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X-Copy was pulled in the US but not overseas. DVD-Shrink is on the net and regularly updated.

If you want to use an HD DVD player or a BluRay player to stream content throughout your home, EVERYTHING will have to comply with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The "CONTENT PROVIDERS" are the very force that required that draconian copyright technologies be utilized before they would support the formats.

If you study what they have done, even if someone finds a way to hack a certain player, that player's seed keys will be cancelled and ALL of that model will be rendered useless until or unless firmware or hardware mods can be installed to ensure any hole is plugged. How? It will be put onto every movie sold after the hack is discovered. Play any content pressed after the date of the hack and your player will be disabled.

This is not "easy" like DVD was. Now if you want to engineer your own home theater server (and they have existed far longer than MS has dabbled with them), then you will need content. Where are you going to get it. Over the Air? OK, but it is not of the quality or bandwidth of the new HD formats, which are "Transparent to the Master" in quality. Satellite? OK, but even here we have compression artifacts to deal with. They exist in the original uplink encodes, and macroblocking, excessive grain etc are visible.

A New generation of motherboards and video cards also have to meet these DMCA requirements to work with the new formats and Vista. It will NOT output HD material into a display or video card that is not HDMI/HDCP enabled. Even if you capture this HDMI signal, at 1.5gbs, how are you going to record this uncompressed data stream (at 1.5 gigs per second)? It was engineered for this very reason. So you will need an encoder at $300,000.00 or more to encode it in MPEG2, MPEG4, h.264, or VC1. Then you can burn it to disc.

The new formats also contain up to 7.1 channels of uncompressed PCM audio or Dolby or DTS HD formats (True HD and Dolby Plus), but you must get a new surround receiver with HDMI 1.3 (5c and HDCP enabled copy protection) or you are not going to hear these new formats... 5.1 channel analog will pass the data, but not in digital form. DD 5.1 and DTS-ex are available via toslink (optical), but this is just the audio format present on DVD's.

No, MS and hollyweird have crushed "Fair USe Rights" and this time they will get away with it because (under 'toon) they passed these laws that allow them to.

LLS