Quote:
| This is OT, but I disagree (if you want, we can initiate a new thread for HDMI). |
Ofer, feel free to move this whole discussion to another thread. You can do that, can't you? I wouldn't want the initial posts to be missed, that's why I think it's better to move it.
Quote:
| The $15,000 (or $30,0000) yearly license will simply be rolled back to us. We'll be paying lots more for these titles and the equipment because each of the companies involved with making these movies, cables, transcoding, subtitling, etc. - will all be buying HDMI equipment. It's like a new type of tax for HD material (except that it's not the government who is getting to use the money) |
First of all, you really have no idea how those license fees are being translated to the end-user. You can't say it will cost us "lots more" unless you have numbers. For all we know it's adding all of $5 per player and $1 per disc. Granted, right now HDMI and HDCP outputs tend to be limited to higher-end players, but that very well may have more to do with engineering costs and marketing perception of a "high-end" feature than actual license costs. Secondly, this is a
consumer standard, not a broadcast standard. The people doing compression and transcoding will
not necessarily be using HDMI. You're clearly overstating the situation here.
And thirdly again I go back to this: HD content providers want protection for their revenue stream. No copy protection, no content. Would you rather pay an extra, say, $2.50 per HD-DVD due to that copy protection, or would you rather
not be able to buy them at all?
Mark:
Quote:
| I need to junk a $30K scaler and an $80K CRT projector if I want to use those products. How is that a win situation for this consumer? |
And just how many people would have to do that? You know darn well that's not the typical consumer, and they can't base their business decisions on people like you. Maybe you should change your argument to: it's a loss for
you. Then we could agree
(Incidentally, HDCP/HDMI alone will not force you to do this. It is perfectly within the HDCP/HDMI standard for an HD-DVD player to provide both component outputs and encrypted digital outputs at the same time. It remains to be seen, however, whether the HD-DVD standard will permit that.)
As for the other copy protection issues: as I said, I don't claim it will halt all bootlegging. But it will certainly curb it. The fact that DVDs were cracked is irrelevant for two reasons. First, that's a
disc protection system, and HDCP is a
stream protection system. Without going into the details (although we can discuss them in more detail if you like), it's going to be
quite expensive for a bootlegger to use HDCP cracking to bootleg HD-DVDs. That means bootleggers will have to sell a
lot of pirated discs to make money---and that makes it all the more likely they'll be caught.
So that leaves the possibility of breaking the discs protection, and that's my second point. DVD CSS was a first-generation technology that failed to anticipate the abilities of the average hacker. DVD-Audio and SACD have much more robust copy protection, and HD-DVD I guarantee will be better protected than that. Find me a web site where I can download pirated SACDs, with the original DSD data intact, and we'll talk.
So it is simply false, at least for practical purposes, to state that
any copy protection will be broken. It is indeed possible to design a system that's sufficiently robust for this application.
Quote:
| Organised criminals who benefit most from illegal copying will have the resources to break/circumvent HDCP if they choose so that can continue to churn out illegal copies. |
And if you read my post I said it won't stop such people. But it will deter many, and that's the goal.. First of all, the HDCP cracking equipment alone will be expensive to create because of the controls in placed on chips. (The unique decryption keys are generally built into the chips themselves before they leave the manufacturer to the licensed buyer). So someone will likely have to custom-engineer HDCP decryption hardware, ripping apart existing HDCP-compliant hardware to do it. Secondly, after HDCP is removed you're left with an
uncompressed HD stream: for 1080i60, that's something like 1.5Gbps. So you need a terabytee fileserver to store the data, or a real-time video codec. The latter won't be readily available on PCs for awhile. So in short, the economic costs of HDCP-based piracy are far higher than they are with, say, a videocam bootlegger or a WVHS bootlegger.
It's certainly not
impossible, and I agree it
will happen, but as I said content providers are not looking to completely eliminate it, they're looking to sufficiently curb it.
Quote:
| Copy protection is nonsense. It will always be broken. It solves nothing in the long-run and hurts consumers (in the short term) who bear the consequences of these decisions. |
No, this is nonsense. The fact that
current copy protection schemes have been broken in no ways means they
all will be. Has the SACD format been cracked, for example? The MLP tracks from a DVD-Audio disc? The DVD community is learning from past mistakes, and I'm willing to wager that HD-DVDs are pretty darn solid.
