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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."
I'm trying to reply to other posts but /. isn't letting me. The article states that any HD mvie/song/whatever that relies on (Intel's) HD Content Protection in hardware will be degraded by the system when that hardware feature is not present. The article mentions video card, but I'm guessing probably sound card and maybe the optical drive itself have to support HDCP. I have problems now when I try to play some DVDs I bought through my computer. Windows pops up some kind of error message about being unable to determine copyright something or other. This is more of the same. Or think of it like the old Macrovision method that made it harder to dub VHS tapes.
It's actually worse than that macrovision method. In that case you could still watch it on your TV, just any copy you made was crappy. In this case, Vista degrades the image at the DVI output. My monitor right now is connected by DVI. Do Microsoft and "Hollywood" expect that we'll be playing things other than physical HD media on our computers? Because I think a lot of that will be handled by external players or set top boxes of some kind for your TV. Streaming or net-delivered movies and TV? I guess that's growing.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
(summary) "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 Kb>then Windows own WMV codec."
I normally let these slide, but the than/then confusion gets to me more than the their/there/they're mix ups. Mabye it is the fact that I pronounce their/there/they're the same, but than/then differently? I hit the word when reading and my brain pukes and I have to re-read the sentence to see what I may have missed. Why is this so confusing and hard to get right?
Maybe I'll have to get all my stories read to me so I can just chalk it up to accent/pronunciation. Offtopic, but some of the samples on that site are hillarious...