Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Playback Under XP

An anonymous reader writes "In the last few weeks the first HD-DVD and Blu-Ray drives for PCs have slowly trickled onto the market. Up to now, it has not been clear what system requirements you need to actually be able to play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. The operating system was the main cause of concern; many rumors cropped up that the new generation of video discs would not work under Windows XP. Hardware.Info put the question to Cyberlink, the company behind Power DVD, if the lack of a protected videopath in Windows XP would make it impossible to enable HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback. They have answered the questions, and provide a complete checklist of what you need to play Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies in HD resolutions on your home PC."

Comments

DRM, just say no!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bluraysucks.com/

Re:What you need to watch HD-DVD

[gEvil (beta)]

What is a new HD DVD set top box going to look like, a cray supercomputer?

Nope. It's going to look like a 2.5GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and a USB card running Red Hat.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[jmorris42]

> Personally I hope that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD _never_ get cracked, or at least if they do it's never ported to Windows in an easy to
> use fashion. It's hard to think of any other way to get the formats dropped faster.

You mean like DVD was dropped? Nope, once they commit billions to pushing a format that have to follow through. At least once it hits a critical mass. If the crack doesn't appear until after millions of players are fielded and thousands of titles are released they are stuck.

Since Vista dropped the requirement for TPCM we have all known the next gen DVD formats were going to get cracked. As soon as a software based player is available it is toast. And I'll tell ya something else. Mplayer won't need a dual core CPU and a 256MB video card for playback either.

Regular DVDs could be played back with a 1X DVD drive, a Pentium 90 and a video card with hardware scaling and color space conversion (i.e. xv support). A little back of the envelope math tells me a fast single core Intel or AMD cpu is more than enough. If your video card can do scaled video and colorspace on 1920x1080 windows you should be in the ballpark. If you have XvMC support you should be golden. HD video isn't THAT many more bits or pixels per second, despite what the marketing would have you believe.

Besides, I still don't understand your thinking. If it isn't cracked I ain't buying in. Didn't buy DVD until DVD Jon make it usable. So if this stuff ain't cracked it can all rot in hell for all I care.

Jon says he will

[in2mind]

Does anyone know if the DRM/encryption in BD/HD has been cracked yet? Is DVD Jon working hard on this

AFAIK Not yet. But DVD Jon has said in his blog that he will. check his site

http://nanocrew.net/2006/01/08/deaacscom/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060116-5989 .html

Re:What you need to watch HD-DVD

[benwaggoner]

Plus a bunch of DSPs, including a hardware video decoder.

This is NOT something that's going to "just work" on a P4M computer!

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[indil]

Too late. High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (the Blu-ray and HD-DVD DRM) was broken years before it was ever put on the market. As expected, the industry has pulled the rug out from under itself by using a custom and unproven (and incidently, unsecure) encryption algorithm. Apparently, they had a requirement to keep the hardware gate count <= 10,000. According to the cryptanalysis, the following are possible for HDCP-compliant devices:

• Eavesdropping on any data
• Cloning any device with only their public key
• Avoiding any blacklist on devices
• Creating new device keyvectors

And all you need to do that are 40 devices. You can extract their keys and quickly calculate the master key, which can then be used to circumvent the DRM.

From the paper:

An attacker can reverse engineer 40 different HDCP video software utilities, he can break open 40 devices and extract the keys via reverse engineering, or he can simply license the keys from the trusted center. According to the HDCP License Agreement, device manufacturers can buy 10000 key pairs for $16000. Given these 40 spanning keys, the master secret can be recovered in seconds. So in essence, the trusted authority sells a large portion of its master secret to every HDCP licensee. With the master secret in hand, one can eavesdrop on all device communications, spoof any device, and clone any device, all in real time. One can produce a device that, by parroting back the KSVs of its peers, cannot be disabled by any blacklist. With a reasonable amount of computation, an attacker can also produce new device keys not on any key revocation list.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[benwaggoner]

Well, many of us will mainly be watching the movie and main audio at any given time, but a vendor hardly would go to market with a player that didn't support big features of the disc (well, Blu-ray lets you do that by having a couple of different profiles, but not HD DVD). That'd be like having a DVD player that didn't support subtitles. To get a HD DVD logo for a player, you need to support the interactive features.

I gather you haven't seen any of the IME (In Movie Experience) titles. For example, on Bourne Supremacy, on the fly you can have a video commentary track, where the director or producer will pop up as a picture-in-picture to give a face to the narration. Lots of very cool things along these lines will be coming in later titles, and its stuff you'd want to be able to access. And we're talking real-world titles - there are clearly the bits available to do it.

Also, HD DVD absoutely mixes multiple audo sources in real-time, and this is used in real titles. They were required to be premixed on DVD, but not on HD DVD. This is a good thing, since you don't have to waste bits on doing the base audio when doing commentary tracks. This is also why audio decoding is moving out of recievers into the players, and the players output mixed PCM over HDMI as the optimum output mode.

You're dramatically underestimating the load of rich media playback, and overestimating the load of decryption. And I'm not aware of any software players that'll be doing any sort of reencryption in software, or why that would be needed.

I imagine free players like VLC will eventually support playback of non-AACS HD DVD discs. But they'll have similar decoder requirements. We're definitely talking about using GPU compositing, GPU codec decode assist, etcetera.

And we're not even talking about Blu-ray, which has higher max codec complexity, plus it has to run a Java VM and another encryption layer...

HDCP not a requirement!

[benwaggoner]

It'll play HD movies just fine.

There is a technology called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that content publishers could turn on (but haven't) that'd reduce your output resolution to 940x540 if using a non HDCP output. But given how many players and sets there are out there that don't support it, all the released HD DVD titles don't use this, and will allow you to use every pixel of your current display.