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."

Comments

Wow

[ipooptoomuch]

So is this saying that pirating the movie will yield a higher quality then buying it?

This has often been true.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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

It IS a "make it suck" flag

[Moraelin]

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.