Forum Overview
::
American McGee's Honda Civic
::
Re: Something to remember about HDMI
[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Fullofkittens"]...it's not just passing around HD audio and video. It's also guaranteeing that DRM is being honored via encryption and decryption at each end. So an HDMI KVM switch would have to be certified to do all that shit and have the crypto smarts to pull that off, requiring a much fancier gadget than if it was just electrically switching a stream to another output.[/quote] This is the first I am hearing about DRM in HDMI. What a crock of shit. What kind of poisonous race traitor would implement hardware DRM in the best-looking display path? God, there are some engineers out there that are worthless as human beings.[/quote] Fullofkittens is correct, HDMI also provides a hardware-based DRM scheme, it's intended to close the "analog hole" e.g., one of the easiest ways to copy an audio stream is to record off the speakers. Let's not forget that one of the biggest hardware-based DRM systems is Macrovision, an encryption system that causes a VCR to not send the Video Blanking Signal, which doesn't cause a problem with your TV but fucks up the ability to copy tape to tape on VCRs, it's been mandated by law on VCRs and has been around at least 20 years. It's why you can't just hook two VCRs together and copy a tape that way. I used to defeat that by discovering that there was no Macrovision for Beta, so I'd rent tapes in Beta, then use someone's Betamax to play the tape and copy it to a VHS recorder. It allowed me to get copies of movies I could not buy because either they were no longer available or were never released in VHS. Whether you agree or disagree with DRM - IMNSHO far too often it just inconveniences consumers while doing nothing or almost nothing to stop piracy - some content providers want it and feel that they are entitled to put it on their works. Hardware-based systems are much harder to defeat because it's easier to hack software to disable them than it is to design the device or equipment to reverse a hardware-based scheme. [/quote]