Quote:
Originally posted by chef423:
I have been seeing this in the forums. What is going on with this topic. I was in the market to buy, but I dont
want to spend 2-4k and find out later I should have waited.
Thanks in advance,
chef423
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Well, you might want to read the "boycott now" topic (for amusement, if nothing else). A boycott seems laughable to me--all the current HD capable set owners (much less owners of tuners) put together represent a
tiny portion of the American television viewing public. If the high value content broadcasters lost the business of any significant part of them through a boycott (which I doubt that they would) I think they'd just shrug.
The current state of things is this: on the 25th of July, a gang of equipment companies and some Hollywood studios signed off on the DVI/HDCP hardware/protocol spec. This is basically a copy-protected digital version of the analog component video connectors on the current sets: it carries the bits of a single, already tuned, already decoded and
decompressed program in digital raster from a set-top-box to a monitor for display, just as the component video cables carry an analog HD presentation of a single tuned-in program from some STB to a monitor for display. The difference is, it's a digital bitstream that can be encrypted if the content is deemed to be too valuable to be carried in the clear. It has a low bandwidth upstream channel for authorization and key-exchange with the STB. This interface is explicitly designed to be unfriendly to recording now and in the future, which has caused a lot of furor, since many people thought that the studio's acceptance of it was an attempted end-run around the FCC's Fair Use law, which it is not. DVI/DTCP, while not intended to be copied from, is also not intended to be the sole data buss in a copy-protected home digital A/V network. (For an overview, see Silicon Image's
whitepaper on the topic--they developed this jointly with Intel).
A week or so before that, Sony Pictures and Warner Pictures
announced their acceptance of the 1394/DTCP connection and Mitsubishi committed to adding the interface to their televisions. This is a system that has been worked on for the past three years by a consortium five companies (Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba) so it also gets called the "5C" standard. This wraps copy protection mechanisms around a tuned portion of a still compressed HDTV bitstream. This is certainly more sensible for recording--since the programming enters your home digitally compressed, why would you want to record any decompressed form of it anyway? This would be the connection between an HD recorder of some sort and whatever tuner you have.
DTCP provides multiple levels of copy protection. These are:
- "Copy Freely" for material whose copyright holders don't care how you copy it (or which is in the public domain),
- "Copy One Generation", to allow you to record high value material to which you have subscribed access,
- "Copy No More" to mark playback of recordings of "Copy One Generation" stuff and
- "Copy Never" which will mark retail prerecorded material.
"Copy Freely" stuff is not encrypted by the protocol and requires no authentication between devices--the source is allowed to send it to any requesting sink. "Copy Never" requires the highest level of security; for some reason, a little more lax authentication policy is used for "Copy One Generation" and "Copy No More". The two modes are called "Full AKE" and "Restricted AKE" (where AKE stands for "Authorization and Key Exchange"); a source transmitting "Copy Never" material must
require "Full AKE" from the sink. What I believe is that recording devices are not allowed to implement "Full AKE" when acting as sinks, and thus could not even talk to an HD DVD player outputting a copy-protected program. (My source of information for this is a cursory reading of
the DTCP Informational Spec Vol 1, Rev 1.2 , dated 25 July 2000--there may be a more recent spec, but I haven't found any online. Also read their
whitepaper , which is a little less technical and give a little more of the philosophy and outlook of the scheme).
Now, DVI/HDCP and 1394/HDCP are not mutually exclusive and could appear in any number of combinations in HD A/V equipment. HD monitors without HD tuners could have only inexpensive DVI/HDCP connectors; monitors with built-in tuners would have 1394/HDCP ports for I/O to HD recorders and players and a slot for some sort of standardized Point-of-Deployment card (another point of hot controversy where the cable companies are dragging their feet--they
really don't want to give up supplying STBs to customers) to authorize viewing of copy-protected material. Sets with tuners and 1394 ports wouldn't need DVI inputs, but they might include some to accomodate possible HD DVD players including only DVI outputs.
As to whether you should wait or not, I'm contemplating that myself. I've been sitting on the fence for a long while: in the middle of researching my own possible HDTV purchase, I discovered 5C and the fact that all the current HD STBs have built-in provisions to down-rez high-value content (one would hope only big-ticket theatrical films and only recent ones) when agreements could be reached on copy-protection. The studios are providing a relatively small amount of HD material now on a provisional basis (and I wouldn't be surprised if there are people out there making digital copies of all of it
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif ). To tell you the truth, if I were them, I would
never release theatrical productions in HD--this copy protection stuff is doomed to be defeated and the hit on their after theater sales has the potential to be
huge. A workable business model for the film industry if it essentially loses control of distribution of its product is very difficult to imagine.
I'm thinking it could take another year for this DVI/HDCP/1394/DTCP equipment to fall into place. In that year, I
could be enjoying progressive scan DVDs and what little HD broadcast material is available now on one of the modestly priced (and modestly sized) sets available this year. I make a larger investment on a bigger and better set in four or five years when all this is sorted out and HDTV has
really gotten under way.
If you do decide to buy now, you might want to buy Mitsubishi, since they've made their famous
promise to upgrade all of their HD tuner-upgradeable TVs to 1394/DTCP at a "reasonable" cost expected to be less than $1000. I'm eyeing their WT-46809, which I've found online at
Crazy Eddie for $1950.
-- Mike Scott
[This message has been edited by michaeltscott (edited 08-08-2001).]