The Dark Side of HDCP - Why is My PS3 Blinking? 233
FloatsomNJetsom writes "High Definition Content Protection is supposed to make sure you're not playing pirated content, but sometimes your devices screw up the HDCP 'handshake' (over an HDMI cable) and nothing works. This happens with some regularity with the PS3, and Popular Mechanics investigated and found a quick and dirty workaround. From the article: 'We then checked with Leslie Chard, president of HDMI Licensing, which owns the rights to the standard, who told us that HDCP is one component of HDMI that has been plagued with interoperability issues. HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) is designed to prevent the interception of data — specifically copyrighted Hollywood movies — between an output component and a display. As Steve Balough, the president of Digital Content Protection, the licensing company for HDCP explains, the two pieces of hardware must exchange a key, a sort of certificate of authenticity unique to each individual device, to verify a secure connection.' The problem isn't limited to the PS3 — many HDTV cable boxes and have the same problem. The fix there? Unplugging the power cable."
news flash: cheap product has problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:why so onerous, technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but as we see, the "work" that goes into DRM is rather craptastic, and tends to make things that fail horribly at what they are designed to do. I think we are better off with these brilliant minds workign on DRM then things that actualy matter (say firmware, codecs, drivers, whatever).
I don't think I'm the only one (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why not just use DVI instead of HDMI (Score:4, Interesting)
HDCP with games? WTF?? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought HDCP applied only with certain movies that demand it. Does this mean that everything going through the HDMI port of a PS3 is encrypted? Including what Linux displays?
If that's the case, my appreciation of DRM just went from "I couldn't like less" to "wait, I think I can". It highlights the problem that technology-enforced legislation is bound to be too greedy if it has any hope of being effective.
Acronyms? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:why so onerous, technology? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text [wikipedia.org]
I used to have a CD player capable of using it, but I never found a CD with any text on it.
That's it, I'm staying with Y-Pb-Pr (Score:2, Interesting)
So I've got a decent LCD TV with HDMI, and a satellite box with HDMI, and a DVD player that upconverts to HDMI, and the [prize] PS3 is supposed to be on its way with HDMI....
And they're all going to go through a remote-controlled component video switch I've got on order. (Currently, I'm using a manual switchbox.) I'm "opting out" of this HDCP game, I don't like the rules, and I don't want to play.
Any Blu-Ray disc I try and which doesn't play on component will go back as "defective" or "unfit for sale." The media companies want to pull these stunts on consumers, they need our co-operation for it to work. So don't play along, stay analog.
You know what? Y-Pr-Pb looks pretty damn good. Don't think you can get 1080p on it, but the Viera screen is only 768 vertical, so that doesn't matter (to me) anyways. Flat panel monitor pictures aren't "drawn" like CRTs anyway; the incoming signal is decoded to a framebuffer for driving the display.
And HDMI switches cost too much, are hard to find with digital audio switching, and I don't feel like replacing my (otherwise excellent) AV receiver because Hollywood says so.
For anyone considering a similar solution: Compare the bandwidth of co-axial digital audio and composite video (the orange RCA plug and the yellow RCA plug). They're pretty close, right? Check out the voltage and cable impedance; they're the same. What's that mean? Any AV selector switch with composite video AND component (or S) video can switch co-ax digital audio via the composite video channel. (Well, simpler ones where it doesn't try to convert composite to S or component, or put up on-screen menus or whatever.) That means there are, readily and inexpensively available, switch-boxes that don't _claim_ to have digital audio switching, but which actually work really well. I used a $30 box from Radio Shack that did S-video, composite, and left+right audio to switch S-video, digital audio, and left+right audio. (Not all laserdiscs have digital audio tracks... yeah, that makes me feel old. And the "multiroom" feature on my receiver only works with analog audio. _That_ will get me to upgrade. Hollywood get stuffed.)
Re:Westinghouse or HDCP at fault? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I've had the same thing happen with my Sony TV (HDCP compliant DVI plug) and my cable box. It happens very rarely (blue moons happen more often), but it does happen (solution I use is to turn the cable box off; the TV's connected to it, too, so in effect, I'm rebooting my TV and cable box).
For it to happen so frequently (w/ the PS3 and the Westinghouse) tells me one of two things, or both. One is that the standard isn't defined well enough or people (the TV, Sony and the cable box makers) are cutting corners. I wouldn't be surprised if it's both.
Its not the spec! (Score:2, Interesting)
While HDMI carries a digital signal, and thus, it carries the same visual quality regardless of the cable quality, a poorly made cable, with little or no shielding, and "leaky" connectors is going to be much more susceptible to EM interference.
If you get enough interference (it doesn't take much with a 5 dollar eBay cable), you will have occasional blackouts, etc.
I was able to solve this on 3 separate occasions for family and friends, by replacing their cheap cables with higher quality, shielded cabling.
Re:why so onerous, technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why not just use DVI instead of HDMI (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:why so onerous, technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're absolutely right... And, I already knew about this, but didn't want to bog down more than I'd already done in my post..
Here's what's interesting about the CD-Text, and why it really goes to my original point: It showed up in 1996, about 13 years after my first CD player! I'm pretty sure those doing the inventing could've cobbled together a text for CD a little earlier.
I, too bought some CDs excited about the new text format. But the players that could display were few and far between, and I finally opted out of getting the machines (the CDs were ones I'd have bought anyway). I guess if I thought they were serious about this, they'd have put a little more energy into it (earlier delivery, more advertising, more players). But, they didn't -- this was a huge potential for a nice leap in functionality. Heck, I'd even have considered paying a nickel or two more per disk for the extra info.
I think the record industry was lazy with this -- it wasn't interesting to them, their money was just rolling in from their cast of mega-stars and mega-bands. There was no incentive.
Some would point to the "role" of a business isn't to make everything and anything but instead to maximize profit, and rolling out the CD info as part of the product didn't fit that model. In my opinion the huge fascination with mega-dollar dealings obscured that customer satisfaction, even delight, provides, if more subtle, comparable returns for the investment. As it is now, I buy far fewer CDs than before, mostly because I resent their actions. I return any CD with copy protection built in (it's darned near impossible to figure out and know before you walk out the door with it).
Yeah, there was CD text, 13 years late, and long after we the people were already filling up the database with our own typing pools. Sony's effort may have even been an attempt to thwart the CDDB effort (I really don't know on that one).
Re:why so onerous, technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
No not at all, and perhaps that's a misconception. People aren't concerned about ridiculous copy protection just as a theoretical exercise, it's more practical than that.
Copy Protection (so called DRM) exists to segment the market artificially. If you buy a CD, the record company would strongly prefer that the only thing you do to it is listen to it in a CD player. In their view, putting the music on an iPod, on a home network, etc is against their use rules and they feel you should pay more for it. After all, you're getting more use without them getting more money. DRM is a way to make sure you only use it where they intend.
Same way with DVD's. While people would buy VHS and DVD to watch movies at home, the use is more complex with computers, iPod video players (zunes!), and home networking. Again, to them, this is a way to segment the market and create scarcity where none exists.
There is a multi-billion dollar industry around ringtones! Imagine if you could just rip your CD and put it on your phone! Why...that would be more money the consumer would have and less the record company would have!
To the record companies, the CD was a big blunder. Not only does it have excellent sound (which they are already charging us extra!) but you can repurpose the music to suit your needs from home stereo, to cars, to personal music players to phones, to what else is new next week. And they don't get any more money.
Yes yes, people will make illegal copies, but this loss is peanuts compared to what they see as new markets made possible by stopping you from copying your own music to another medium.
and, I don't have a problem with them trying to get more money for the same music over and over. I do have a problem when we have the government essentially on the take to support this model. It certainly doesn't benefit me as a consumer, and apparently it doesn't benefit the artist either (http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2004-05-
So your argument is superficially convincing, nonetheless, I think it's not the real reason for copy protection and DRM.
Re:why so onerous, technology? (Score:2, Interesting)
Just look at how many people thing a crashing computer is normal... Here I am with my Windows box, I run games, I run torrents, I run all the same crap everyone else does, yet my uptime is mostly dependent on how often I change hardware around. Sometimes I hear stories like "if I try to run Limewire while Outlook is running on my MDG, the thing shuts down so I just don't run those two at the same time". In my head I'm thinking Jesus Christ buddy! He needs a new power supply. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I get one single crash and if I can't precisely pinpoint the source of the problem (and eliminate it), I lose sleep.
If I had an HDTV and PS3 that worked only 80% of the time, I'd spend more than 20% of the time hunting someone down to fix it. People don't buy something for it to work only part time. If someone sold you a car that only runs 6 months a year because of a software glitch that can't be fixed, do you think it's fair that you pay full price ? Would you even pay half price since it works half the time ? I sure wouldn't.
Re:It's a known bug in the Westinghouse TV firmwar (Score:4, Interesting)
But why the hell does playing a game require HDCP? If you were playing a movie, then I could understand the paranoia.
"Hey dude, check out this rip of me playing [insert popular game here]."
Why the hell does sony want to stop people copying game footage? It's not like you can clone the game this way.