HDCP High Definition makes a stand against piracy
It’s a necessary evil that could kill older HDTVs, but all the movie studios are behind HDCP. You’ll have to learn to live with it.
HDCP could be described as a conspiracy on behalf of the major film studios to control high-definition content.
You can’t really blame them. They want to control a product they worked hard to create, and their livelihood depends on a profitable business model.
But HDCP remains an aggravation for consumers, a buzzword you should ensure is on the spec sheets of any new high-definition devices you buy.
Get on board the HDCP Conspiracy Train
HDCP is an encryption method or secret handshake that every device so much as touching a high-definition video signal should know. This includes HD DVD/Blu-ray players, HD-Satellite or cable boxes, home-theater receivers, PC-Video cards and monitors and especially your HDTV.
Failure to meet HDCP compliance means you could be subject to having bad things happen to your pristine high-definition image quality.
As annoying as it is, HDCP is quite clever.
It allows individual content providers to dictate whether they want to flag their content (movies, TV shows, etc.), thus protecting it from being distributed in the analog realm.
Here’s an example: Let’s say in the future, Disney decides it wants to protect Pirates of the Caribbean 5 from digital piracy. Disney has the option of activating something called an (Image Constraint Token) ICT flag.
If a Pirates of the Caribbean 5 Blu-ray disc is sold with the ICT flag "On", anyone playing it back on a Blu-ray player through VGA or component video outputs will experience the dastardly downrezz.
Downrezzing means having your resolution down-sampled from 1080P (1920×1080) to 960×540. That’s a lot of missing picture!
Fortunately, the ICT card hasn’t been played by the industry, yet.
At the time of writing this, no HD-DVD, Blu-ray disc or broadcast HDTV special has had the ICT activated. So you can play it back through component cables and not have to worry about HDCP compliance.
It’s a good thing too!
Non-HDCP High Definition Video Sources Could be in Trouble
Many people own the Xbox 360 with its HD DVD add-on.
Unless you have the new Xbox 360 with HDMI, you’re not HDCP complaint. HD DVD (but not games) through standard Xbox 360 with its component output would be downrezzed if ICT were active.
Do you remember back in the early 2000s when HDTVs were insanely expensive?
There are people who actually bought a Pioneer Elite Plasma back in 2001 and paid over $20,000. All those sets have is a set of lowly analog inputs in the form of component and VGA.
Many newer HDTVs with only DVI may not be HDCP compliant and what’s even worse, HDMI - that bastion of HDCP compliance - has even seen a few products released that don’t quite measure up.
For more information you’ll want to be clear on the HDCP compliant input/output methods.
Tags: TLM
Encrypting the compressed video on disc is one thing (a much more sensible thing), but encrypting raw digital video at 1920x1080 is meaningless. Nobody will copy raw video like this. A 90 minute movie (assuming 24p no audio) would consume just under a terrabyte and would require a storage transfer rate of 150 megabytes per second. (Not only that but the decode/reencode process will lower image quality)
How is it hurtful? Signal errors mean a whole frame gets lost, not just a pixel - and saying someone shouldnt be able to play a movie they paid for on a computer monitor is just nuts. Plus you could argue that the needless encrypt/decrypt processing wastes valuable energy ;)