Toshiba HD-DVD Player Planned to Enforce HDMI 277
CCat writes "Digital Spy reports that at a recent Toshiba road show in the U.S., Toshiba demonstrated their upcoming HD-DVD specification. The most interesting thing for people buying TVs at the moment is that Toshiba has stated that their HD-DVD Player will ONLY output high Def on the player's HDMI output (plus other digital connections) with the analog output downrezed to 480 lines. Prior slashdot disussion talks about the copy prevention angle and HDCP guidelines."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
The funniest part is that no one would want to bootleg over the component connections anyway. I don't know of a signle component capture card that's priced remotely near what a normal consumer could afford. The big piracy houses will find a quick workaround anyway. But they'll stave off all four casual pirates with access to professional capture devices, at least until the HD-DVD encryption is cracked.
We're all used to ludicrous DRM systems, but I've never seen an electronics company (without a major stake in the film/music production business) so willing to shoot themselves in the foot.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, no kidding. I bought a Toshiba HDTV in late 2001, and it only has component video inputs for HD content. Instead of rewarding me for paying a premium to be an early adopter, I'm being punished because of the assumption that I'm going to pirate movies. Very classy.
Simple; (Score:5, Insightful)
The market will teach them to stop doing that.
People will buy this crap... (Score:4, Insightful)
But what does it matter anyways? Will there EVER be something that will take full use of the resolution? For example, take the cleanest looking 720p ESPN baseball game, how much higher can the resolution get? There must be some relationship between screen size and the perceptible difference. For example, can people see more detail on a 42" screen if one is 480p and the other is 720p? Maybe on a 120" projection screen it becomes noticable, but how much?
Truth be told, I would be more happy with the current 480p that DVD can play now if the studios treated customers better. No more re-releasing a DVD 3 times, with the first release being shitty and a buy it for $29 or have nothing attitude. Then 18 month later is the re-release "ultimate edition" which cleans the picture up. Coulnd't the studio release a clean picture the first time? And do away with fraud, for example the season 2 boxed set of Magnum PI has a bonus episode of the A-Team, and this episode looks fantastic, very clean. But if you get the boxed set of the A-Team, the other episodes don't look like they have as much resolution. Did the studio spend all their time making the one "free" episode look as good as possible, and neglected the rest because the studio knew the free one was going to sell the set?
And while we are at it, NO MORE FUKING "COPYWRITE" WARNINGS THAT CAN NOT BE FAST FORWARDED AND NO DISABLING OF THE MENU BUTTON DURING PREVIEWS!!! I fucking hate studios that lock me into 5 minutes of copywrite warnings, previews and the studio logo.
And here is a shocking idea. If the studio made a product the way people wanted it, then maybe there would be less copying. If a $30 dvd was not released 3 times, maybe the first version would not be copied like crazy because nobody wants to get fucked with a crippled version.
And I have a long memory. I have a bunch of music CD's with rot. I have one DVD that pixalates, and it did not do that in the past. None of my VHS tapes lock up or pixilate, they keep playing.
I almost wish the S-VHS caught on with near dvd quality. It would be hard to control an analog source. But that is why studios lie and tell us things like DVD's last forever, when in truth they get rot, or lies like no anaolg source could have the same resolution, which it could.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
I know the conventional slashdot wisdom is "no time at all" but I'm not so sure. There was a long, annoying period of several years during which linux could not play DVDs. The manufacturers have a lot of money at stake (well, at least the content producers do) and I wouldn't be surprised if they finall get it right.
Re:Format war (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:HDCP requried by DVD spec (Score:5, Insightful)
DVI is not encrypted, is it?
This reminds me of the macroflash that some DVD players have. If you try and copy a DVD to a VHS tape, it will phase in and out of the picture in all sorts of colors. Did people think that a 480p picture needs to be protected from being copied on a format that is half the resolution and interlaced?
I am still awaiting a technology giant to dare Hollywood to not support a format and thus lose the sales that way. Of course with companies like Sony running their own music and movie divisions that probably will not happen any time soon.
The problem is not with copying a DVD. Studios don't lose money because someone copies a DVD and trades it. Studios loose money when you already have the $29.99 blockbuster hit on DVD, and two years later they re-release the same movie on DVD and clean it up a bit. Who wants to buy the same shit twice? It pisses people off, and that is when they start thinking about copying a DVD. No, they don't copy the ultra edition, because that is the one they want to buy and have as a part of their DVD collection. They copy the crappy first release. Now I have known some DVD collectors with 700+ DVD's to copy a DVD, and then see the DVD was done right, and buy the first version. People don't want to buy shit.
Studios do not respect people. If Studios respected me as a person, they would not waste my time. Not in theaters with 20 minutes of commercials and $5 popcorns. Not with DVD's that disable the menu and fast forward buttons. Not with DVD's that get re-released three times.
Re:The issues are there, but nobody's attentive. (Score:3, Insightful)
When this war on Terror eventually gets old, people are going wonder what happened to all their basic civil liberty's, why mega corporations dictiate what they do, why health & education aren't working etc etc.
You misunderstand consumers (Score:3, Insightful)
But this is TV. When the TV starts screwing up, the other folk in the household get pissed off. They start to ask "why did you buy this piece of crap"? And then it gets returned.
It's easy to screw around with peoples freedoms where they do not notice. But when you start causing issues with peoples entertainment, they take notice and put a stop to it right quick.
If consumers are so easily duped, how come DVD-A didn't take off? Or perhaps DAT? When formats are not free in all ways a consumer cares about then people will not buy them.
Re:You misunderstand consumers (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical consumers have no imagination and accept what they are told. If you complain, you're met with either the same resigned agreement you get when you complain about the weather, or the "company line" about how it's all good and necessary and looked at as an idiot or a communist.
It's damn near impossible to underestimate the stupidity of the masses.
Pretty crazy, really (Score:3, Insightful)
The scale of the problem was far too enormous for most companies to do anything out of warranty. If your player was four years old, and therefore out of warranty, there's nothing they can do about it. If they did, they'd be screwing their stockholders out of a misplaced sense of social justice.
Your product lasted as long as it was guaranteed to last. Now you know that when you buy a product, the warranty period is all you should expect, because that's all you've paid for in their eyes.
Maybe that will change how much you're willing to spend on things, but it's not manufacturer specific. They all responded the same way. Products with a one year warranty were generally fixed out of warranty, products with a three year warranty were not.
Re:You misunderstand consumers (Score:4, Insightful)
But this is TV. When the TV starts screwing up, the other folk in the household get pissed off. They start to ask "why did you buy this piece of crap"? And then it gets returned.
If this were entirely true, digital cable/satellite TV would not be the heaping piece of crap that it is today and you might actually get picture quality comparable to analog and not wait 2 seconds just to change the channel.
As for HD, I have yet to see a stream, by means of over-the-air or terrestrial cable, that didn't have the bitrate squeezed so hard that artifacts were everywhere and anything beyong 480p was pointless.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The issues are there, but nobody's attentive. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, they'll just spend their next pay check on a new tv that's no better then their current one except for oh say, the copy-protected video input port. That is, if they hadn't already been persuaded by the manipulative best buy employee to buy a new tv before hand anyway.
You are over-estimating the average intelligence of most people in hope that they'll realize what DRM is (among the other stupid things going on around them) and take a stand. I lost that hope a long time ago.
Re:Format war (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:HDTV! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
As in "find one private key, crack all content made up until this point"? Not too long.
As in a permanent crack like DeCSS, which was fundamentally broken when the algorithm came out? Never.
It is much more a hardware job than a software job this time around. Find the private key locked down in your DVD player (which is set to self-destruct if you try).
It is more a question if anyone is willing to do that NOW. The smart way would be to let the standard be established, movies to be released on the medium so that when it happens, the movie companies can't just jump ship.
We already have a format that is acceptable size and quality for pirates. The real killer piracy application of HDTV players is not pirating HD-DVDs, it is playing DVD-source pirate copies. Downloading HD-DVD images (15-25GB) is a problem of the future, not today.
Kjella
Divx (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope that this Toshiba player goes the way of Divx and is shown the door out.
Re: DVDs getting multiple releases (Score:3, Insightful)
If I found out my car company had brakes that could stop my car 10Xs faster, or an engine that could get 4X the fuel-mileage, that doesn't cost any more than the crap they gave me, I'd be very angry.
Similarly, people who buy DVDs, expect that there isn't going to be a better one comming along soon. They expect that if there's any extra content available (deleted scenes, interviews, etc) it will be included on the DVD they bought. Finding out that you were sold crap, and the studio intentionally held-back content they had available and could have given you, tends to piss someone off.
Movies are not like cars. You can't go to a different manufacturer and get what the first one was holding back from you for their next model.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Only Takes One :) (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course the funniest thing will be that same factory produces "big name" playes during morning shift
Easy
Re:HDMI != HDCP (Score:5, Insightful)
"Data protection is obligatory"
But the paragraph you quote:
"Content protection capability is recommended..... An HDMI compliant Source should protect all of the protected audiovisual data."
Doesn't sound like "obligatory" to me.
Re:Format war (Score:3, Insightful)
All that DRM crap COSTS MONEY. Based on the price of that box, I'd say each crippled HDTV display that uses DRM adds easily 50 euros or more to the wholesale price of the product due to the DRM crap.
You and me, paying so that our ability to view content is restricted...
And that 399e is 399e because those widgets are probably illegal circumvention devices in some parts of the world, and the components inside probably come with a big price premium, as their (masked) manufacturer is taking a risk with them.
Re:HDMI != HDCP (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't read this standard, but I'd be stunned if you were right.