Windows Vista, HD and the high cost of Content Protection

[bigburner]

An informative article by Peter Gutmann of Auckland University, if you've got 10 minutes to spare.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...ista_cost.html

Whilst the thrust of this article relates to the damage that the computer industry will sustain as a consequence of Vista's content protection functionality, there are obvious impacts on the hi-fi / home theatre industry.

Here's a controversial paragraph from the article that may stimulate some discussion in this forum:

The silly thing about the industry's obsession with image quality is that repeated studies have shown that what really matters to viewers (rather than what they think matters) is image size and not quality. Sure, if you take the average consumer into a store and put them in front of the latest plasma panel they'll be impressed by the fact that they can count each individual hair in Gandalf's beard, but once he's leaping about wrestling with the balrog this detail becomes lost and the only differentiator is image size. You can find a good discussion of this in The Media Equation by Stanford professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. In one experiment on visual fidelity they showed a film using the best equipment they could get their hands on, and again using a fifth-generation copy on bad tape and poor equipment. There were no differences in users responses to the two types of images (see the book for more details on this). You can see an example of this effect yourself if you can set up a machine with a CRT and an LCD monitor. Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for a minute or to. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty? Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?

[Hdale85]

hmm....Scary

[aud19]

Yeah....Vista scares me abit All this supposed content protection does nothing but limit consumer fair use :evil:

[Kevin P]

Exactly. I won't touch Vista with a 39 1/2 foot pole, at least for a while until all the dust settles. There's a reason I went with Linux for my HTPC. DRM/copy protection only limits legitimate use and does nothing to stop piracy. In fact, with some of the newer draconian schemes, unencumbered pirated content will be superior to crippled legitimate media.

I avoided XP for years because of activation. And that's child's play compared to what Vista has.

[Brandon B]

The silly thing about the industry's obsession with image quality is that repeated studies have shown that what really matters to viewers (rather than what they think matters) is image size and not quality. Sure, if you take the average consumer into a store and put them in front of the latest plasma panel they'll be impressed

The average consumer is one thing. He's lumping all viewers into one large group. People on these forums don't generally fall into that group.

The average consumer is also happy with MP3 through a $400 HTiB.

So while his point is valid for the population at large and for the industry as a whole, the 5-10% of the market made up by people like us will be damn loud and unhappy if they simply go for size.

Broad brush, meaningless conclusion.

BB

[AndrewM]

Is that what passes as quality writing these days? Do you think Skippy there even bothered to do say 5 minutes of fact checking? Let's look at some of the highlights...

Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's “The Dark Side of the Moon”, released as a Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to play it under Vista. Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista disables it, and you end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

SACD in a computer?

Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video. But what if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good chance that you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really does support HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did. As the site that first broke the story in their article The Great HDCP Fiasco puts it:

It can and will be disabled in set top players as well, this is not unique to Vista and is decided by the content provider.

If you have even more money to burn, you can go for the largest (conventional) computer monitor made, the Samsung's stupidly large (for a computer monitor) 46" SyncMaster 460PN. Again though, Vista won't display HD content on it, turning your $4,000 purchase into a still-image picture frame (oddly enough, this monitor has been advertised as “HDTV ready” by retailers even though you can't display HD images on it, although in practice the term “HD-ready” has been diluted close to meaninglessness).

Obviously he has no clue what common terms mean, "HD Ready" just means it is capable of displaying a certain resolution and nothing more. It has nothing to do with viewing protected content, you will be able to view all the unprotected content you want from now until the display dies in however many years.

In order to appropriately protect content, Vista will probably have to disable any special device features that it can't directly control.....

Yea..."probably"

An interesting potential security threat, suggested by Karl Siegemund, occurs when Vista is being used to run a security monitoring system such as a video surveillance system. If it's possible to convince Vista that what it's communicating is premium content, the video (and/or audio) surveillance content will become unavailable, since it's unlikely that a surveillance center will be using DRM-enabled recording devices or monitors. I can just see this as a plot element in Ocean's Fifteen or Mission Impossible Six, “It's OK, their surveillance system is running Vista, we can shut it down with spoofed premium content”.

And why would that "If" actually happen?

(The silly thing about the industry's obsession with image quality is that repeated studies have shown that what really matters to viewers (rather than what they think matters) is image size and not quality. Sure, if you take the average consumer into a store and put them in front of the latest plasma panel they'll be impressed by the fact that they can count each individual hair in Gandalf's beard, but once he's leaping about wrestling with the balrog this detail becomes lost and the only differentiator is image size. You can find a good discussion of this in The Media Equation by Stanford professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. In one experiment on visual fidelity they showed a film using the best equipment they could get their hands on, and again using a fifth-generation copy on bad tape and poor equipment. There were no differences in users' responses to the two types of images (see the book for more details on this). You can see an example of this effect yourself if you can set up a machine with a CRT and an LCD monitor. Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for a minute or two. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty? Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?

Conversely, image size is a huge differentiator: The bigger the better. So in practice a degraded image on a huge VGA monitor (or by extension anything with a lower-quality analog input) will rate better than a non-degraded image on a much smaller LCD monitor, assuming you can find an example of the latter that Vista will actually output an HD image to. Of course convincing consumers of this is another matter).

The sales of HD big-screen type displays has far outpaced the sales of SD large screen displays. 10'ish years ago the local big box retailers devoted the majority of floor space to regular sub 40" SD displays with a small room with a handful of big screen TV's. Today it's the opposite. Even look at the lower-end stores, 10 years ago a store like Walmart likely had no big-screen displays, today it's half of their TV section.

A few others, his views on hardware acceleration for HD content isn't true as a whole, PC hardware for the most part isn't quite up to doing HD with some form of hardware help (video card). This was also true of DVD back in the day, my first DVD player for the PC included an MPEG decoder card, today the need for that just isn't there, the same will be true of HD video as well.

My brain is hurting now from all the mights/maybes/chances/ifs in this whole write up. The whole paper reminds me of my school days when your teacher professor wants a 3000 word paper, yet you only have 2500 written and you're done.

Andrew
If the planet blew up today, chances are that we'd all be dead. But maybe it's possible to survive as the government might have created a mega-space vehicle to save humanity

[Brandon B]

On the other side of the argument, though MS has shown a little too much willingnes to roll over for the content industry. I'm seeing reports that a lot of the songs from the Zune store can't even be "squirted" (and eyeew to that term) at all even with the 3 plays/3 days limit, as the label can deny even the limited feature if they choose, and many are. Don't know percentages though. Anyone else?

BB