High-Quality HD Content Can't Easily Be Played by Vista 434
DaMan1970 writes "Content protection features in Windows Vista from Microsoft are preventing customers from playing high-quality HD audio/video & harming system performance. Vista requires premium content like HD movies to be degraded in quality when it is sent to high-quality outputs, like DVI. Users will see status codes that say 'graphics OPM resolution too high'. There are ways to bypass the Windows Vista protection by encoding the movies using alternative codecs like X264, or DiVX, which are in fact more effective sometimes then Windows own WMV codec. These codecs are quite common on HD video Bittorrent sites, or Newsgroups."
Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Features (Score:3, Interesting)
Feature-Loss (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
Because even my grandmother can tell the difference between a 128kbps AAC and a lossless stream!</sarcasm>
Seriously though. 16-bit, stereo audio sampled at 44.1KHz is 1378 kilobits. A 128kbps AAC is nearly 11:1 compression, while most FLACs are lucky to reach 2:1. That makes AACs at least five times cheaper to distribute (assuming the only cost involved is bandwidth, and that costs rise proportionally to bandwidth) than FLACs.
That sounds to me like the format has a "make it suck" flag. Which I actually don't doubt at all... but it's still different from using slightly lossy compression to save half an order of magnitude on storage and bandwidth. Nobody's pro^Wmovie collection is in a lossless video codec, after all...
-:sigma.SB
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the laws are rediculous - going so far as to allow, for example, resampled and up-resed DVD (normal) playback over VGA but not over component despite the fact that both connections are analog and have the same level of security (i.e. none). The only difference is that VGA is viewed as a PC monitor connection and HDMI is viewed as a TV connection.
This issue of course pre-dates the current concern for BluRay and HD-DVD playback which require a secure path to the display for full res playback. When you find another OS that can legally playback these formats over an insecure channel in full res then you can start complaining about Vista, but until you do you should restrict your complaints in this area to the media cartel that is creating these rules and the government that supports and enforces this type of behavior.
Or you can just accept, as I have, that the winner of the BluRay vs. HD-DVD war will actually be downloaded movies and normal DVDs and ignore any weird playback behaviors in BluRay and HD-DVD.
This has often been true. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily with quality -- I admit, some of the pirated stuff is pretty bad. But in terms of overall experience, piracy wins almost every time.
Let's take a few examples...
Movies (standard-def)
Buying a DVD outright is too expensive. I watch a movie once, maybe twice, then I'm done. It's also not convenient -- either I have to drive to a store, or I order online and wait days for it to be shipped.
Renting is too inconvenient, for the same reasons as above. Netflix comes close, but lacks instant gratification.
Both of the above deal with physical discs, which can scratch, break, etc. If it's a rental, it might come that way, and I have to wait for another one to ship. Also, many discs feature copy protection above and beyond CSS, most of which is designed to make the disc look corrupted to a ripping program -- but that can prevent me from playing it properly, even in a dedicated DVD player.
There are some other half-assed attempts, like the iTunes Music Store and Amazon Unbox, all of which require me to run proprietary, Windows-only software to make the purchase, and usually gives me a DRM'd file, which I must play on proprietary, Windows-only software. Ok, iTunes works on a Mac -- except I'm on Linux, so that's no help.
So, piracy wins on almost all counts -- I can get near-instant gratification, it's convenient, I can do it entirely with open source software (KTorrent to download, mplayer to watch), and it's cheap enough that I often download things I'm not sure I'd want to spend money on -- and sometimes I enjoy them, and sometimes I don't.
The only thing piracy loses on, currently, is that rentals give me full DVD quality in the time it takes to drive to the store. It can take several days to download an ISO at that quality, with all the extra features. But that's only a matter of time and bandwidth -- and even when I do rent a physical disc, I often rip it immediately, so that I can take the movie back and watch it whenever I have the time.
There is actually one other thing -- the movie theater itself. I do actually pay to see good movies in the theater, when they come out, even though I could probably download them a few days before they come out.
Movies (high-def)
This is a no-brainer: I currently can neither rent nor buy, because my monitor doesn't support HDCP, I don't have a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive, and neither is sufficiently cracked for me to just pop in a disc and play it on Linux, on the monitor I currently own.
The best bet would be something like iTunes or Amazon Unbox, which suffers from all the same proprietary issues -- assuming they even have high-def content -- plus I may run into the HDCP issue.
However, my Internet connection and my hard disk can both handle a 5 gig or so download of an h.264-encoded 720p movie -- which still looks damned good.
This is a case where I do actually want to be a good consumer, but can't. I'd like to buy the Serenity HD-DVD, but that would require me to buy either an HDTV and an HD-DVD player or a new monitor, new video card, and an HD-DVD drive, all of which is prohibitively expensive -- especially considering my current monitor is somewhere between 720p and 1080p (it's 1600x1200) and works fine, so I'd be buying a new monitor for no good reason.
TV shows
Well, TV itself (cable, satellite, etc) just sucks. It's not enough to interrupt you every 5-10 minutes with ads, they have now started pushing an ad into the middle of a show -- taking over a full quarter of your screen with an animated ad, with a little bit of sound to go with it. You're also required to buy channels in bundles, which limits choice -- if you pick and choose the channels you want, it may cost more than just buying one bundle that has them all -- but it will cost even more if your channels don't happen to all be in the same bundle.
Renting them sort of works. The frustrating thing there is, it makes sense to rent them one DVD at a time, so you can wa
Use MPlayer? (Score:3, Interesting)
BillSF
PS: I use a EUR 30,-- ATI Radeon RV370 X550 which should be all the video card you need. $1000 is more than I pay for an entire dual-core amd64/3000MHz (2800MHz in 64bit mode) system with 4G of RAM and two 500G hard drives!
Re:A bunch of garbage (Score:2, Interesting)
It IS a "make it suck" flag (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference between plain DVI and encrypted DVI (a.k.a., HDMI) is largely one created by the DMCA:
1. with DVI, you could, at least theoretically, make a video capture card with a DVI _input_ connector, and just rip the digital content that way. Basically the computer would think you're outputting to a TFT monitor, when in fact you're getting to record the digital output stream in all its quality.
2. with HDMI, well, you could do the exact same, you just have to fake the authentication and include the decryption. Which isn't impossible by any reckoning.
However,
1. Since DVI it doesn't include any copy protection, it doesn't count as circumventing it under the DMCA.
2. Since HDMI does, it does. So they could raid anyone selling such cards or adapters, and demonize anyone who bought one.
However the bottomline at the moment is that
A) I don't know of any actual such devices at the moment, and
B) If you're going to decrypt it anyway, you might as well decrypt the DVD, but
C) most people have DVI or VGA connectors on their monitors, while virtually noone has a HDMI monitor or graphics card.
So for the sake of protecting against a theoretical threat, they are making it suck for a bunch of legitimate customers. Better yet, it makes it actually more rewarding to download a ripped copy than to buy a legit one.
Actually, AFAIK it's even more funny than that. They try to detect fluctuations too, so you can't snoop on the stream in transit. So all it takes is a wobbly monitor to get your stream downgraded even if you _do_ have HDMI.
At any rate, much as I don't like MS, I dunno if I'd blame MS here, other than for bending over. If the MPAA demands that kind of stupidity, either you comply, or you get to play no HD videos on that computer. So MS likely faced the lose-lose choice of either they implement that idiocy, or they get to tell some hundreds of millions of potential customers that Vista doesn't play HD media at all. You can probably see how the latter is a faster suicide.
Re:is this story just flamebait? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This has often been true. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a messy lazy bastard, I damage stuff all the time.
I love Warcraft 3 online, so I have a clone CD image on my drive that I mount and the copy protection is fooled by Daemon tools and the game works.
The stupid thing is I require a GENUINE CD KEY TO PLAY ONLINE I can NOT play online without that key, it's a real, made by blizzard key, keygens won't work!
So why do I need my damn CD in the drive? I've already proven I own it.
Silly stuff.
Re:It IS a "make it suck" flag (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
I think what you meant to say is that you will boycott HD until it is as easily cracked as DVDs are now. Am I right?
Okay, this is crap and so was his first paper FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone who's shot HD video with a camcorder seen the errors he's claiming? Tracked them down? What consumer camcorder supports ICT? Why in this world would it support ICT? ICT is what tells Vista and other devices to protect apparently and if it's not turned on Vista doesn't do anything. Where this guy got the idea that Vista would arbitrarily protect video just because it's a high rez is beyond me. If that were the case wouldn't it also try to protect all of the other various CODECS out there?
Some discussions on AVS about this -> http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=8
BTW how come when I search this mystery error message about OPM resolution being too high I get a zillion hits on his paper but nothing from users screaming from the rooftops? Does it strike anyone else as weird that he seems to be the ONLY one complaining about this? If it's such an issue then finding users screaming shouldn't be a problem. Seems like every other bizarre error I've entered into Google has found others with the problem so why not this error?
As much as it is fun to bash Microsoft this guy doesn't even pass the giggle test....
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
So, off the bat, you completely misread the OP's point. He never claimed anything regarding cost to consumers, but was speaking about the cost of distribution--and even that includes a caveat! But let's move on to your next point.
When did anyone ever mention anything about wasting money? Up until this point we were just discussing realities: FLAC files are much bigger than 128kbps AAC files, so it costs more to distribute FLAC files. Coincidentally, it also costs more to store them.
This is where you really lose it. Are you just going to completely ignore the space on your hard drive the FLACs take up? An average 500GB drive costs between $100 and $120. The average FLAC album is 500MB. [awaken.com] The average 128kbps AAC album is (let's be generous here) 50MB. That is an entire order of magnitude. You would need to buy 10 500GB drives to store an equivalent amount of FLACs as AACs. Now, most people don't have music collections that are that large--but my current collection (recorded in a mix of MP3 and AAC) is easily 80GB, stored on a 500GB drive. I could not fit this same collection on the drive using FLAC; I would have to either switch to a TB drive, or span the library over two separate drives, both of which would cost me money. Unless you are claiming you only play FLACs from your DVD backups, (in which case the cost should factor in time and convenience), there is no doubt that FLACs cost you considerably more to store than AAC files.
So, in conclusion, FLAC does cost more than AAC, for everyone. I'm not claiming the cost is unjustified; some people vastly prefer lossless audio. Others really don't care. But there can be no doubt that the extra quality carries with it a hefty price tag.
HD Samples for emperical testing in Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
720p @ 2 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-720
1080p @ 10 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-sam
Note that the 1080p clip was designed for Xbox 360 playback, so it'll need a pretty beefy PC for playback.
Also, note the current VLC release doesn't play these back correctly, alas (I think a problem with DQuant or B-frames). They're fully VC-1 spec compliant; maybe they can use these clips for debugging.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
MS is a champion of HD-DVD. MS makes many console games for the 360, and many games for the PC.
MS also owns a substantial stake in NBC.
Beyond that, MS is heavily involved in distribution of video (through WMV) and audio (through WMA). If MS said, "We aren't doing DRM, Period," they would loose the video/audio market, at least as far as the cartels are concerned (MPAA/RIAA).
MS is very much enfranchised with the current audio/video powers-that-be. Keep in mind this also applies to Sony (Sony Music versus Sony Electronics). The consumer electronics industry is definitely of two minds over DRM; and even the non-content providers somewhat relish the thought of putting consumers on the upgrade treadmill.