Posted on 02/13/2006 7:49:00 AM PST by zeugma
Introduction
You want to know a secret? None of the current ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards will support the full capabilities of Windows Vista.
But let’s start from the beginning. This story starts with my upcoming LCD Monitor Round-Up. As you know, a good monitor should last several years and outlive every other component in your PC, other than perhaps a keyboard or a mouse. So, when it came time to do another review of LCD monitors, my attention turned towards “Windows Vista-ready” monitors: those with HDCP. After all, it makes no sense to recommend a monitor that will go obsolete in just a few months.
At the time I started my article, there were only 10 PC monitors with DVI/HDCP support (we’re reviewing 5 of them). I was disappointed, but what was surprising is that many of these monitor manufacturers weren’t advertising their HDCP support. For monitors, HDCP support is the most important feature for having a “future proof” solution.
HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This content protection system is mandatory for high-definition playback of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. If you want to watch movies at 1980x1080, your system will need to support HDCP. If you don’t have HDCP support, you’ll only get a quarter of the resolution. A 75% loss in pixel density is a pretty big deal – Wouldn’t you be angry if your car was advertised as doing 16 mpg, and you only got 4 mpg? Or if you bought a 2 GHz CPU and found out that it only ran at 500 MHz?
As part of the Windows-Vista Ready Monitor article, I was going to publish a list of all of the graphics cards that currently support HDCP. I mean, I remember GPUs dating as far back as the Radeon 8500 that had boasted of HDCP support.
Turns out, we were all deceived.
This is probably good for a tech ping
bttt
So what did MS develop Vista on? A Solaris Workstation?
Does anyone know
what this means in plain english?
Does the screen itself
check the input source
for copy-protection code
and scramble itself
if a user tries
to display images that
they home recorded?
i wouldn't be suprised at all.
Hollywood believes that they can tell you what kind of player to use, and what type of monitor you watch it on.
They are probably right, as we have the best congress their money could buy.
I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's somehow Bush's fault.
It should be called HDCC, for content control, not protection. Because it's all about control
It's part of the copyright cartel's goal to be able to tell you what you can do with video and when. They know the pirates will break whatever encryption they use, so it's basically to keep Joe Schmoe in line.
zeugma told part of it. Basically, it makes a secure path from content to pixels on the screen. If any part is not considered secure (the video card in this case), it will either not display or display with degraded quality, depending on the wishes of the corporation.
If you have all HDCP-certified hardware, you will only be able to do with that video what the copyright cartel has allowed. IOW, kiss Fair Use goodbye. It's been a thorn in the side of the copyright cartel since the VCR, and now they think they've finally found a way to get rid of it.
And we won't have Mr. Rogers to testify for us this time around.
Sony lost a court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court many years ago concerning your right to have the ability to tape things. I believe the case in question was the recording of Television content to videotape, though the ruling has since been applied to casettes and other similar media. Now, they want to implement the restrictions they could not win in court by technology that you will not be allowed to circumvent even if you previously had the rights to do so. For instance, if you buy a CD, they don't want you to be able to cut a disk for use in your car. They also don't want you to be able to use it in your mp3 player, or anything else. They've already purchased enough congresscritters to make copyright perpetual and now they want the ability to dictate how you can use items you purchase into perpetuity. Nice huh?
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The communication schema is the following: the OS COPP Driver (Certified Output Protection Protocol) verifies with the graphic card bios to check if it is legitimate or not. Once this verification is done, the card then goes to the monitor KSV, a unique 40 bit key, which will authorize (or not) the reading and displaying of the movie after comparison with a data base provided by the HDCP consortium.
For example, here are all the steps of HDCP certification when a Silicon Image chip is involved:
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I think I'll pass on getting any of this crap. Let's hope the marketplace kills it dead.
That's it? This is so getting hacked. Unfortunately, they've already made the hacking of what you purchased illegal.
Ain't it all ironic, for those of us old enough to remember the Betamax versus Disney/Universal case?
History Lessons For The Grokster Age
Arik Hesseldahl, 04.01.05, 10:00 AM ET
As the U.S Supreme Court hears arguments against digital music file-sharing services this week, I am reminded of the musician and record producer Quincy Jones.
In April 1982, Jones told a hearing of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that the biggest threat facing the music recording industry was the audio cassette tape. [!!!]
Back then, the music industry was in a panic. Sales were down, and the convenient scapegoat was teenagers recording vinyl LPs to cheap tapes. Some 39 million people spent $600 million on blank tapes, according to the estimate of one record company study. Another estimate suggested that for every album sold, another was copied to blank tape.
Robert Schwartz, a Washington-based lawyer, now legal counsel to the Home Recording Rights Coalition, a nonprofit consumer interest group, was at the 1982 hearing. "I recall Quincy Jones predicting that, unless home audio taping was restricted, there would never be another hit album that would sell as many as 5 million units."
Music companies were lobbying Congress for a fee to be levied on tapes and recording equipment, not unlike the governments in Germany, Sweden and Austria had done.
Eight months after that hearing, Jones would prove his own glum prediction wrong. He co-produced with Michael Jackson the album Thriller, which hit the market in December of that year. It went on to sell 26 million copies in the United States and more than 50 million worldwide, and spent a grand total of 122 weeks on Billboard magazine's charts, 37 of them at number one. Thriller took home seven Grammy Awards in 1983, three of which were shared by Jones.
Artists like Bruce Springsteen and Prince would prove Jones wrong as well. Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. sold 15 million units in the U.S., while the soundtrack from Prince's film Purple Rain sold 13 million.
In fact, from the Recording Industry Association of America's list of Gold and Platinum albums, I count more than 60 albums that have sold 10 million units or more since Quincy Jones gave his dire assessment of the music industry's future.
The music business was, in 1982, just about to enter a period of substantial change. Viacom's (nyse: VIAb - news - people ) new cable TV network, MTV, was just getting started and would soon change the way popular music was marketed. Jackson, Springsteen, Prince, Madonna and The Police would all have a hand in making it a cultural touchstone for young people the world over for years to come.
Technology was changing, too. In 1982, Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) and Philips Electronics (nyse: PHG - news - people ) sold the first albums on a new format called the compact disc. Before the '80s were over, CDs would eclipse vinyl albums. In 1990, U.S. consumers spent more than $3.4 billion on more than 286 million CDs, versus a combined total of 39 million units for LPs and singles the same year. Curiously, albums on cassette sold nearly twice as well as CDs that year--consumers bought 442 million albums on cassette tapes, and another 87 million cassette singles, for combined revenue of $3.7 billion.
In 2000, U.S. CD sales peaked at 942 million units, accounting for $13.2 billion in sales, and it's been downhill ever since. The music industry again kicked into panic mode. It blamed file-sharing networks, first Napster--before it became the paid download service it is now--and now others, namely Grokster and StreamCast Networks, for the loss. Consumers who use free file-sharing networks, they argue, are doing so largely to steal music and video content.
This week, media companies, including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (nyse: MGM - news - people ), The Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ), Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ) and Sony, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the companies behind the file-sharing networks should be held liable for their customers who chose to use the service to break copyright laws and download music to their digital music players.
Notable among those media companies is Sony, which in 1984 won the right to sell its Betamax video cassette recorders, and in so doing established an important legal precedent. The court found that a technology is legal, even if it can be used in a way that infringes on copyrights, so long as it also has what the court called "substantial non-infringing uses." The court essentially gave U.S. consumers the benefit of the doubt, knowing that many would bend and even break the rules, so long as most stayed honest.
Of course, the world didn't end for the media companies that sued Sony. The plantiffs in that case--Disney; Universal Studios, now jointly owned by General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ) and Vivendi Universal (nyse: V - news - people ); and others--embraced the home video market, selling and renting high-quality video cassettes with movies and music videos on them. This in turn spawned video rental companies like Blockbuster (nyse: BBI - news - people ), which reported $6.1 billion in revenue last year.
It seems to me the lesson is clear for media companies: Embrace new technology. Find a way to use it to offer your content to consumers, who will reward you with their hard-earned money. Give them good music to listen to and good movies to watch, in new formats that are friendly for iPods and PCs, and all manner of new digital devices. Make them easy to use, as easy if not easier than those found on the file-sharing services you so dislike, and you'll make a mint. Stop litigating and legislating, and get back to the business of entertaining. Let these painful, temporary periods of adjustment work themselves out.
But, most of all, don't panic.
FORBES.com
We don't hear talk of that from the MPAA and RIAA, do we?
I wonder how many know there's a royalty on every blank video and audiocassete that goes to the two aforementioned Gestapos? Record your newborn bay or your barking dog, and they get a cut. I dare someone to tell me that's not exactly the same as the Mafia "protection" racket.
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