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Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Playback Under XP

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sooper-high-def dept.

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."

6 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. What you need to watch HD-DVD by slightcrazed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A shit-load of cash and a bunch of new hardware, apparently. Seriously, I need a DUAL CORE CPU just to watch a fricken HD DVD? Are you serious? What is a new HD DVD set top box going to look like, a cray supercomputer?

    1. Re:What you need to watch HD-DVD by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      This guy's the limit!
  2. What a deal! by shawnmchorse · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would only need to purchase a whole new computer, video card, and monitor to support playback of movies in somewhat higher resolution. Hold me back...:p Do they really think that introducing new hurdles like HDCP and a "secure video path" to be able to watch this stuff will encourage people to buy and actually use it? Or do they just not care?

    1. Re:What a deal! by winnabago · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hell, my computer can't even run the diagnostic utility that supposedly tells me how deficient I am. Guess my answer is "no".

      --
      Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
  3. Surely no-one's going to buy a bluray... by niceone · · Score: 5, Funny

    .. after it just killed that aussie TV guy?!

    --
    ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
  4. Re:1 goat, 1 long knife by indil · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.