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Next-Gen DVD Players to Rely on HDMI?
RX8 writes "For those thinking about upgrading to either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD when they become available, you may want to think again. According to Designtechnica, the next-generation players will not support 1080i or 1080P and quite possibly not even 720P using the component video connection, it will have to use HDMI. Why? Because of copyright enforcement. Hollywood wants these new players to get rid of component video all together. So if you have an HDTV and want to use these new players, chances are you are out of luck. Neither the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD camps are officially saying anything about this yet, but early players are only showing these high resolutions using the HDMI connection."
What are these copyright protection schemes trying to accomplish? ... 99% of consumers *don't* copy their DVDs, 99% of consumers *don't* upload their DVDs to the internet ... But do you know who this hardware will affect? 99% of consumers.
The last 1% of consumers who do backup / upload will continue to do so regardless of the protection. All it takes is a single producer to have a accidental backdoor (see X-Box exploits via a game).
Further more why are they protecting the extra quality so vigorously? From what I've seen you have get non-HD pictures without any kind of protection, but for HD you need all this crazy stuff... But who is crazy enough to upload a full quality HD movie on the 'net?
I think the copyright holders are going to KILL psychical media far faster than it otherwise would and push consumers towards platforms like iTunes for their video.
This article would have been better titled: "Next-Gen DVD Formats Will Flop" because that is exactly what is going to happen. They've got a small market of people willing to replace all of their gear as it is, and now they have introduced compatibility problems on purpose with these inane restrictions. Nevermind the fact that they've got two completely incompatible formats, one of which is guaranteed to fail. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. The word of mouth on these things will be how "so-and-so spent gobs of money and it didn't work".
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
3. You realize that after you buy both machines and even though you have a TV with HDMI, that it only has 1 HDMI port, and you have to switch the players back and forth every time you want to play a disc of a different format.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No, the serious pirates can for example buy "magic box" from countries outside of DMCA/EUCD reach, that will decrypt HDMI signal using the weaknesses found in the HDCP before it even was implemented in a single device.
It will be just like someone at Ars Technica wrote: your HD player sometimes won't play your legal HD content on your computer or HDTV. But it will always play illegaly downloaded HD content from the Internet -- talk about shooting yourself in a foot.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162