Copy-protection on next-gen DVDs is killing the future
More doom and gloom today on the DRM front as we get closer to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray launches. CNET's take on
the situation hit the web today and they're warning consumers about the necessary evils brought about by HDCP and the yet to be completed AACS
standard. When will Hollywood and other related industries realize that by not working together, all of their time
and money on the new formats will be wasted? If they're not sure what we mean, just go talk to the folks behind SACD
and DVD-Audio. All of the confusing terms and the "will this disc play in my house?" questions are simply
going to kill what could have been high-definition heaven. When the general public starts to truly understand the limitations of the DRM strategies and hear that their new content will only play at half of the best resolution, do you really think they're going to shell out hundreds of dollars for new gear? Why should they? At this point, we're thinking of renewing our subscription to the Columbia House DVD club just for spite.
Filed under: DIY
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Charles Martell @ Feb 16th 2006 6:13PM
Get over it. Buy HDMI equipped components and enjoy the HD moving pictures.
Peteo @ Feb 16th 2006 7:12PM
"Get over it. Buy HDMI equipped components and enjoy the HD moving pictures." HAHAHA
If only it was that easy!, see you didnt do you home work and you do not realise that any device that plays back blue ray or HD-DVD disks must have HDCP sypport that INCLUDES your HDMI HDTV! I would say about 80% of the all HDTVs out there DO NOT support HDCP! and you can bet theres gonna be alot of pissed off people.
Mike anderson @ Feb 16th 2006 9:22PM
(Get over it. Buy HDMI equipped components and enjoy the HD moving pictures)
It's Idiots like you the reason Sony and MPAA are going to get away with it. consumers are not educated in what DRM is and what it will do. I certainly will not buy.
c.Lake @ Feb 16th 2006 10:23PM
Charles M. Are you some sort of a dumb-ass? People are not going to just "GET OVER IT" after paying a couple thousand on a new flat panel TV, sometime between now and 2009.
This crap has got to stop! People need to be informed of the facts about DRM's, format standards, and Hollywood's constant standing in the way of technology. All they see is dollar signs and not normal human behavior. If people do not understand something, they will do without it, that is a known and proven human reaction.
This new format war, that Hollywood has created, is not going to work the way they want it to. Something is going to be overlooked, forgotten or not considered to be a problem. Just a little opening to give "Fanboys", geeks, and hackers, living in their mom's basement something to do for the next 6 months. It's going to happen!
Blue-ray (or HD-DVD ...whatever), is going to blow-up in their faces, and it will be a well deserved, and expensive ego bruising, lesson that Hollywood desperately need to learn.
Jellodyne @ Feb 17th 2006 12:38AM
Pretty much all the HDTVs on sale now support HDCP. Most of the HDTVs from last year did as well. The one I bought did, but then again, I saw this coming.
Steve @ Feb 17th 2006 2:40AM
Jellodyne, thats pretty nice of your TV but this DRM crap really punishes most early adopters who paid between $5-15k of their hard earned money to buy what they were told was the best of breed TV. And really its only a matter of time before HDCP isn't enough and they change formats again. Just look at the evolution of HD connectivity from Component->DVI->HDMI->HDMI w/HDCP->DisplayPort all in a span of a couple years. The worst thing about DRM is that there isn't a simple $10 adapter you can buy to fix it.
Dave @ Feb 17th 2006 7:47AM
Frankly this isn't rocket science. The average consumer will take the box home. It won't work. And off they'll go to the store to hear "well to make it work you'll need one of these 1000-10,000 dollar TV's" and the consumer will say "here's your box back thank you but no thank you".
Frankly these folks are spending a lot of effort into something that often takes far less effort to break (meaning security). Typically you build a security code so that you can keep 50-75% of the people honest who might not otherwise be, a barrier that is not too hard to build and not impossible to breach, and you have a nice balance of cost vs return. These folks think they are building the Titanic. 30 days after it's released they're going to find their years of work goes the same direction the Titanic did.
They are not killing the market. But they will frustrate and turn away a lot of customers who encounter difficulties in what they expect to be able to do. Customers will expect these things to work as old VCR's did, watch a movie on a prerecorded item, record a show in HD and move the movies of some childs birthday to a high capacity video disc.
How will customers respond when they get messages like "you can't do this" or "sorry that show is not recordable"? Have a look at how people feel about the cable industry. People will look at their alternatives, probably standard DVD+RW at this point, and consider that they didn't have all these "problems" with that technology. They'll take the lower hit in quality for less issues. And those billions of R&D spent will be wasted until they go back and work to get it right.
These companies aren't stupid, despite how we technologists tend to think of them. But they do make mistakes. They are trying to judge how much "complication" the average consumer is willing to put up with. What I strongly believe they are misjudging in a generation that often has a hard time just figuring how to SET UP Hd, is that customers of today have an extremely low tolerance for anything that doesn't work simply and just like it's previous generation worked. People don't have time to muck with things or learn. It has to be simple. It has to do what they expect. And if it doesn't, it takes about zero time for that word to get out on the street and people stop buying the item.
HD DVD and Bluray want to be very cautious how many barriers they put up, AND how much they spend building protection over what they'll gain. Protection will be cracked and customers will be pissed off. And if you spent a lot of money getting there, no one buys the machines, AND someone cracks the format, the profits that will come in to cover all that cost will be pathetic. Making a mistake like that is mighty expensive.
Food for thought :)
Ben Drawbaugh @ Feb 17th 2006 7:54AM
I hate this as much as the next guy, but I don't buy this early adoptors left in the cold jazz. Early HDTV adoptors are PQ gurus or they wouldn't of been early adoptors. Almost every new TV for the past 3 years is HDCP ready. It is hard for me to imagine someone who is obsessed with PQ and hasn't bought a HDTV in the past 3 years. The technology has come so far todays TV's are leaps and bounds above the ones 4 years ago.
Charles Martell @ Feb 17th 2006 9:00AM
(Charles M. Are you some sort of a dumb-ass?)"c.Lake"
(It's Idiots like you) "Mike A."
Apparently I'm not as dumb as Mike and c.Lake.
All three of my HD display devices have HDCP compliant HDMI inputs. I also was an early adopter with an HD CRT display that I sold three years ago when I first learned of HDCP.
I'll be watching Blu-ray HD DVD's and you apparently will not.
The whole copy protection scheme will soon be defeated and you guys that have lagged behind will be able to enjoy your HD too.
I do agreee, the motion picture industry is the dumb-ass.
Richard Holman @ Feb 17th 2006 9:07AM
I bought my tv based on hdtv compatibility and connections so that I could connect my computer. The other day I found out that my 6600gt will not do hdcp and now find that even if it did my tv might not. HD Looks great on it OTA and MS downloads but I can't continue to shell out money in this endeavor. I love movies now I wonder when the dvd's do come out will it be a blu, or hd player that I need. I understand that the resolution will not be the same. Which is fine if I don't have to pay for it. I don't want to rent an HD dvd and only get part of the enhanced resolution.
Griffon @ Feb 17th 2006 12:03PM
You know people are banding all kinds of comments around. The fact is (from industry reports) that less then 5% of all TV's in the last 3 years have HDMI/DVI. Of those less then 1% is HDCP compliant. Don't think for a second that having a HDMI or DVI port makes you HDCP compliant, it does not. There are no ramp rate numbers to show how things have shifted toward the end of last year but over all very few sets are compliant on the market, this represents a significant consumer barrier and tremendously reduces the value proposition of all the next gen format, particularly when folks learn about the ridiculous resolution step down (when is tantamount to theft since it directly erodes the value of your purchase), and the insane phone home requirements, that most folk will not grasp until far to late.
Why do the mega corps not care, they know all this? Because this is about attacking fair use now and eliminating or blocking through law and technology as many consumer rights as possible. And they are taking a long view, by starting their assault now they hope to have things well contained by 2008-2010 when everyone is needing to replace their devices (anything RP with a bulb in it probable a lot sooner). By then they hope to have enough control over our actions so that there will simple be no other alternatives or backward compatibility and you will have no choice but suffer at their hands and pay over and over for every play and have to phone home every time you even look a next gen format disk and fork over all your consumer info and credit cards directly into Sony's war chest... 3 years from now we will be lucky if we can record commercials much less shows. Fast forward, skipping commercials on disk or TV? Forget it.
Ben Drawbaugh @ Feb 17th 2006 1:07PM
Griffon,
This is the first I have heard about recent TV's with DVI not being HDCP compliant. I know that "some" manufactures specifially of the "off brand" variety don't support HDCP, but specfically what TVs do you know of that are "name brand" (ie. Sony, JVC, Mitsubish, Samsung, Pioneer, Panasonic etc) that have a DVI port, but DO NOT support HDCP?
Thanks
Ben
Steve @ Feb 17th 2006 1:19PM
Ben, many early adopters are not "PQ gurus." I know a fair number who bought it a) with a bonus, i.e. cash windfall, b) for their wives who wanted a flat panel for space, c) for the biggest screen for sports. These people don't know their DVI from their HDMIs and will be left confused and angry when they can't watch a new DRMed DVD. And Charles, while you may feel smart now for being HDCP compliant, the precedent is being set NOW for Hollywood to arbitrarily institute new standards through technology and law (a.k.a. the broadcast flag). When HDCP gets cracked, how long do you think it will take for them to make Blueray 2.0 which requires some new DRM scheme thats not HDCP compatible?
Ben Drawbaugh @ Feb 17th 2006 1:28PM
Steve,
Great points, but those people that are not "PQ gurus" will also not notice that their HD is downconverted to 540p and will be content with the component outputs.
Not to mention it is up to the studios to choose to criple their movies, which has to be labled on the DVD's packaging. They can choose not to buy movies that enforce the downrezzing.
This is besides the point that older "HD" TVs actual effective resolution is no where near HD in the first place.
But I can't say it enough, HDCP sucks but it isn't the end of the world.
Steve @ Feb 17th 2006 1:32PM
Ben, a quick search on AVS forum for HDCP brings at least a few
http://avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=7002296#post7002296
http://avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6808816#post6808816
That doesn't include the thousands of HDTVs without modern DVI or HDMI inputs, or projectors/desktop monitors with non-HDCP DVIs. DVI != HDCP. DVI is an old standard which is going away but has no requirements for HDCP.
Ben Drawbaugh @ Feb 17th 2006 2:09PM
Steve, thanks for the links I will check them out. You are right there are alot of TVs that don't even have DVI ports and that is a crime.
But alot of DVI ports do support HDCP, my Mitsubishi 55813 for example has a DVI port that supports HDCP. The model right before mine didn't have a DVI port but Mitsubishi finally gave up and added one. It seems that Mitsu was one of the last hold outs in the world of DVI.