Microsoft, Chip Makers Working On Hardware DRM For Windows 10 PCs

writertype writes: Last month, Microsoft began talking about PlayReady 3.0, which adds hardware DRM to secure 4K movies. Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all building it in, according to Microsoft. "Older generations of PCs used software-based DRM technology. The new hardware-based technology will know who you are, what rights your PC has, and won’t ever allow your PC to unlock the content so it can be ripped. ... Unfortunately, it looks like the advent of PlayReady 3.0 could leave older PCs in the lurch. Previous PlayReady technology secured content up to 1080p resolution using software DRM—and that could be the maximum resolution for older PCs without PlayReady 3.0." Years back, a number of people got upset when Hollywood talked about locking down "our content." It looks like we may be facing it again for 4K video.

Comments

This never works

[HBI]

Whatever they design, it'll be broken fairly easily and circumvented just like DVD and Blu-ray and every other DRM format. This is just keeping the plebs from making easy copies.

Re:This never works

[rudy_wayne]

It will either be cracked within a week, or, it will prevent 4k content form becoming popular.

Re:This never works

[BitterOak]

Whatever they design, it'll be broken fairly easily and circumvented just like DVD and Blu-ray and every other DRM format. This is just keeping the plebs from making easy copies.

"Keeping the plebs from making easy copies" would be a huge victory for the movie industry. There will always be some piracy, but the piracy the Industry fears most is that which occurs solely in the home, without the use of file sharing sites, cause it is ultimately the hardest to police.

Re:This never works

[HBI]

Then also, one has to wonder why anyone cares about 4k content. Sure, it's prettier, but is it enough better looking than a 1080p Blu-ray to make it worthwhile to obtain?

My bet is "no".

Re:This never works

[CohibaVancouver]

the piracy the Industry fears most is that which occurs solely in the home, without the use of file sharing sites, cause it is ultimately the hardest to police.

I find this hard to believe. If I buy Big Hero 6 on DVD and then rip it so my kid can watch it on my tablet I can't imagine the industry would care that much - Certainly much less than if if I didn't buy the DVD and instead just torrented it.

Re:This never works

[harvey the nerd]

4k is pretty but I can live without it. Besides, if they keep this up, asia will pass them by sooner or later.`

Re:This never works

[mattventura]

It wouldn't do much. DRM circumvention is generally done by someone who actually knows what they're doing, and then the DRM-free version is posted for all to easily enjoy.

That being said the DRM will probably still be a joke.

Re:This never works

[mlts]

I wouldn't say it will be cracked in a week. The latest gen consoles don't even have a single crack or mod in place, much less an actual break, and with hardware DRM, it will be the same thing.

However, what will kill it is that DVDs, streaming, and Blu-Ray is "good enough". If people realize that their UHD content only can play on PlayReady hardware using only PlayReady monitors, cables, and other items... they will give it the same treatment as they did DIVX players and just not bother to buy it.

In fact, it might even slow down PC sales (which are stagnant already) if some misguided, false rumor gets around that the latest DRM spies on you or lets malware on your system. There was a lot of FUD about Secure UEFI booting... just wait until people encounter hardware DRM and cannot play their new 4k content.

Then there is bandwidth. 4K content is great... but bandwidth in a lot of places just can't handle it, so people will not be streaming it for the most part.

Re:This never works

[jedidiah]

Keeping the plebs from copying their own stuff doesn't do anything but make paid for content less useful than the pirated stuff that someone else went to the trouble to liberate. And it only takes one. Past that point, all of the rubes can make extra copies as easy as if the original media had no DRM to begin with.

Re: This never works

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you are in their sights as well. The end goal is to get compensation for every separate ingestion of content. No first sale doctrine, entertainment as a service.

Re:This never works

[JaredOfEuropa]

Exactly. Why buy a locked down 4k bluray, when the Pirate Bay has a free copy that will play where I want when I want. I'll pay for content but not for digital restrictions added on.

Re:This never works

[Megane]

I came to say roughly the same thing. 4K resolution is absolutely overkill for video. Sitting six feet away from a 37" 1080p TV set to 720p in Windows (otherwise I can't even read the small text), I can watch a 480p video without feeling like I'm losing anything. I still don't have Blu-Ray, aside from a BD reader drive that a friend gave me because he wasn't using it. I put it on an Ubuntu box and have not even been able yet to play that Talledega Nights movie that was one of the earliest releases (I got it real cheap at a thrift store, it's my only BD disc at all).

Re:This never works

[g0bshiTe]

The latest gen consoles don't even have a single crack or mod in place, much less an actual break

http://wccftech.com/hackers-break-ps4-firmware-176-webkit-exploit/

http://www.kdramastars.com/articles/71455/20150129/xbox-one-jailbreak-jtag.htm

http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/forums/xbox-one-modding.463/

Re:This never works

[itzly]

The latest gen consoles don't even have a single crack or mod in place, much less an actual break, and with hardware DRM, it will be the same thing.

A crucial difference is that a movie is read only. There's no interaction. So, all it takes it playing the stream, and finding the weak spot where it can be grabbed, for instance by hooking up special hardware to the LCD panel.

Re:This never works

[AnotherBlackHat]

Just checked a torrent site for Game of Thrones S05E01

Res:624x352, Size:424 MB, Seeds:8622, Leeches:399
Res:720p, Size:1013 MB, Seeds:6849, Leeches:643
Res:1080p, Size:2.66 GB, Seeds:2181, Leeches:171

So it looks like about 10% want 1080p, 40% want 720p, and the remaining 50% are fine with 352p
From that, I'd guess 80% of the market can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p.

But the main takeaway is that most care more about the story than they do about resolution - the acting isn't any better at 1080p.

Re:This never works

[PRMan]

"Was this hack always an inevitability? Perhaps not. Fail0verflow claims it only started to work on the PS3 system when Sony made the decision to disable the machine's Other OS functionality."

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2011/jan/07/playstation-3-hack-ps3

It takes a long time when nobody's trying. As soon as Sony removed OtherOS, it only took a few weeks.

Re:This never works

[Anonymous Coward]

https://d18oqavmcmo3u.cloudfront.net/resolution_chart.html is one example of how the high resolutions aren't worth it. There are many more as well. There is a reason, other than limited shelf space, as to why TV stores and makers all want you to see their stuff close up.

Re:This never works

[ckatko]

Congratulations, you now know you need glasses.

I went from using my 23" 1080p screen to a 40" screen at 1080p and it's blindly low DPI. You can see the damn ClearType subpixel rendering at a few feet away.

Re:This never works

[vanyel]

I vote on the latter - even now, with an 8' projection screen, I often select 720P instead of 1080 because the file sizes are much smaller and the visual difference is negligible. 4K media may be worth it on a 10m screen, but not at home.

Re:This never works

[realilskater]

For many it is the file size not the resolution that determines which one they will download.

Re:This never works

[Kjella]

He shouldn't have said in the home - probably more the school yard and campus. We used to pirate stuff on floppy discs and later burned CD-Rs with MP3s. Before online activation was possible as a requirement you could just install as many times on as many PCs as you wanted. And it wasn't like we hoarded it, here's my collections of MP3s for your collection of MP3s just pick anything you like and if you don't want the rest just delete it. But I think that's a bit 80s and 90s thinking, then you had Napster and the 00s. If there's "casual copying" like we did today, it's a secondary effect of a torrent download, one downloads and spreads it around to friends and extended family. That seems quite likely to still be going on.

Re:This never works

[Dutch Gun]

I can certainly tell the difference between 1080 and 720 on my 60" TV when watching from about 10 feet away or so, although it's certainly not a dramatic difference. According to charts I've seen, I'd need an 80" TV to even begin seeing any benefit to 4K, and it tops off at 160". For most people, at least for TVs, 4K just doesn't make any sense.

Here's a handy chart to see the optimal resolutions given a particular TV size and viewing distance.

Re:This never works

[BrookHarty]

I have a 27 inch 2560x1440 monitor, with youtube 4k and test 4k media, I can tell the difference with 1080P vs 4K. Its a very big difference.

4K downsized to 1080P gives a great more detail, due to downsampling gives a higher detail, due to 1080P using 4 blocks with the same pixel, so 4k downsize, each 4 blocks are have a different pixel, its very noticeable. Chroma Sampling

Plus 60fps over 30fps YT is very noticeable, so thats another technology I want to see take off.

Also have a HDTV that is a normal 1080P HD tv, works great, yet i can tell the difference due to the low encoding rate on movies and the much higher on sports. Sports look absolutely amazing, none, none of the HD Prime movie channels are selling true blue ray quality tv. Comcast is ripping people off.

So do I want 4k? Hell, I want as fine pixels per inch as you can get, with the bandwidth to push it. We are no where a 50 inch tv running a high PPI, going to be a few decades away,which is a shame.

Re:This never works

[sexconker]

If the GPU is doing the decoding then you just record frame buffer.

24*3840*2160*23.976

Just under 4.5 Gbps. 2 hours gets you just under 4 TB.

You can take advantage of the pre-existing chroma subsampling to reduce that, and you can do as much encoding (lossless or not) as you can keep up with to reduce it further. But even at full, lossless RGB, 23.976 FPS 4K video recording is easily achievable today.

Re:This never works

[colordev]

Very much so. DRM for audio-visual content can and will always be circumvented - as long as humans need to be shown the content in decrypted form. Once a media file is shown in decrypted format, someone will record and convert it into non-DRM format.

If someone manages to create a really paradigm shifting and exiting media format "scent enhanced oculus-3D-hologram vibrating world with transparent multi-layering technology", then there may be temporary chance for effective DMRs - but even then only until alternative (open source) DRM-free formats are created.

Re:This never works

[hairyfeet]

What he is talking about is DIVX (all caps), named to make people think of the OTHER DivX , which was an attempt at "DRM in a box" that went over about as well as a loud ripping fart in an elevator.

I predict other than the *philes (the same folks that bought Beta, Laserdisc, and anything else that claimed to be "better" than the rest) 4K is gonna flop as bad as 3D TV, the reasons why are numerous, 1.- DVD is "good enough" for the majority, which is why after all these years BD is still not a blip compared to the massive DVD install base, 2.- The bandwidth in the USA to stream 4K without getting capped? EXTREMELY rare, most folks would be lucky to be able to watch 2 vids before they get capped, 3.- The not insignificant investment from users that really like what 1080p looks like now, and 4.- The fact it won't work with anything they already have, thus causing the "I gotta buy the Beatles albums again" syndrome which in a "jobless recovery" isn't gonna fly.

Considering the majority of PCs still don't come with BD? I'm really not worried about 4K DRM, it'll be another WMA, only bitch is the wasted die space used by your GPU and/or board for this shit you'll never use. Damn, now I'm gonna have to grab that R9 270x before they have time to add that shit.

Re:This never works

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference between the DivX codec, and the player which was sold by Circuit City.

The player by Circuit City required a modem and would dial into a number to validate that a piece of media was allowed to be played. Yes, you could buy a "silver" piece of media which was supposed to play indefinitely, but most media only had a certain time that it was authorized to play. IIRC, the media was also bound to the player, so even the paid-for "silver" DIVX media could only work on one player.

The market gave that the middle finger over DVDs.

Re:This never works

[Ol Olsoc]

Under normal living-room conditions, you need a side-by-size comparison to tell 720p from 1080p. Anything more is just a gimmick.

Re:This never works

[Chas]

You're right. It'll either be broken or it'll just deep-six the format.

I wish these jackasses would just stop wasting time, money and other resources telling people how they should consume content and put the cash they save towards...more/better content.

Fuck me! If they'd just stop with this idiotic shit, I'd look the other way and CHEER if they just used the saved cash to line their own pockets!

Look at the current situation of Blu-Ray.

There are NO free players out there that work reliably.

Most Blu-Ray player software, that isn't the trial versions that come with a drive, costs between $50 and $70
And all the PAID ones stop working for newer disks and force you to pay AGAIN to upgrade 4-12 months after purchase. Not to mention most of these programs are buggy as shit too.

Something like AnyDVD costs the US equivalent of $90 with updates for 2 years (and can be bought with lifetime support/upgrades for $130).
And you can recycle an old PC, toss in a few disks and BOOM! Media server!
At that point, it's actually less hassle and expense to RIP a Blu-Ray to a video file than it is to LEGITIMATELY play the disk!

Why? All this stupid DRM crap standing between the content makers, the content and the consumer.

Re:This never works

[Bing Tsher E]

That's storage, which scales to infinity. Screen resolution is something you look at all at once. To put it another way, you'd never run all 10tb of whatever is contained on your hard drive array all at once. At most the typical user accesses an 8-10gb file at any one time.

Re: This never works

[DoofusOfDeath]

Whoa there. You wouldn't steel a car, would you???

Re:This never works

[Gavagai80]

If you've purchased the DVD, you've shown you have the money and inclination to pay. They may have a better shot at forcing you to pay a second time for your kid than they have at getting a pirate to spend money. It's better for their bottom line to focus on stopping you from copying your DVD than to worry about the basement-dwelling pirate who lacks disposable income.

Re:This never works

[serviscope_minor]

Have you tried the latest OSS stuff with BD+ decryption support?

I only ask out of curiosity: I don't own a BR drive so I have no experience. There's also not a huge amount of info online on how well it works in practice.

Actually part of the reason I don't own any BR discs is because of this. Watching a smallish screen from a distance (my TV isn't huge) doesn't require 1080p all that much and I CBA to fuck with encryption, unskippable ads, lack of proper seeking and so on during my leisure time. And the discs are a bit pricier. Add that all up and I have no BR player.

Re:This never works

[Megane]

Congratulations, you now know you need glasses.

No, it means I have a lawn. Can you see it? Good. Now get off of it.

Re: This never works

[Megane]

But I might aluminum a car.

Re:This never works

[rtb61]

Let's be honest by far the bulk of content except maybe landscape channels sucks balls at 4K. Botox dead faces, awful plastic surgery, crappy acting, set flaws, bad special effects, poor camera work, stupid shit like lens flare and the list goes on. Never of course to forget the blatant bullshit of 3D double vision (now there was a truth they managed to hide for years, lying bastards). DRM or more accurately the theft of everyone digital rights pushed under the PR=B$ lies of digital rights management (they really are sick people when they come up with that blatant double speak).

This has nothing to do with anyone's digital rights and everything to do with censorship in hardware, in your home, that you are forced to pay for. Don't pay a licence fee for your wedding videos, see them blocked until you do. Can't play old content on new hardware because you can not transfer it as you are actively blocked from doing because they specifically want to charge you for the same content over and over and over again, well, suck it on up losers. Are M$ evil, you, betcha. Why are the evil fuckers at M$ so desperate for it, monopoly in collusion with a 'PATENTED' DRT (digital rights theft) method, that is the pay off for them, that and a long term plot to become the dominant global publishers and drive most others out of business.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

And why would anyone willingly submit themselves to this abuse? I absolutely will not be adding hardware that only serves the purpose of limiting what I can do with my PC.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you will not be adding the hardware that does this. Because chip makers are doing it for you. If you want a computer, it will have DRM built in at the lowest hardware and software levels. Period. Deal with it, and stop making stupid and empty threats.

Re:Why?

[MrL0G1C]

Absolutely, I never bought a blu-ray player because there was always talk of DRM related playback issues - especially for the PC. Also they didn't drop in price like DVD and CD Drives, I suspect that's because of a shit-load of DRM patents.

Re:Why?

[Kjella]

And why would anyone willingly submit themselves to this abuse? I absolutely will not be adding hardware that only serves the purpose of limiting what I can do with my PC.

Does your computer have a HDMI/DisplayPort or DVI port made in the last 10+ years? You got DRM. Nothing keeps you from running the RMS-approved distro of choice and play all the creative commons content you like though, you won't notice it's there until you try to play protected content. And that's why boycotts won't work, the only reason to buy a DRM-incompatible version of the same hardware is so you can try to play protected content and bitch about it not working, kinda like buying a Mac and complaining it won't play PC games.

You must understand that the entire movie industry is in a "now or never" mode, DVDs was broken, BluRay was broken and these 4K discs will rival the cinema master (DCI 4K) in quality. If the standard is established enough they can't just ditch it and the DRM is broken, they won't be able to do one better. So they're trying to make this the most unholy DRM abomination ever, because if it fails it's game over. It's really that simple.

If you read between the lines

[ArmoredDragon]

What they're saying is "If you want to enjoy your content unencumbered, it's probably best to just pirate it."

it's hard to patch hardware

[WillgasM]

Once it's cracked, it's cracked.

Here we go again.

[marcello_dl]

Reminds me of the blu ray DRM that made them unsuitable for linux.
Result, no blu ray here.
Not even when the player got cheap and linux supported it.

Re:Here we go again.

[gmack]

I have yet to see a good Linux blu-ray player. The result is that I simply rip the blu-ray with makemkv and then run the result through handbrake to bring the size down a bit. This has the added advantage that my quad core xbmc box ($110 CAD) lets me browse though my movie collection on my NAS using my remote and that's far less effort than swapping discs. This also came in handy when I was in Spain and Amazon sent me the US region movie instead of the EU region movie and the blasted thing wouldn't play in my EU locked blu ray player.

Re:Here we go again.

[SuricouRaven]

The only reason linux can even play DVD is that CSS has more holes than the Conservative party budget proposal.

Fine by me...

[neminem]

You know the content will still be uploaded to thepiratebay literally within seconds of release (or sometimes before... thanks, anonymous GoT leaker!), right? And everyone who wants to pirate it will just do that still? So this is only going to hurt, or at least vaguely annoy, people who weren't going to pirate it anyway?

faint whiff of BS?

[sribe]

So, it will be totally impossible to create software to decrypt these video streams? They now have an algorithm which can be implemented in hardware, but not in software? Yeah, right...

but I can....

[harvey the nerd]

... stop buying from it. Even if I have to live in Archive.org.

The movie studios are full of idiots

[Karmashock]

I'm sure MS etc knows this can't possibly work. So they're doing this to placate the movie studios by doing something that the studios think will work even though it can't possibly work.

All that has to happen is ONE person has to break the DRM and then convert the movie or whatever into some other DRM free format and then that format is passed around the internet.

Look at all the crap on the pirate channels and it is all DRM free. And nearly all of it had DRM on it at some point. It was stripped off.

Now they say here that this is Hardware DRM. But that's bullshit. Some aspect of it is going to be software and that is where the cracker is going to break it.

So yeah. Headline should read "Movie Studios still don't understand how computers work."

Re:The movie studios are full of idiots

[Rob Y.]

But it may give either Microsoft or OEM's an excuse to use the new 'flexibility' in locking down the boot process. If the movie studios require secure boot to be turned on - or even require it to be manditory in the BIOS - before they allow you to view 4K content, then maybe OEM's will start selling Windows 10 machines with a BIOS that doesn't allow you to disable secure boot. Hopefully there won't be a market for that, since once that's in place, all that needs to happen is for Microsoft to switch to a new key for secure booting and charging an arm and a leg to sign Linux bootloaders. Not quite game over, but game made one hell of a pain in the ass.

I guess it's a race between Microsoft seeing a new opportunity to re-monopolize PC hardware and their realizing that Windows is enough of a 'natural' monopoly as it ever needs to be to be worth sacrificing any goodwill over. The whole 'Windows 10 will be a free upgrade' thing makes me think that their number one priority with Win10 is to get Metro on every desktop in the hopes that developers will then feel the need to port to it. Otherwise they've lost mobile for good.

Cinavia hasn't been broken

[BenJeremy]

Audio-based watermarking that survives a variety of attempts to process it, and even overcomes being recorded second-hand. ...and yet, all it requires is somebody digging into a Blu-ray player's firmware to determine the detection algorithm.

There are claims by products $$$$ that it has been cracked, but all of those methods involve a database for specific films to apply their "fix".

Fucking bullshit

[AndyKron]

I am so sick of this fucking bullshit.

Re:Not going to work.

[PRMan]

Compressed HD video is currently decoded by hardware on your graphics card. Especially on your phone, which isn't powerful enough otherwise.

DRM Industry

[duke_cheetah2003]

I'm really really starting to think the DRM industry is the ones pushing this crap forward. It just doesn't even make sense to anyone but the people peddling this junk. Consumers don't want it. Producers want to sell stuff, so they shouldn't want it either, because consumers don't.

Re:Hah

[Megane]

Ditto for 24/96 and 24/192 audio. Too bad that Neil Young doesn't understand the concept that the purpose of higher resolution sources is to reduce artefacts during editing/mixing, and thinks that we need to carry around lossless high-resolution audio on dedicated player hardware.

Re:Unfortunately (for them)

[Moof123]

Worse yet, PC's today are barely faster than 5 year old ones at similar price points. Moore's law ran headlong into a thermal brick wall. The real speed increases are showing up with SSD's and better GPU's. The GPU's look to be approaching similar issues as intel is, they are just a process generation or two behind them. We can no longer expect a 2x speedup ever couple years, but more half that rate at best.

The net result of this and other trends (brain drain and money drain by mobile) is that we can expect that most home and work PC's will not be worth upgrading much faster than every 4-8 years, while 2-3 was the norm not that long ago.

Re:This is horrible news

[jonwil]

Your problem is that you bought a Sony instead of (like I did) an el-cheapo DVD player out of China that doesn't have any of the extra crap the Sony does getting in the way.

Re:You cannot stop the DRM Behemoth

[taustin]

Folks like you said that about digital music, too. And yet, pretty much all music is sold without DRM these days.

Re:Unfortunately (for them)

[epyT-R]

How else do you think 'consumable' content is created? The death of the pc is the death of the internet as anything but cable tv 2.0. That's not what you want unless you own a cable company.

HDCP 2.2 or later display also needed

[Joe_Dragon]

Also your display is going to need to be replaced.

The linux / ESXI sever market is to big to cut off

[Joe_Dragon]

The linux / ESXI sever market is to big to cut off with locked down firmware.