So, my home PC (which I can’t get back to for a few hours) has never really played well with modern digital content with everything except Youtube basically playing in potato quality, because I assumed that services like Google Play Moves & TV and Amazon Prime Video were just shitty and poorly made and would only play HD on actual TVs and cellphones because Copyright Law Lulz (fuck the man!).
But instead, it’s apparently because my setup isn’t registering as HDCP compliant, and I have no idea why. Or, more specifically, the listed reason doesn’t make any sense to me.
From my Googling, it sounds like virtually every decent video card in the last 5 years or so should be HDCP-compliant pretty much as a matter of assumption. Certainly it looks like the 290X would have been (mine was the bog-standard Sapphire variety, if that helps). My monitors are listed as HDCP compliant via DVI-D, and that’s how they’re connected. Yet in the Radeon settings program, HDCP is listed as Disabled for both monitors (and it’s not a switch I can toggle, as far as I can tell).
And, indeed, according to ArcSoft’s BD Assistant, all of that is true! GPU, connector, and monitor all listed as HDCP compliant. However, it says my driver isn’t compatible?
What on earth does that mean? People say to use WHQL drivers, but I mean, I just got whatever Steam updated me to (don’t have the exact driver number handy, sorry). I certainly never downloaded any beta drivers, which seems to be a problem people are talking about, unless that’s what Steam does??
I mean, in short, why would AMD release multiple display drivers for their 290X series (cuz I’ve updated my drivers semi-regularly over the years and never had luck using HDCP-locked media on this PC) that is ostensibly HDCP-compliant that breaks that functionality?