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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.
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.
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..."
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?
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
Everything is hackable. I don't know WTF the manufacturers are thinking, this shit will be cracked as soon as somebody actually makes a board that supports it (and HD-DVD/BluRay arrive). I'm assuming they will attempt to use the DMCA against any cracks, but our friendly overseas comrades will no doubt help us out.
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?
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.
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.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
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?
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make install -not war
First of all, it's not stealing, it's copyright infringment. Calling it stealing plays right into their hands. Don't do it.
Second, they don't need actual copyright infringment to occur; they just need the appearance of it, along with charts showing "lost sales" and cash for the lobbyists.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
True, but if you just spent $300 or more on a brand new video card, expecting it to support HDCP (because the spec sheet says so!) and it turns out you'll have to buy a newer new video card that actually supports it, you've just wasted $300.
That's the problem, and the source for the next big class action lawsuit.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Tell me, how's even DVD Jon supposed to circumvent encryption that's embedded in the hardware?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Also, Sony's AC3 format comes to mind. Say hello to HDDVD
Sigh.
AC3 is the technical name for Dolby Digital. You are probably thinking of ATRAC.
HD-DVD is using the exact same protection standard as Blu-Ray, being the AACS system. HD-DVD will also require the same display encryption system to operate as Blu-Ray, so if you don't have HDCP, you won't be able to use an unhacked system. Both formats pretty much support the same sets of audio and video CODECs too.
As much as I can gather, BluRay and HD-DVD are similar in so many ways that the the most significant difference between them are in the optics and the physical media. In fact, they both use the same laser wavelength. There are relatively minor things such as the control language, and HD-DVD is requiring managed copy when Blu-Ray isn't, but my main point is that they aren't anywhere nearly as different as people think.
Blu-Ray isn't under Sony's exclusive control either. All but two of Japan's electronics makers collaborated on the hardware format, it is a consortium that included names like Pioneer and Matsushita (JVC & Panasonic) as well. I don't understand why people fixate on BluRay as if it is Sony's format, they should be given credit for industry collaboration here, but I suppose this is one of those "bash anything touched by Sony" things. In this case, it is actually NEC and Toshiba that thought they should make their own alternative format, well after the BluRay consortium announced a functioning optical standard. Indications I've heard have it that NEC/Toshiba's format was accepted only because of shady politiking of the DVD consortium.
our friendly overseas comrades will no doubt help us out.
Until their laws are "harmonised" with those of the US (eg. see the Australia/US free trade agreement).
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!
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"?
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.
How many days will it take before someone files a class-action lawsuit?
Are you suggesting that people overseas are more free than us Americans? How the fuck can that be? Oh my world is fucking shattered.
Welcome to the America... we tell your country what to do, we own your nations workforce, we run the planet... we talk about freedom but we really just want to control all of you and our own people.
America... the great lie.
Obviously, it would be slightly more complicated than that, but I don't see any problem in principle. Of course, now MS are going to make Vista refuse to hibernate if Treacherous Computing applications are running... *rolls eyes*
Pirate Party UK
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
if by "lost sales" you meant "sales didn't rise as much as we expected"
I swear, those **AA companies are their own worst enemies. All the big movies are sequels, and all the new bands are variations on a theme.
They've gotten too addicted to the "blockbuster" model of business and it has been slowly failing them.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
Don't forget, there's a lot of students with easy access to multimillion dollar equipment, this is, essentially, how the xbox got hacked (a couple of the times).
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
What I dont get is how is this possible from the cryptographic point of view. The contents of the disk is encrypted with a key, which has to be only done once, otherwise you would need to duplicate the contents on the disk as many times as you have keys. So, the way I understand it, there is a master key somewhere here, which is then doubly encrypted via a set of device/vendor unique keys. Once you crack one of those, you get the master key for all the HD disks produced so far. All the goons can do is to change the master key for all future releases and then invalidate the particular device/vendor key. But that does not get them all their previous contents back, only locks the new products, until another device key gets cracked and the new master is out. Rinse, repeat.
The only way I can see this working for the goons is to demand that each device continuously downloads new keys from their center, and have a unique per-device keys + unique per disk keys. I.e. each disk having its own key, so that a break of one will not affect any other. But this means that no consumer device can ever work off-line.
I am sure that this is the long term plan, but I do see a number of opportunities to at least run interference and foul things up for them in the short term. That is of course not a solution, but something to keep in mind as a part of a strategy, as driving their costs into stratosphere can only help.
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
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
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."
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.
Interesting thought.
I'm waiting for what anyone informed has to say about this suggestion as well.
I wonder what would happen if this was done on a large scale; create a "poison pill" DVD that contained a large number of garbage keys with a date set some time in the future (so that its keys would be preferred over other DVDs' that you might insert later), and you could just fill up your player's key catalog and prevent it from loading any new ones.
It seems too obvious an attack, though. I assume there's something that keeps you from trivially adding new keys to the list in the player.
However, I wonder if disabling the WRITE ability of the EPROMs or whatever they use to store the keys in the player hardware wouldn't become a popular hack.
I'm not sure that the hack for HDCP is going to come from some 'lone wolf' like DVD Jon. I think it's more likely that it'll come from some nameless Chinese electrical engineer, working for some factory that wants to get into the mod-chip business. That's unless the hardware is completely potted under an inch of epoxy.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Of course you are correct in your point that they didnt take off, or they have not yet. Although I doubt they will take off soon (SACD), I believe they *will* in the near future as they have better sound quality than CDs and consequently than any kind of MP3. If you believe you can not distinguish between a normal CD sound and a SACD sound you just have to wait until you listen to one of those.
That's just the thing, though--moving from audio tape to CD was a no brainer... sure, the quality was better, but the CD also brought more to the table than that: random access. It was far more convenient to use a CD which let you skip to the next song, or easily replay a track, instead of having to rewind and fast forward. People later took a step BACK from CD quality audio, to listen to lower quality MP3s because they're "good enough" and far more convenient than CDs are, in the sense that you can bring ALOT more music with you in ALOT less space.
Aside from audiophiles, few people really care about the technical quality of the playback medium--hell, most people don't even seem to care about the quality of the music! Listening to $BOYBAND at a thousand times the resolution is like putting lipstick on a pig.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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.