Up until a couple of weeks ago I was blissfully ignorant or ignorantly blissful of the full impact of HDCP. I was so proud of my foresight when I bought my 42 inch plasma display over three years ago. I bought one without tuner or audio to be ‘future proof’; it was touted to be HD ready. It had a DVI-D input which I assume was HDCP compliant. I had no way to test and it is not like the information was openly published. I recently bought my wife an HD DVD player for her birthday and have been trying to surmount copy protection issues ever since. Copy hell, all I want to do is watch a SD DVD at 1080i instead of 480p. OK so the software solution is to make a copy of the DVD with ALL of the copy protection removed, that way I can use it any way I want. I know of several choices for the software to accomplish this. In essence making a copy for my own use makes me the criminal. When I am forced to make a copy of a DVD, for my own fair use, analog signals are not involved in any way, for that matter no DVD player of any kind is involved.

What we have here is the planned obsolescence of all of the AV equipment of early adopters. I want a hardware solution to this problem, yes I know there is one and it is on its way.

Can you help me?

Also, I would buy the HD DVD player if it weren’t for the format war and teh ICT crap. I bought by HDTV in 2001. Almost no sets had DVI back then, and HDCP was not out yet. I like my TV, it works great. My XBox 360 outputs fantastic looking 1080i to it. Basically, the MPAA and those involved (Sony and Toshiba), are punishing everyone for piracy that will happen by very few. For that, I won’t buy HD DVD or Blu Ray until the ICT stuff is stated to never be on a disc or at the bare minimum the packaging shows which have ICT and which don’t.

On another note, I saw HD-DVD’s for sale (namely Last Samurai), and thought the packaging was a joke! It felt VERY cheap. I was sort of expecting something fancier than today’s DVD cases, but this could easily be crushed or bent.

There is a possibility some discs will not play at full resolution on your monitor, but that does not make it “fact that they will downsample the proramming for my present 43″ plasma monitor”

Being upset over the possibilities of copy protection does not require sensationalized statements about what is and is not happening. I would feel uncomfortable saying something like that thinking that it is untrue. If you don’t think that what you’re saying is incorrect, then I guess we disagree.

I’m not buying either format because I feel $500 or certainly $1000 is too much to pay for a DVD player of any kind, no matter how good it looks. I just don’t watch movies that much, I’ll continue watching overcompressed cable channels until prices drop. My second reason for not buying would be uncertainty about the format, I’ll wait to see if LG or anyone else actually makes a universal player.

Richard Lawler
HDBeat.com

That said, buying an HDTV without DVI/HDCP support in 2005 is really just kind of a huge blunder. Manufacturers have been supporting DVI/HDCP since 2003 (I have it on my “antiquated” CRT rear projection set), and wouldn’t even have imagined that it was possible to buy a set in 2005 that didn’t have it.

On the plus side, at least your TV salesperson didn’t try to overcharge your credit card and threaten you, I guess…

Honestly while I was wowed quite a bit by the HD-DVD stuff at CES (in a *carefully controlled visual environment*) I still don’t think it adds enough value to justify the cost of the unit or the huge hassle factor when the machine doesn’t work as advertised.

The leap from black and white television to color was huge. The leap from standard definition TV to HDTV was huge. The leap from today’s DVD to HD-DVD is not that huge (in my opinion based on the HD-DVD’s I’ve seen).

There is not a strong enough reason to get me to upgrade and if as an early adopter I won’t (fairly little to be gained from a quality improvement, high cost of the players, uncertainty about formats Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, the fact that they will downsample the proramming for my present 43″ plasma monitor, etc.

No thank you. I’ll stick with what I’ve got.

I think that you overestimate consumers. Even you didn’t know about HDCP. 99.99% of all customers won’t know about ICT and frankly won’t care. Most people (as sad as this will seem) get their information from sales people and I SERIOUSLY doubt that salespeople will bring it up.

Even worse yet — most probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

As for the comparison to CSS… there is a HUGE difference. The inclusion of CSS *does* stop the weekend copier. ICT (if it actually did anything) would only stop “the pros” and, like you said, they will soon have better ways to do things. The only reason to activate ICT would be if the studios were convinced that ICT would be a “keep honest people honest” system and since to take advantage of the “hole” you would need some serious gear… that’s really not what it is.

As for why they don’t say “we won’t use it…” Fear. It’s easier to say “We’re not using it” and leave the option open just in case the world changes in some unforseen way.

The other thing that people need to remember is that TV sets have and will have HDCP. The further we go into the future, the less likely that people will be affected by this.

Cheers,
Steve

I’m sure that there are individuals within the studios that “get it” just like I’m sure that there are individuals who are so misguided that they actually think degrading the analog signal will do something to combat piracy.

Overall this has almost nothing to do with is preventing piracy, they know full well that the pirates are too well funded, equipped and trained and that HDCP will be little more than a speed bump for them. This is about impeding fair use.

You say that the studios won’t use ICT becuase there’s no point, arguably there’s no point on CSS on current DVDs, people like you or I can easily defeat CSS but the studios still use CSS on every DVD they produce to keep Joe AOLer or your Grandma from making a backup copy of their DVDs.

ICT will be the same way, they will degrade and eventually disable analog output altogether to ensure that the ONLY output will be HDCP making it prohibitively difficult for the average consumer to exercise their fair use rights to do things like make backup copies of their media.