Guest post by “One of the more touchy subjects crowding my inbox lately relates to how Windows Vista will fail to render High Definition video in ‘pure’ High Definition on most existing monitors. There’s quite a bit of hemming and hawing over the probability that Windows Vista users will have to buy new monitors to see HD content. Let’s get a few facts out on the table before we oil our rags and tie them to our spears, because there’s a considerable amount of misinformation out there.”
Currently displays with HDCP are significantly more expensive and at least for me there is no reason to waste my money and support HDCP when I can get a better display for the same price. In fact, I see HDCP as a temporary technology and given the reluctance of consumers to buy HDCP enabled euipment I doubt that it would ever catch on.
Since they’ll likely be two modes “High quality” (for “trusted systems”) and “Degraded quality” (for other backwards compatibility), and since “trusted systems” can only be achieved if you upgrade your OS to a DRM OS, your motherboard to a DRM motherboard, your monitor to a DRM motherboard, and any other device on your system that gets in the way, most people would essentially be stuck in “Degraded quality” for the next five to seven years. This is assuming Vista will be released in the next two years and it runs on existing machines. If it doesn’t Vista will likely not gain critical mass until long after WIndows XP’s end of life.
I see one of three things happening:
(1) “Degraded quality” will be good enough for most people, so essentially DRM would irrelevant. (People still enjoy listening to the radio or audio tapes, even though it is far from CD quality). There would be no point in purchasing DRM hardware, and it will die a slow death as hardware manufacturers (who have slim margins) try to compete with clones. DRM may stick around forever, but it won’t much matter to the public who will ignore it (e.g. region coding)
(2) “Degraded quality” will not be good enough for most people. In that case, DVD sales will drop and/or pirate programs will spring up to cheat the system (e.g. a version of ReactOS on Bochs could pretend its DRM compliant). In this case, DRM will die a quick death.
(3) “Degraded quality” will not be good enough for most people, but the FCC will require all US machines to implement DRM and outlaw noncompliant machines (existing machines will be grandfathered in). The RIAA or US govermentment uses its influence to get other world governments to pass similar legislation. Comsumers are dragged kicking and screaming into the DRM world. The Linux kernel will require a binary module to even book on the new DRM machine.
Personally, I see (1) as being the most likely outcome. The RIAA will try to get (3) and they may do a lot of damage for several years, but the level of control required for true DRM is unsustainable for any general purpose machine. The genie is already out of the bottle.
All he’s saying is “Don’t blame Microsoft” but the fact of the matter is that you will still see downsampled video on your shiny new monitor (without HDCP) at the discretion of the content provider.
I want to know what all the environmentalists have to say about this. If people are actually going to want to watch this new stuff, there’s going to be a huge number of monitors thrown away (admittedly the situation is already pretty bad in this respect, but it will get worse).
Yes, don’t blame Microsoft for this. But, do consider that Microsoft are one of the few companies who have the might to refuse to accept this for the good of the consumers – but when has that ever mattered to them?
I don’t think Microsoft has nearly the pull on the entertainment industry you think it does. How badly would DVD sales really be affected if Microsoft disabled DVD playback in MS Windows? Would the entertainment really drop HDCP if Microsoft refused to allow HDCP media playback in Vista?
Your third scenario looks highly unrealistic because goverment cannot force hw manufacturers to implement drm, and cannot outlaw nondrm hardware.
Agreed, but it’s not without precident. Most VCRs have a primitive form of DRM so that some tapes aren’t copiable. Old VCRs (which weren’t around when the mandated “standard “was created) and comercial VCRs ignore this “uncopiability” restriction, but all new non-comercial VCRs are required to obey the restrictions.
Of course, the VCR is a special purpose machine and computers are general purpose, but regardless, the FCC/RIAA/… will see (3) as possible because it was possible with the VCR.
People still enjoy watching Divx movies (worse quality than DVD, even screeners with even worse audio/video quality), listen to MP3 music (worse quality than CD) because of how high priced are audio/video contents today (here in Italy a CD-Audio costs nearly 20€ at the stores, i.e. more than 24$, we have to buy AudioCD from other countries’ online stores to get better prices). HD content will be higher priced than standard DVD content so if people don’t buy DVD, they won’t buy HD. They will simply get 5€ worse quality content from the illegal streets vendors or download them from the net for free.
This whole movement into the DRM world had better be totally transparent to the average consumer or else it will remain a niche market.
There will always be those people willing to pay any price to have the highest quality stuff and will jump through all kinds of hoops to get it to work. This generation of consumers is a lot more tech savy in general than the last generation, but there’s still only so much hassle they’re willing to go through to watch a movie at home.
If you read the following paper “A Cryptanalysis of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System” by Crosby, Goldberg, et al. at:
http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/~iang/pubs/hdcp-drm01.ps
…it becomes pretty clear that there are some major security problems with this specification.
In the paper they basically assert that HDCP is insecure because they specify using linear shared secret generation. Then go on to say this could be fixed by using an identity based encryption scheme. However, I think that even this is flawed!
Not only does the attacker see all the normal variables that are transferred over the wire (public keys, pre-determined numbers multiplied by a random number, etc.) but they also see the final product that the crypto was trying to hide. The picture on the screen. Which can be got through any variety of means, perhaps even as crude as hooking up a video camera pointed at the monitor. With this information I believe one could derive the private “master” key and subject HDCP to all the problems the paper points out. But I’d be happy to be shown the error of my ways…
So I’ll guess that “legal” media won’t be an option in the future then… well well it’s their money.
I agree. There is overwhelming opposition against DRM and forcing this controversial technology upon everyone would lead only to more filesharing of movies etc. and this is probably not what the movie industry wants.
First off the current attitude of the industry towards content is nothing but lame.
1. There is not enough content out there, so what is the industry worried about pirating anyway.
2. 1080i 480p 1080p this does nothing but make some hardware unusable and beleive me this is not fun if you just spent 2000$ on a HD monitor
3. Microsoft released Terminator Hidef with a lame DRM. I purchased a legal DVD and returned it the second day.
Moral of the story first have standards, have widespread usage and then go about protection. If you do otherwise there is no motivation to upgrade.
There is no broadcast flag, currently – the FCC’s plans were put on hold after the EFF successfully challenged it.
http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/
That doesn’t mean legislation won’t be passed to do the same thing, but it hasn’t been done yet.
This whole content provider war is a bubble, just like the dot coms before them. The whole industry of media conglomerates is gearing up with new technology to ensure that they can get the most profit out of the age of digital media. The problem is, they assume that us poor consumer sapps have all this money to spend on entertainment, when we really don’t. All this media and communications is not making us any richer, it is (at best) only enabling us to do more work for the same wage.
This is not about technology, it’s about money. I’m sorry, the vast majority of consumers just can’t afford to pay for premium content. They won’t just “go along with it” as per the normal “joe user” or “sheeple” theories. Because although Joe doesn’t understand the difference between 1080p and news radio, he knows how much he makes per month and how little of it he can spend on media subscriptions.
When we fail to show them the money, this whole digital media mess will collapse under its own price tag.
some people are completely dim
they value brand names more than the actual product.
let me give you an example;
Some people I work with think that Vauxhall and Ford cars are not as good as BMW or Mercedes.. however, none of them actually drive !
also
the vast majority of the general public think that Microsoft products are the best, simply because they recognise the brand
this is a commodity that Microsoft really values;
Windows Media Player
Windows Messenger
Microsoft Office (including)
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Powerpoint
Now I am sure you got the point…
Media Player and Messenger are both included with Windows XP, so why include the Windows name at the start?
Word, Access, Powerpoint Outlook etc are all included in Microsoft Office… So why do they always have the Microsoft added at the start ?
Simple, it is a BRAND
the most important part of Microsoft’s business is its brand….
BTW – which is better, Pepsi or Coke ?
what is so wrong with being reminded that Microsoft make that great software that we all use
and you linux fanboys shut up, you all use IE
The kings of FUD declaring there’s mis-information out there. Damn, spit coffee out your nose funny.
who tried to mod me down there ?