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High-Quality HD Content Can't Easily Be Played by Vista
DaMan1970 writes "Content protection features in Windows Vista from Microsoft are preventing customers from playing high-quality HD audio/video & harming system performance. Vista requires premium content like HD movies to be degraded in quality when it is sent to high-quality outputs, like DVI. Users will see status codes that say 'graphics OPM resolution too high'. There are ways to bypass the Windows Vista protection by encoding the movies using alternative codecs like X264, or DiVX, which are in fact more effective sometimes then Windows own WMV codec. These codecs are quite common on HD video Bittorrent sites, or Newsgroups."
So is this saying that pirating the movie will yield a higher quality then buying it?
Say what you want, but these are much requested features from Microsoft's customer base. What is causing the confusion is that these wanting-to-see-HD-content people mistakenly think that they are Microsoft customers. They are Microsoft's consumers, all of whom have accepted the Windows EULA, and so might as well stop complaining.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Vista is supposed to be a very feature-rich OS. This hinders performance greatly if you wanted to watch some HD-DVDs. You now cannot even encode your own videos in WMV (HD) unless you don't mind the down-scaling. I still don't have Vista myself, but this would be another reason, albeit a small one currently, to not get it. The x264 codec is kick-ass codec for viewing high-res videos. I am betting Microsoft will release a patch or update early 2008 to remove this said "feature".
Vista will down-res DRM protected content that it is required to down-res. I hate it, you hate it, we all hate it - but the alternative is for it to not be able to play that content at all. The content that is being down-res'd is content that you simply can't play on any system without down-resing or 'breaking the law'.
Yes, the laws are rediculous - going so far as to allow, for example, resampled and up-resed DVD (normal) playback over VGA but not over component despite the fact that both connections are analog and have the same level of security (i.e. none). The only difference is that VGA is viewed as a PC monitor connection and HDMI is viewed as a TV connection.
This issue of course pre-dates the current concern for BluRay and HD-DVD playback which require a secure path to the display for full res playback. When you find another OS that can legally playback these formats over an insecure channel in full res then you can start complaining about Vista, but until you do you should restrict your complaints in this area to the media cartel that is creating these rules and the government that supports and enforces this type of behavior.
Or you can just accept, as I have, that the winner of the BluRay vs. HD-DVD war will actually be downloaded movies and normal DVDs and ignore any weird playback behaviors in BluRay and HD-DVD.
Not necessarily with quality -- I admit, some of the pirated stuff is pretty bad. But in terms of overall experience, piracy wins almost every time.
Let's take a few examples...
Movies (standard-def)
Buying a DVD outright is too expensive. I watch a movie once, maybe twice, then I'm done. It's also not convenient -- either I have to drive to a store, or I order online and wait days for it to be shipped.
Renting is too inconvenient, for the same reasons as above. Netflix comes close, but lacks instant gratification.
Both of the above deal with physical discs, which can scratch, break, etc. If it's a rental, it might come that way, and I have to wait for another one to ship. Also, many discs feature copy protection above and beyond CSS, most of which is designed to make the disc look corrupted to a ripping program -- but that can prevent me from playing it properly, even in a dedicated DVD player.
There are some other half-assed attempts, like the iTunes Music Store and Amazon Unbox, all of which require me to run proprietary, Windows-only software to make the purchase, and usually gives me a DRM'd file, which I must play on proprietary, Windows-only software. Ok, iTunes works on a Mac -- except I'm on Linux, so that's no help.
So, piracy wins on almost all counts -- I can get near-instant gratification, it's convenient, I can do it entirely with open source software (KTorrent to download, mplayer to watch), and it's cheap enough that I often download things I'm not sure I'd want to spend money on -- and sometimes I enjoy them, and sometimes I don't.
The only thing piracy loses on, currently, is that rentals give me full DVD quality in the time it takes to drive to the store. It can take several days to download an ISO at that quality, with all the extra features. But that's only a matter of time and bandwidth -- and even when I do rent a physical disc, I often rip it immediately, so that I can take the movie back and watch it whenever I have the time.
There is actually one other thing -- the movie theater itself. I do actually pay to see good movies in the theater, when they come out, even though I could probably download them a few days before they come out.
Movies (high-def)
This is a no-brainer: I currently can neither rent nor buy, because my monitor doesn't support HDCP, I don't have a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive, and neither is sufficiently cracked for me to just pop in a disc and play it on Linux, on the monitor I currently own.
The best bet would be something like iTunes or Amazon Unbox, which suffers from all the same proprietary issues -- assuming they even have high-def content -- plus I may run into the HDCP issue.
However, my Internet connection and my hard disk can both handle a 5 gig or so download of an h.264-encoded 720p movie -- which still looks damned good.
This is a case where I do actually want to be a good consumer, but can't. I'd like to buy the Serenity HD-DVD, but that would require me to buy either an HDTV and an HD-DVD player or a new monitor, new video card, and an HD-DVD drive, all of which is prohibitively expensive -- especially considering my current monitor is somewhere between 720p and 1080p (it's 1600x1200) and works fine, so I'd be buying a new monitor for no good reason.
TV shows
Well, TV itself (cable, satellite, etc) just sucks. It's not enough to interrupt you every 5-10 minutes with ads, they have now started pushing an ad into the middle of a show -- taking over a full quarter of your screen with an animated ad, with a little bit of sound to go with it. You're also required to buy channels in bundles, which limits choice -- if you pick and choose the channels you want, it may cost more than just buying one bundle that has them all -- but it will cost even more if your channels don't happen to all be in the same bundle.
Renting them sort of works. The frustrating thing there is, it makes sense to rent them one DVD at a time, so you can wa
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Another article on what Vista doesn't do.... While I don't use any MS "operating system" products, if you feel you 'need to', perhaps MPlayer from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ is your answer. The Windoz pre-compiled port is incomplete but people I know, that use Windows, pick MPlayer. (In Europe, the media player is not normally bundled as its seen as an anti-trust issue.) If the 'DRM' is only in the media player, this should work and its "free". It might be a hack to get Vista to accept it though. Please send them a few bucks if you use a pre-compiled version, but they'd probably prefer someone to complete the port over money. The entire source tree and API is also available from the MP site and mirrors.
BillSF
PS: I use a EUR 30,-- ATI Radeon RV370 X550 which should be all the video card you need. $1000 is more than I pay for an entire dual-core amd64/3000MHz (2800MHz in 64bit mode) system with 4G of RAM and two 500G hard drives!
Agreed. Vista handles hi-def transport streams and mpeg HD just as well as MCE2005 did. No problems at all. More than likely some people are having trouble setting their resolutions to match their TV. That was the same problem people had with MCE2005 so nothing new here. They just need to go on support forums or as said above get a decent HDMI card and not rely on crappy onboard video to watch Hidef with! It's not Vista this one I'm afraid! I imagine it's just as much fun as trying to get your Linux box running http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/mythhd.php - a similar experience to getting your TV working under MCE2005. Much easier now with Vista and an HDMI card and a HDTV. Before now you were heavliy reliant on using Powerstrip (a great program for the job but not for non-techies. The day of Media Centers being completely plug and play for home users is still a little way off assuming they want to do more than just listen to music on it. We're getting there though :)
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
It _is_ a "make it suck" flag, or rather "make it suck if any component along the chain isn't DRM'ed and encrypted." The MPAA and RIAA are so caught in the whole "auugh, evil pirates are copying our content and causing us billions!" hysteria, that, well, they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot than let the spec have any place where someone could record/rip their precious content.
The difference between plain DVI and encrypted DVI (a.k.a., HDMI) is largely one created by the DMCA:
1. with DVI, you could, at least theoretically, make a video capture card with a DVI _input_ connector, and just rip the digital content that way. Basically the computer would think you're outputting to a TFT monitor, when in fact you're getting to record the digital output stream in all its quality.
2. with HDMI, well, you could do the exact same, you just have to fake the authentication and include the decryption. Which isn't impossible by any reckoning.
However,
1. Since DVI it doesn't include any copy protection, it doesn't count as circumventing it under the DMCA.
2. Since HDMI does, it does. So they could raid anyone selling such cards or adapters, and demonize anyone who bought one.
However the bottomline at the moment is that
A) I don't know of any actual such devices at the moment, and
B) If you're going to decrypt it anyway, you might as well decrypt the DVD, but
C) most people have DVI or VGA connectors on their monitors, while virtually noone has a HDMI monitor or graphics card.
So for the sake of protecting against a theoretical threat, they are making it suck for a bunch of legitimate customers. Better yet, it makes it actually more rewarding to download a ripped copy than to buy a legit one.
Actually, AFAIK it's even more funny than that. They try to detect fluctuations too, so you can't snoop on the stream in transit. So all it takes is a wobbly monitor to get your stream downgraded even if you _do_ have HDMI.
At any rate, much as I don't like MS, I dunno if I'd blame MS here, other than for bending over. If the MPAA demands that kind of stupidity, either you comply, or you get to play no HD videos on that computer. So MS likely faced the lose-lose choice of either they implement that idiocy, or they get to tell some hundreds of millions of potential customers that Vista doesn't play HD media at all. You can probably see how the latter is a faster suicide.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Look, I'm no DRM lover and Microsoft isn't my fave but WTF is with this guy? Take an HD-DVD, decode it, play it back. Wow, surprise it PLAYS! In fact it plays at full resolution. According to this guy it won't and if it does it will look like it's being played on an old tube TV - except it doesn't. The very first guy to break HD-DVD did it because his system wasn't DRM compliant and refused to play his legally purchased media - as documented on Doom9 months ago. Gee, remove the DRM and it worked fine and still this guy keeps insisting that Vista won't play back high quality video. I call Bullshit! $100 dollar video cards outperforming $900 video cards? Is no one fact checking this guy? Odd, I know folks who have been running Vista, 64bit at that, who haven't seen ANY of the issues that this guy bitches and moans about. These folks DL HD content and play it with zero issues but to hear this guy that's simply not possible - what's he smoking?
8 8747
Has anyone who's shot HD video with a camcorder seen the errors he's claiming? Tracked them down? What consumer camcorder supports ICT? Why in this world would it support ICT? ICT is what tells Vista and other devices to protect apparently and if it's not turned on Vista doesn't do anything. Where this guy got the idea that Vista would arbitrarily protect video just because it's a high rez is beyond me. If that were the case wouldn't it also try to protect all of the other various CODECS out there?
Some discussions on AVS about this -> http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=8
BTW how come when I search this mystery error message about OPM resolution being too high I get a zillion hits on his paper but nothing from users screaming from the rooftops? Does it strike anyone else as weird that he seems to be the ONLY one complaining about this? If it's such an issue then finding users screaming shouldn't be a problem. Seems like every other bizarre error I've entered into Google has found others with the problem so why not this error?
As much as it is fun to bash Microsoft this guy doesn't even pass the giggle test....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I'm always impressed by the enthusaism of Slashdot that leads to people composing the lyrics to mocking songs before actually trying the stuff :). But for the rest of us nerds who like to try stuff, I've got a couple of Creative Commons licensed HD WMV clips I've made that play back nicely in Vista over VGA at full resolution. This should be a clear refutation of the FA.
p --2-mbps/p le/
720p @ 2 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-720
1080p @ 10 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-sam
Note that the 1080p clip was designed for Xbox 360 playback, so it'll need a pretty beefy PC for playback.
Also, note the current VLC release doesn't play these back correctly, alas (I think a problem with DQuant or B-frames). They're fully VC-1 spec compliant; maybe they can use these clips for debugging.
My video compression blog