesn't need the resolution to be good, it's all about the content, the acting, the story. As long as the DVD is looked after, it's all that 90% of people will need. With clever filters DVD resolution can be upscaled very nicely as well, so it will look good on most HDTVs, as long as the DVD player is decent (+ progressive output). If you can afford a HDTV, then spare a bit more for a decent player, eh?
This article read a little too much like a conspiracy theory.
What it missed was proper dates when HDCP was to be ratified and when the hardware that contained the keys shipped to hardware vendors.
I'd first start blaming availability of hardware and finality of the spec before reaching back and slapping ATI or Nvidia for not having support on board. Chips ship with specs; boards limit those specs. Case in point, dual link; if your chip supports it, then only if your board supports it do you actually get it. That's why it's better to RTFB (Read the F***ing Box).
I also thought it was funny they decided to lay more blame on ATI because they are a board manufacturer as well, thinking that Nvidia doesn't have a final say on what boards their products end up on. If that were true, I could make my own Nvidia/ATI FX 78X1900 XT dual chip system with 16 megs of RAM and have the guys at firingsquad benchmark it.
Exactly. These companies pushing all of these DRM schemes have got the technical people in a fuss because of libertarian platitudes, when they know just as well as anyone else that it won't prevent piracy. It's the hardware stupid. They keep pushing this stuff in order to SELL MORE HARDWARE. And if they manage to push a PARTICULAR brand of DRM, then they've LOCKED YOU INTO the whole line of THEIR products, or their PARTNERS' PRODUCTS. Once you decide you just have to have the Matrix Trilogy on Blu-Ray to play on your 100" plasma HDTV, then you've just lined the pockets of a particular group of people within the hardware world. And even if another manufacturer wants to jump onto that bandwagon, and sell compatible hardware, they're going to have to pay the first group a HEFTY fee to do so. Ultimately, it's about VENDOR LOCK-IN. I don't think these people care a whit about your STUPID "PIRACY." Vote with your dollars accordingly.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
like a previous poster said, i wont buy in to any part of this DRMed crap --neither-hardware-or-software...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I keep looking at the soon to happen transition from analog to digital over the air TV. How come nobody in the stores will bother to put up an antenna and display real world digital TV? It's either one of the demo channels on one of the pay services (sat or cable) or in house loop. So far this makes it difficult to judge what to buy that works. The in store demos are great if you plan on connecting to cable or a dish. Connecting to an antenna seperates the monitors from the recievers. How can you sell me a TV for over the air television if you can't even demo it in the store. I need better assurance I can make it work at home.
The truth shall set you free!
$7400 on a 42" plasma? Dude, you were robbed. Even 18 months ago, you could get far cheaper than that, and not for crappy import shit.
I've been thinking about this whole DRM situation. I think my problem with the matter lies in that efforts are being made to force me into paying for something which offers me no added value. It adds value for the content providers.
Looking at it when we go out and buy expensive TVs, HiFi gear, and to a lesser extent computers, to deliver their content we are doing them a massive and costly favour. We are giving them a route to our eyes, ears and minds. Since we are paying for this infrastructure, it seems entirely wrong that these restrictions are forced on us.
A workable solution could be to provide two routes to content - for those willing to pay for their equipment, a protection-free platform. For others, content providers could finance the content delivery mechanisms and provide them at minimal or no cost to the consumer and implement all the protection schemes they want.
In this situation, it is likely that the majority would adopt the cheaper route and abide by their rules. It strikes me that these are the types of people who don't pay much for their equipment today and perhaps even the group which contributes least income to the content providers. In turn, the minority who spend money on entertainment gear today and who take issue with the restrictions being imposed on them (the enthusiasts, perhaps), could continue doing so.
There are different potential nuances of this concept, such as offering equipment with and without DRM technology, with the DRM'd versions being significantly cheaper due to Hollywood funding (and their crippled functionality of course).
In essence, if content providers want more value from the products we put in our homes, they should have to pay a fair price for that value (and since DRM will allegedly offer them great monetary returns that price can't be low) and that payment should add value to the product for the end-user. In such a situation, my anti-DRM sentiments could quite easily be challenged.
Unfortunately, I suspect short-sightedness and greed will prevent this scenario from ever materialising.
Does this mean that 3d card makers Nvidia and ATI are left out in the cold?This wouldn't encourage many people to purchase thier products. How many people need HDCP anyway? We really need to start rebelling against DRM. WE are the paying customers. Without paying customers your company goes out of business. It's a fairly linear path. WHY does everyone keep laying down and taking it from these stubborn callous people? DRM scemes like the above are ill-fated. There will be mod chips and software hacks for all computers coming from the worlds best hackers.All DRM does is infurate the elementary level children for a small amout of time and other legitimate paying consumers.
Only if it "works."
By the subject of this whole article, for a whole segment of the marketplace, it's going to be considered "broken" already. Even at that, we gotten to the technical operability aspects, yet. If they can make sure that HDCP "just works" for everyone but geeks, they'll probably get DRM pushed into the market. But so far the only form of DRM I've seen hit the market that "just works" is traditional DVD CSS, and its scope was much more limited.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I read this headline and wanted to know what a "flasco" was.
New consumer model then:
Rent or buy
Rip
Convert to a viewable format
Return to store, possibly with a complaint that the disc is incompatible
Burn compatible formatted version to dual layer DVD
Watch at own convenience on any device
!profit
If you read one the links to Microsoft's documents in the article, I believe you'll notice they say the drivers have to report the HDCP status (of the video card and monitor IIR). Thus, it is more accurate to say that it is not at present possible to buy any computer, even custom-built, that is capable of using the HDCP features of Vista. Which does make me wonder about how that part of the Vista OS code is being tested....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
A work is the property of the author.
/ a1_8_8s12.html
The guy that wrote the Constitution of the US (Thomas Jefferson) asserted several times that people did not and could not "own" ideas. Period. I have read his reasoning and I have to say, I agree with him. Maybe this is easy for me to say because I am not a media or software company, but I do write short stories, and I still agree with him.
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents
Furthermore, I think people who support the DMCA view of things should consider where we will be as a culture in a few decades. I understand the incentive argument, but the restrictions on reuse have become way more burdensome than is necessary for the promotion of creation. We will lose our creative/technical/cultural lead for this very reason. We currently hold a position very similar to France in the 1700's. Pretty soon we may hold a position very similar to France in the 1900's.
Call me a luddite, but I cant believe the amount of money people spend on all of this 'high end immersive home entertainment' crap.
... the rest is up to you.
... and kiss her for the first time as the tide laps against the beach.
.. feel good and learn more about the people you thought you knew.
really - thousands of dollars for what can only ever pass as a semblance of reality.
Want a real immersive FPS experience ? - drop $100 and spend a weekend out in the bush shooting paintball.
Want a real immersive flightsim ? drop $100 and spend a weekend learning to hang-glide, and get a feel for what flying is all about.
Want an immersive and memorable porn experience ? - drop $100, go out clubbing, meet dozens of attractive real people, have real conversions, get real phone numbers, and
Here are some recent $0 experiences which no amount of 7800GTX SLI cards can come close to :
- Hours wasted building sandcastles on the beach with a hot nursing student from china who doesnt speak the local language that well. Teach her a bit of english, learn a bit of mandarin, and engage your brain in the most complex real-time strategy game as you attempt to interpret her alien body language. Still on the beach as the hour approaches midnight, having built a full scale replica of a great white shark in the sand. Accidentally trip over the shark, catch her in your arms
- Hang out at a mate's house with a dozen or so others and play an 8-ball tournament, music, fridge full of drinks, play with the pet lizards
- Go to a birthday party, get smashed, end up at a bizarre karaoke bar, get up on stage with complete strangers and yell your lungs out. Pile into a taxi with your new found friends and end up at a 5-star hotel for breakfast as the sun rises. Obnoxiously pile up your plates with everything on offer, and charge it all to room 315 before slipping out the back door.
- Hand write an ultra-soppy card that you make yourself to an imaginary woman that you might have known for ages. Make sure you put your name and phone number on it. Go out, walk into a club or restaraunt and approach the most stunningly unbelievable waitress you can find. Hand her the card, and say 'Hi again - just wanted to say that im real sorry about the other night, I hope this card makes up for it'. Turn around and walk out, and dont look back.
Dont know - I just dont even have time to turn the TV on these days.
A work is the property of the author.
All copyright laws refer to somethimg called a "work" but not one provides a general definition. This deficiency leads to contradictions in the application of copyright laws.
For example, if the "work" in question is a book, do we mean the physical copy, the sequence of letters, the layout of a particular edition, just the plot?
If the ontology of a "work" is already problematic, what more the ownership of such work?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Find out next time, on Slashdot.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Turn and face Canada...
Depending on how far south he is from, it may already be a lost cause...
Actually they don't have any kings at the moment, just to let you know. But, the Queen rules over several kingdoms. England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Places like that. Combined they are the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
her works became governed by US copyright laws the minute she published them in the US. so it doesn't really matter where she is from, because she decided to publish here she has to follow US laws.
Correct.
No, sorry, that's wrong. The Queen has 16 different kingdoms, known as the Commonwealth Realms. The United Kingdom is just one of these, a single kingdom; the name comes from the fact that it used to be 2 kingdoms before 1801 (the Kingdoms of Ireland and of Great Britain), and before that, since 1607, 3 (Ireland, Scotland, and England), though all three were in personal union for a few hundred years. Note that Wales hasn't been a kingdom for a rather long time - about 900 years or so; it's currently a principality (which is more than can be said for Northern Ireland, Scotland, or England).
James F.
Well, TFA clearly shows something interesting : lots of graphic cards marked HDCP ready aren't.
So there is something fishy, very possibly illegal, that must be covered by a consumer protection law.
Outright lying by a corporation is punishable, as far as I am concerned.
So I propose instead we return all the Graphic Cards marked HDCP compliant directly to Nvidia/ATI, and ask for a free working replacement + inordinate amounts of money...
Any Lawyer wanting to mount a case ? I hereby patent the idea and claim 10% of the class action trial reward money.
And 2*Nvidia 7800 GTS@512Mb as a memorandum of our fight and victory 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I'd rather have two great artists and a hundred mediocres ones out there, than just one great artist. The idea that "quality as a whole will suffer" is only coherent if you're too lazy to do anything but consume media in an absolutely random fashion.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, Wikimedia servers are experiencing trouble at the moment. I believe you may have slashdotted them. I know that the Isle of Man, Falkland Islands, and the Channel Islands are crown protectorates, but beyond them and the members of the U.K. I had no idea that there were that many places that had allegience to the Queen. I assume that Australia and Canada are part of them since they are still considered to be part of the Commonwealth, but I thought they were independent countries bound to the comonwealth by treaty.
Intel: "You can't play your movies at full resolution, lol." /. : "O RLY?"
/. : "NO WAI!!!!!"
Intel: "YA RLY!"
Yeah, We'll see how long that lasts. Just like "You can't play DVD's on Linux" this too will pass.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Give that /.er a cigar. Same reason that nobody's interested in SACD or whatever they're trying to push for CDs.
I think the thing these companies are forgetting is that the move to CD/DVD was a huge upswing in convenience for the user over records/tape: size, random access... and oh, fidelity too. The next major shift to mp3/mpeg was a loss in quality, but an increase in convenience.
It's clear to me that most people will give up some quality for convenience, not the other way around. Nobody cares about quality anyway; witness the number of widescreen TVs in bars with the aspect ratio set to "make everyone look short and fat" or "stretch the edges so it looks like a fisheye lens". The aesthetics of something completely irrelevant-- the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad black bar trumps quality every time.
My non-geek friend was really PISSED when he found out that he couldn't put a legally purchased & downloaded song onto his digital music player, because they didn't support the same hoohah copy-protection protocol. I told him this is the reason I don't use [whatever crippled service he was using] - I'd rather buy the CD unencumbered for a little more. He muttered some vulgarities which I roughly translated as "not going to buy anything more from that download service".
Welcome to the new world, buddy.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
For people talking about quality of DVD vs. HD, I'll say that HD is noticeably better (and just comparing OTA HD). It's not just the resolution increase, but it's the storage capacity/bandwidth increase. One of the biggest irritants for me with DVDs are the noticeable compressions artifacts. If there were a DVD25 (25GB SD DVD) that allowed for SD DVD but with a 3x increased bitrate, that ALONE would make me happy. Now add in 2.5x resolition and ... well, hopefully that won't reintroduce artifacts :P
btw, I've heard that BR was going to use h.264 and WMV-HD while HD-DVD was going to conitnue to use MPEG2. Somewhere else, i heard that neither was going to use h.264 and that both were going to use MPEG2. Can someone confirm?
has never been cracked :)
Canada and Australia ARE independant countries. It just happens that we have the same queen/king as the UK. We have different laws, different taxes, different foreign policies, different stances on the war in Iraq, etc, etc. But we have the same monarch.
Since the monarch's role is largely ceremonial, there is nothing that ties us to England except history and good relations.
http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1600/specs.html
It mentions HDCP for the x1600 at least.
I've been watching the digital video scene since 1984. I've watched the dogttraining of the consumer the whole time; the redefinition of "copyright" as "property", the elimination of the free analog 1080i hidef TV signal and the new reign of metered digital "content" protected by hardware. The destruction of the national news networks to be replaced by corporate for-profit newsertainment. The balkanization of the national consciousness by way too many bad voices. TV won't be about education and the old raising of the spirit dreamed of by the PBS network. More like the 19th century than the 21st.
Here's the simple answer about the graphics cards: Hollywood doesn't want PC's to run DVD's. They aren't in a hurry to sync up the hardware. They want "content" (the recording you bought belongs to them, forever) output to hardware they license, which will be multi-thousand dollar entertaiment centers. They know prices will drop, but they also know tech will improve and 4K scan content will eventually be marketable, and so on forever. They want a piece of each new lump of money from hardware, and they want a steady stream of cash from IPTV "rentals".
They want a structure that can respond to rapid technological change by rewriting the rules about who owns the video/audio -- the consumer or them. No matter what changes, even direct video to the optical nerve and audio to a cochlear implant, they want a legal structure that says they own what enters your brain.
They aren't paying attention to PCs 'cause they want the damned things to just go away.
Me? I'm running Windows 2000 SP4 on a NON-DRMed box, and have a nice stack of mobos and other parts that run video just fine without their f-ing approval. I don't have to check in with MS to obtain permission to run my PC. Linux is an option, but I'm fairly sure they'll sue anyone into oblivion who reverse engineers DRM for Linux boxen.
I can see their undoing on the horizon. Eventually we'll be able to fabricate our own PC hardware, on our own mini factory machines. We'll make what we like -- unless they outlaw that as well. I assume they will, but I have hope.
In the very end, we really don't need videogames and hidef video to live a good life.
You seem to think that everyone in America is in the lower 48. When I face Canada, the island over the water is Hawaii. Well, if you go far enough, you could consider New Zealand too, and some other smaller islands around.
Learn to love Alaska
I sort of doubt this... it is easy to prove just by looking at a picture.
I have a simple 20" monitor/TV. If I play a DVD and then switch to a HD (720p or 1080i, doesn't matter), it makes a decent amount of difference...well at least I can tell. Especially in nature programs. Trees and items w/small details look noticeably clearer.
I don't think it is quite as great as from VHS to DVD on a good TV perhaps (had weird colour banding on VHS sometimes), but it is easy to tell HDTV and SDTV apart. This is from 10' away though.
Are you saying that Harry Potter is not copyrighted in the US or are you saying that you believe in Harry Potter?
I think you're a troll, either way.
Loki, it's by default. Take an intellectual property course.
Since that's how they want to play it, I'll stick to video rentals. That way, the video store buys one copy (one license fee), and that one copy gets shared by hundreds of consumers before it's replaced.
where are these places with sane copyright legislations ( that will not be shortly rewritten for corporate favors)?
Consumer resistance to change will make this a worthless endevor.
At the end of the day VHS had been mainstream for around 20 years when DVD finally started to come into the realm of everyone and their monther having a player. And the only reason for that was because you can pick them up from supermarkets for £20. Consumers will not stand another format change (let alone a format war) for another 10-15 years.
People still don't understand aspects of DVD properly, like why off region discs won't play on their machines (or why they come out in b&w if they do!). I for one don't want to be the retailer trying to explain why their shiney new box refuses to play on their display because it's not autherized hardware....
Technology is here for use to use it, not for it to limit our uses.
Every room in my house has a modded Xbox running Xbox Media Center and connected to a 600gb server full of divx and mp3. I can run anything I like from any room in the house at the click of a button. It cost me less than £50 (I love ebay) to buy and chip each box and just a couple of hours to set them up. Now here's the real trick. It's much cheaper than any comercial solution, it's got a better UI and it's got a higher quality output than virtually anything I've seen on the market. My Mum can work XBMC easier than she can the DVD player for christ sake! Centralized media and network players are the future, not cramming more bits onto a shiney disc and selling it for some ungodly amount of money.
the only true way to stop piracy is to make it teh least attractive option. How to do it? Simple... Make everything available for download at a cheap price, with no drm restrictions and in a better quality than you could find it elsewhere. If I could buy a divx movie from source for £2 with a gaurenteed fast download and high quality with no restrictions on what I use for playback then I wouldn't bother searching through torrent sites peering at the comments to figure out if the file is good quality, working and in english! Once you reach this point, everyone says the same thing: "Why am I wasting my time finding a pirate copy when I can downlaod it cheaply from source?".
RIAA & MPAA ARE YOU LISTENING? Once piracy becomes more hassle than it's worth then nobody will bother!
Ok, that's my rant done for the day.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Umm... if you're in Detroit, or anywhere north of it, you could be turning SOUTH to look at Canada... takes awhile to get to Britain if you go right from there....
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Thomas Jefferson didn't write the Constitution... he wrote the Declaration of Independance.
The Constitution was written by committee.
Yo, idiot. For the work to be under US copyright it is subject to US laws.
So the original comment - it is public domain but has been granted a licence - is correct.
1. I'll buy beers for you both if you'll bring cigars.
:)
2. I hope you're both right about this, one because I happen to agree with you, but two because I think, as we've seen before, there is a risk of backlash when the negatives of a new format outweigh the potential positives. Furthermore, my parents aren't luddites, but they've just now gotten an HDTV / home theater-type setup. They're going to laugh in the face of anyone telling them they need an upgrade. They think they're in movie-watching heaven when they sit down for movie night, and I'm inclined to agree: I only have an SDTV set, no cable, and have no intention of any sort of upgrade there in the near future*.
3. I would *not* discount fidelity in the realm of the analog -> digital transition, however. The convenience was nice, and no doubt a major driving force behind the transition. However, in the cases of both cassette tape -> CD and VHS -> DVD, there was a drastically noticeable, consumer (i.e., not just *philes noticed) observable increase in quality of playback. For most people, in most situations, next-gen-VDs aren't going to even bring that to the table, with no increase in the convenience factors -- in fact, damned inconvenient to require new componentry and Kosher, holy-watered, big-brother approved computer bits -- will (hopefully) leave this next revolution where it belongs: being shipped back to the assholes who made it.
4. Buying CDs isn't more expensive than iTunes, et al, if you order them through a club. Remember to call them for the opt-in system after fulfilling your purchasing requirements, and then they're there for you as a convenience, and you don't have to reply each month saying you don't want the crap disc they're going to send you. I've been a CD club member for years, and this system has always worked out well. And I rip what I want to whatever quality setting I want in whatever format I need. Sweet
-----
* - No luddite either; audio is a big hobby of mine.
No Mod points to spend. Just wanted to mention that the parent is cogent, succinct, and correct. I only wish that there were some way to impart this level of understanding to my family. Like many, they prefer expedience to doing what is right - reasoning that losing their rights doesn't matter if they weren't using them. In this era of unlimited communication potential, I have been unsuccessful in conveying some of these most simple truths, because in spite of the speed of our communications, the signal-to-noise ratio remains the same (or gets worse) with time. I think that the problem is that in order to turn up the signal (and reduce the noise), we would need to change ourselves, become more open, less dogmatic; we would need to be able to really look at the whole spectrum of ideas affecting a subject while suppressing any biases that we already hold. Does anyone out there have any great ideas for systems that would help to train people toward moderation, away from dogma, away from the belief that what we think is right?
I've got a 32" HDTV and an HDCP-capable DVD player which upconverts.
A 480p signal on a well-encoded DVD basically looks just as good as a 720p HD signal. In a double-blind test I could probably work out which was which given time, but I'm a picky photography enthusiast. The average person isn't going to notice any difference at all.
What's more, DVD resolution is already capable of showing limitations in the source material, such as film grain and lack of sharpness from use of wide aperture lenses. I doubt people are going to spend thousands of dollars to see film grain in higher resolution.
In fact, even though I'm picky, I consider DVD with a good upscaler entirely adequate. I wouldn't be an early adopter of Blu-Ray, even if it had no DRM; my all-region MPEG-4 capable DVD player is entirely too convenient.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I have DVD-Audio capability on my DVD player.
The problem is, I'm not going to buy DVD-Audio discs if I have to buy the same thing again for my iPod, and particularly not if they're more expensive than the already-overpriced CDs.
Hence I haven't even bothered buying the extra cables I'd need to actually listen to DVD-Audio.
And I'm someone picky enough about sound quality to use a headphone amp with my iPod, and encode with LAME --alt-preset standard. The average person is just never going to give a crap.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
No. What authors own is a copyright. That is different than owning the actual work. They don't own the words, the ideas, etc. What they own is the _temporary_ exclusive right to do certain things with them: copy, distribute, and put on public display.
When talking casually the two things can be interchanged easily and communication isn't affected greatly, but there is a difference, and it does matter in some situations.
For example, I can make a copy of a TV show on my VCR. If the show's production company literally owned it, I wouldn't be able to do so unless I had explicit permission.
And the other aspect, that it is a temporary right, is just as important. The show doesn't belong to the company. If the copyright expires, anyone can take any of those previously exclusive actions without violating the law or the company's rights. The default treatment of information in the law is for it to be in the public domain. "IP" rights carve a space out of the public domain, but only for finite scopes and durations.
Color me a dumbass. Sorry about that.
That's me talking out my ass. Sorry, and thanks for the correction.
Well, of course there's bugger-all to tie you to a country that hasn't exist for 400 years (or, if you mean what most people mean by "England", for 900 years). :-)
James F.
Whatever, you knew what I meant :)
I agree. If we can make these companies attack enough consumers they'll make consumers recognize the problem and side against them. The legal and economic footing these companies stand on can be shook if the public notices.
I think that the battle against MP3's and file trading is already getting to shakey ground for these companies which is why they're trying to back off but I don't think we should let them back out. Better to step up the challenge and get these companies caught in a war they can't possibly win.
As it is almost everybody I know is impressed I can copy their DVDs for them. This lets them make back-ups, remove annoying restrictions, etc. Nobody I've ever talked to was happy about how hard it is to use or copy DVDs. Get someone that tries buying a DVD that isn't available where they live and when they try to play it finds out it's region blocked and they are nothing short of pissed. I think that is where this whole thing is moving.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Ah, should have qualified that's NZ dollars -- less than $5000 US.
-- Your mother uses Emacs.
Thinking about it, it REALLY pisses me off that my G5 tower Mac I bought LAST SUMMER with it's dual 64 bit processors, Tiger 10.4.3, an Nvidia 5200 FX "Ultra" with 64 megs of vram and 2.5 gigs of ram will be unable to display HDCP video on my BRAND NEW Samsung LCD monitor. I would not only have to upgrade the optical drive but put in a new overkill video card (I'm not a serious gamer), and replace the perfectly good Samsung monitor which has a 8 ms response time. That's at least 600 extra dollars even though the hardware is ALREADY capable of displaying high resoltion video. Grrrrr... Fuck the intellectual property lawyers costing me hundreds of dollars to watch LEGAL high resolution video.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Think just movies are going under DRM? What about Nikon encrypting part of their RAW output? Now why would they do that? Perhaps because they can get an extented revenue stream, such as high end printing only from Nikon cameras, for example?
Many Dell 20" LCD monitor users are in the same boat. They love their sweet pivoting DVI monitors. But without HDCP support, they will never be useful as, say, a bedroom TV connected to a BluRay player or a future Comcast HD cable receiver.
"Future" HDCP DVI comcast box? They're here already. I traded in for one the day before the super bowl. And at first it didn't get along with my brand new HDCP+DVI 1080p TV. A big fat blue box that covered most of the screen with a nice annoying HDCP error message.
Turned both boxes on and off and it worked...probably just didn't like me plugging in the dvi cable while it was outputting. Although it does display static for half a second anytime I change the input to dvi, I wonder if thats just the TVs scaler changing modes or something else. (also, comcast box does component out at the same time, claims to do picture in picture, havent bothered to try yet)
I cannot see my comment so I posted it again. sorry about that
I think Class Action law suit is appropriate here. If someone can just create a page to accept donations and Slashdot can do a follow up article talking about the site. What you need some donations to start this. Since ATI/NVIDIA retail packages boast "HDCP support" that is what you SUE for. Common consumers who is going to bow down? We have numbers! You paid hundreds for the latest video card whats another 5 bucks?
Someone post create a quick web page to get owners of NVIDIA/ATI cards signed up to fight against this. If someone creates a site and gets a lawyer I am willing to donate!!!
Well, what about the various cables in the rats-nest behind the console?
Is it possible that they DVD player connected to the control box that is connected to the other boxes that ultimately are connected to the STB could be "interrogated" via the cable line?
I imagine they CAN right now interrogate and deactivate a huge swath of DVD player, bu they are fearful of the legal ramifications and the consumer blowback if, say 75,000 or 200,000 deactivated DVD players (console as well as computer-hosted) had one thing in common: remote deactivation/kill.
It's just a matter of time before they decide they have to deactivate our refrigerators, toilets and reading lamps.
Taps. Taps. Lights out. Go to sleep...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
RAM-RAM: RAM's Read-Aversion Memory.
Well, why DOES RAM have to be human-readable?
Isn't it possible to add more RAM to handle the overhead of encrypting regulary RAM?
QUICK AMD! Product Idea: RAM-RAM to the Rescue... Get there before Intel does! (Beat it out like Bam-Bam of the Flintstones: "BAM! BAM! BAM-BAM-BAM!)
And, why can't the RAM-SUSPEND routine do a series of intermittend re-encrypts? The price you pay for rimming the RAM is a RAM-job.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Content downresing is illegal in Japan till 2008 although I have no idea if that legislation will be extended. Until then, it should be possible to purchase a HD-DVD/BD player from Japan and play any movie in pure 1080i/p via component output on an HDTV. Japan will be in the same region as USA anyhow. There's a dozen shopping services for electronics on the web or one can just go over for holiday/business. Easy. So much for MPAA although
I wonder if US released movies would work in a Japanese release HD player despite regions being the same, oh well. ^_^
will simply buy the relevant dvd( I do have some morals) , download the unencumbered HiRez .torrent and watch that on my Knoppix/MythTV box. That way no chance of having a device futzed up by the natzi's.
Where in TFA does it support: "Sorry, retail graphics cards won't be able to do that; only OEM-built computers from Dell, Sony, HP and the like will have that functionality built in." ???? As far as i can tell, retail cards will ship with HDCP just as soon as the board manufacturers adopt the technology which has already been available for quite some time: "What really gets them off the hook is that NVIDIA has been offering their board manufacturing partners designs with HDCP support since May 2005."
The more I think about end to end to DRM the more troubled I get. Suppose the hardware vendors, Microsoft and Apple work it like this, every 18 months or so they announce that the current DRM has been broken by "evil haxor pirate terrorist funding pedophiles." So in order to view the "new improved" movies we are issuing you will need a new video card, new optical drive, and new monitor and you'll need to download the latest encryption key and drivers for all of the above. Or you can just buy a Dell or an entire new Mac system for 999.00 EVERY 18 months. Or in the consumer electronics realm a new home theater receiver and tv EVERY 18 MONTHS to see the latest movies and digital satelite transmissions.
While the average slash dotter might chose to upgrade their system that often for Joe consumer it's a disaster. The average person expects to get 4 or 5 years out of their p.c. and more from the tv. Yet the average consumer also wants the newest shiny toy, and to able to see thev latest movies at their highest quality.
Will the new upgrade cycle NOT be based on the capability of the hardware (the new dual core CPUs will probably easily handle the next 5 years or so of video advances) but on an artificially accelerated life cycle of DRM? If so will we stand for it? As I said in a previous post RMS's position of rejecting DRM for free software is starting to look in the long term wiser than Linus's pragmatic short term hard ware compatibility stance of allowing it in Linux.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
ramshot!
And if your child was regularly having sex with me, maybe I'd link to it's website as well.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
They just threw the gauntlet at every geek in the nation, challenging them to crack the protection. DSS protection was cracked in what, a year and a half?? And that was just a few guys. My bet is that 1 year after Blu-Ray movies become availible to the general public, the whole thing will be in shambles.
Americans -> Auschwitz
I live in Portugal and it's not very common for anyone to have anything overpriced.
All the TV's and monitors have absolutely no support for any of this protected crap.
For a very, very long time I think that trend is going to stick.
Sounds like a 10 8.5GB DVD. Not feasable.
Price per GB is just too high as of yet.
More resolution? go to the cinema. The screen is a few metters away and it's freaking huge. Sounds better than on your computer anyway...
All this kind of stuff sounds too nasty to me, and I believe that this is going to be a long battle if it even lasts.
Who has enough money to buy a new computer set anyway?
My mothers monitor is almost a decade old proly.
Mine is going on that too.
I want to buy a new one, but there is no way in hell I'm going to spend thousands of Euros on a new monitor just because it shows higher resolution content. Eventually...
The amount of money for a High Definition Optical Disk is going to be too much for anyone to care anytime soon.
This is insane.
Your post is the most compelling support for DRM that I have ever seen. And here I thought we were all self-righteous consumers who respect the rights of others, but demand just use rights when we pay for things. Little did I know that we were snivelling socialists, claiming possession of everything that anyone creates. Why should we pay anyone to do anything - all of their accomplishments belong to us already.
And for that matter, why work? Why create? Why exist?
Until today, I thought DRM was excessive, a measure taken by people with limited vision. Now that I have read this (and noted that it was modded Insightful, of all things, by multiple people), I realize that it is necessary for industries to take steps to protect themselves from crazy people who have absolutely no respect for the creativity, property, or rights of others.
Nobody who works and creates any kind of art owes you anything. You make me sick, and a little scared.
What makes Newegg a better store than Best Buy? It's an honest question, as I'm not familiar with Newegg. I see that Newegg is online only, which to me is a disadvantage since I like the immediate satisfaction of driving down to a store and picking up my item, even if it means a few more dollars. Also, the thing with online stores is that when I *do* shop online, I generally search for the best price, instead of sticking to a particular store.
DRM...it hurts beyond making PCs into $2000 movie players. My state's PDF tax form downloads were 'encrypted.' It fuckin' broke ghostscript (gee, pretty much all UNIX/Linux/BSD print filters are ghostscript these days). I COULDN'T PRINT MY OWN DAMN TAX FORMS! WTF?
Pirates don't need to break the protection -- they can produce a bit-for-bit copy.
But nevertheless, pirates *will* break the protection, and then they current regime, where a copy is exactly as good as the original will be replaced by the regime of the future: where they copy is significantly *better* than the original.
This is already the case with CDs. I bougth the original of Bertine Zetlitz new CD. It wouldn't rip nicely to play in my mp3-player. It doesn't work in my laptop, nor work-computer, nor in the car-stereo.
I returned it. Bougth a pirated version on a market in Poland instead: It works perfectly and has *none* of the issues the original has.
Way to go guys ! Punish the honest customers and give the pirates *another* advantage, now they're not only cheaper: they're *BETTER* too.
... HDCP-enabled cards for the retail market yet. ... probably because they want to sell one design around the world, and they think that not all parts of the world will require HDCP in the same way that the US will, so they're hanging back from producing US-only designs.
... I'm contemplating having to get something newer than my VooDoo3, because the playback of the DVDs that I author from my own video footage, is pretty rough without hardware MPEG decoding. That's the sort of thing that will be scareing the video and TV manufacturers shitless.
They also probably fear getting caught up in someone else's train-wreck (DRM in general) and getting the blame for it.
Me
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
HDCP supports the GPU
ATI said that their chips will do something that they will not. People bought ATI products with the understanding that they are HDCP compliant when they are not. That has caused substantial damages that the government is not going to fix. Our checks-and-balance system in this country is supposed to be headed up by the government. When politicians allows large corporations to do basically anything they want, then it is up to the court system and the lawyers to keep them honest. Please write to me at ln@kbklawyers.com if you feel like I do that corporations have to be held accountable for their representations and their misrepresentations.