Over component you can easily rip that data and throw it into a torrent and then the entertainment industry loses 100 BILLION DOLLARS!
This is where I get lost a bit. Right now, I rip DVDs with my DVD drive and various programs, not through some complex DVDplayer->TV-in card->compression setup. Isn’t solving that Step 1 to preventing p2p thievery?
Also, like fundamentally, isn’t any attempt to copy protect something that is eventually displayed on a television to the viewer a waste of time? I can just set up a camcorder pointed at my TV, if nothing else.
No, there is hardware-level encryption. Camcorder@TV is analog and looks crappy. To get bit-perfect copies, you must defeat the hardware. But, all hardware is deployed with required compliant protocols that prevent displaying the video on anything not approved. The only reason you can copy DVDs is because all these mechanisms were not in place before… and the only reason they can be recompressed as divx/xvid/etc is because the crappy, weak encryption scheme was broken due to sloppiness on the part of an implementor. If your DVD burner forbids you from burning images marked as “PROTECTED”, and you can’t play them except on hardware that can decrypt them, then you cannot make digital copies like before - since even if you rip an image, nobody can do anything with it.
EDIT:
When software players come out for Windows, it may be possible to use an illegal program to frame-capture the output. This is not something a most computers could handle, requiring perhaps 150 megabytes per second of disk space, or 500 gigs for a 1-hour movie. But in slo-mo, or with a 4-way RAID setup, it might be possible to capture a movie like that and recompress it.
I did some research - http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/padlock/hardware.jsp - and with a custom chip implementing AES, it is possible to decrypt that stream on the fly. I don’t know what standard they’re using but it probably is not faster than AES, unless it’s trivially weak. Of course, that means that you are paying for an extra $10-$50 set of chips in any HDMI display device, an extra $10-$50 set of chips on any HDMI output (since the raw video stream itself cannot be encrypted before compression, and the compressed stream cannot be decompressed by the monitor, as that would take too much resources compared to a decryption). So you have to do this:
Action : Location : Extra Cost You Pay to Prevent Yourself from Stealing
Read : BD Drive : 0
Decrypt(1) : BD Drive or computer : $10-$20 or 0
Decompress : Computer or video card : 0
Encrypt(2) : HDMI send port on video card : $10-$50
Send : HDMI Send port on video card : 0
Decrypt(2) : Monitor HDMI receive port : $10-$50
Display : Monitor : 0
…giving $20-$120 as my guess for the pricerange of current-gen on the fly embedded 1200 Mbps encryption/decryption.
What are the weaknesses, if these assumptions are correct? Well… the decompressed, unencrypted video stream is sitting around on your computer in between phases “Decompress” and “Encrypt(2)”. So you can still grab it from the video card.
I just realized how illegal I’m being, according to various governments!!! Please read what I posted above as a joke!!!1111 Wait, no ITS ENCRYPTED!!! If you read it, YOU BROKE MY ROT-13 ENCRYPTION AND GO TO GUANO BAY PRISON!!!
They’re not using AES, but it’s far easier than that to decrypt. I remember seeing an article (I think this was it) where they analyzed the algorithm, and determined that if you had a device whose key you wanted to know, you can determine its key from examining the key negotiation results between it and 40 other devices. Once a single key has been revealed, the cat’s out of the bag and now anyone can pretend to be an HDCP-compliant device and decrypt and capture the stream.
Which is why they’ve also introduced the key revocation system, so that if keys are leaked or revealed, playback devices and software can be updated to reject connections with those devices and you’ll have to get a new key.
There’s a device out there right now which can strip the HDCP protection from a DVI connection, so it’ll be interesting to see if its key is one of the first to be banned… (Edit: Here it is.)
If by amusing you mean incredibly annoying and confusing to the common consumer, then yes, it’s going to be hilarious. HDCP was broken awhile ago, and I doubt the new protection scheme both Bluray and HD-DVD are using are going to last for long. Which will be nice for my linux htpc, where I have to break the law everytime I want to play a DVD.
Should we assume that with Sony claiming 100% backwards compatibility there is a little PS2 in the PS3? How else could they get full compatibility with a completely different processor? Microsoft is having a hell of a time trying to do that, and I can’t believe Sony’s software engineers are that much better than Microsoft’s.
Sony still hasn’t explained how they are doing it but that’s what they did with the PS2/PS1 backwards compatibility. There were two seperate lasers on the PS2 - one for CD’s, one of DVD’s and it was fairly common for the system to stop playing one or the other.
The fact that Sony did not mention BC at all at E3 has me worried. I’m not going to be suprised if they have some disappointing news on the subject later.
That is worrisome, yes, but if anyone knows enough about the PS2 and PS1
to create an emulator, it would be Sony. Hopefully.
We could be optimistic and hope they didn’t mention it because everyone
takes such things for granted. Then again, look at the problems with Xbox
titles on Xbox 360 (improving, but still some games that don’t run).
Switching architectures is heinous. People make assumptions about how the memory barriers will work, and that changes when you use a different CPU. Modern CPU’s are very aggressive with the instruction re-ordering, and that alone will cause no end of headaches.
Considering that Itanium is strictly in-order, an can never re-order any instructions, I’m not sure what you mean. Are you talking about speculative loads?
I think the number is either a typo. or Sony are counting all localisations separately, as the PS3 is region-free for games. How Sony are acheiving total backwards compatability is not yet known to me.
Edit: Original source here, for those who care. Time of update was 00:13:29, just below the ‘monkey video’ segment.
