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Comment by m0nastic | Hacker News Reader

For those curious as to what this entails, the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdcp#Cryptanalysis Does a pretty good job explaining.

For those not quite that curious, if you've ever tried to watch a Blu-Ray movie on your computer, and gotten an error about it being restricted from playing back on your display; there's a good chance that is because of HDCP.

If this is true (and there isn't really a good reason to believe that it isn't), this is pretty bad news for the content industry.

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You're joking, right? The only people HDCP has been affecting have been legitimate customers. Pirates have had HD video for years.

<sarcasm>You don't understand. HDCP is great for consumers. It's what lets them view fantastic content from the creative industry. Without HDCP, that content wouldn't be available to consumers.</sarcasm>

It was this angle of attack, or one very similar to it, that I remember reading from an nVidia (or it might have been ATI) powerpoint deck a few years back.

Makes me wonder whether the author was blissfully ignorant of DeCSS, or hoped the readers would be. It's not as if they felt the need to pull DVDs off the market for the last decade.

To be fair, the release of DeCSS may very well have moved up the timetable for releasing BD+ and AACS (which isn't an argument against it, but these things don't exist in a vaccum).

My point was that it represents a headache for the content industry, not consumers. I'm a consumer; I'm thrilled that maybe now I won't have to go through such a clusterfuck to watch a Blu-ray that I've paid for on my monitor.

If I were a content provider, I wouldn't be so thrilled.

Yeah, I didn't mean for my comment to make it sound like I'm supporting the content industry. Rereading it makes it sound like I think this is a bad thing. It was meant more as rubbing salt in the wound.

...And pretty good news for everyone else!

Are you kidding? This is -awesome-.

My single worst experience with iTunes was when I took the dive and spent that extra dollar to rent an HD movie. Just to find out a $5 movie on my $500 Mac Mini won't play on my $1,000 TV.

I haven't made a -single- Apple purchase since then. That's how badly HDCP pissed me off.

Yeah. This is a problem that I've never had with pirated movies. 1020p Blu-Ray? Plays great under Linux on my pre-HDCP LCD and TV.

And it was free.

What problem was HDCP trying to solve, again?

The problem of people not getting money.

Which it failed spectacularly at by a) not doing anything to curb piracy, and b) pissing off actual consumers so much they'd rather pirate, c) being such "a bag of hurt" that it didn't get added to Apple's computers.

and c) the dillusion that there exists lost sales because a torrent of said flick is available now...

No, I think the consumer electronics companies made a lot of money off of this. That Big Content mandated it was even better for them.

Selling a 50 cent piece of wire for $80 is a much better business model than making a movie and getting people to buy it, after all.

> c) being such "a bag of hurt" that it didn't get added to Apple's computers.

Uh, yeah it (HDCP) did; on specific movies rented via iTunes, if you don't have an HDCP compliant display, it won't play.

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/11/18/apple-incorporates-hdcp-...

> What problem was HDCP trying to solve, again?

The problem of the price of goods in a competitive market falling to the marginal cost of production.

That's a problem for the people who produce goods that a new technology is busy reducing the marginal cost of production. It shouldn't be a problem for anybody else, but HDCP makes it so.

1020p? Isn't it 1080p?

Typo.

Particularly bad news for Sony

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