Vista next-gen DVD shocker
p2pnet.net News:- Thirty-two-bit versions of Microsoft’s Windows Vista won’t play back “next generation high definition protected content” (studio-released BluRay and HD-DVD movies), says a “surprising disclosure”.
And it’s all down DRM (digital rights restriction).
The news came during a a presentation on Windows Vista security at Tech.Ed 2006 in Sydney, Australia, says APC Magazine, pointing out, “By far the majority of PCs use 32-bit processors, because despite AMD’s efforts to push 64-bit CPUs into the marketplace early, Intel’s first widely-promoted 64-bit CPU is the just-released Core 2 Duo.”
Now, “PC users will now have to choose between a PC that can play high definition content (64 bit) versus one that can potentially run older devices that only have unsigned drivers available (32 bit),” says the story.
According to senior program manager Steve Riley, there are, “just too many ways right now for unsigned kernel mode code [to compromise content protection],” says APC Magazine, which also has Riley saying, “The media companies asked us to do this and said they don’t want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection”.
In “hastily organised” interview after Microsoft learned APC was planning to run a story, “Riley was at pains to point out that Blu Ray and HD-DVD were storage media and ‘you could put an MPEG-4 movie on them and play them on a 32bit Vista PC just fine’,” says the post, adding, “But he conceded that a commercially-produced BluRay or HD-DVD movie with next-generation high definition protected content wouldn’t play on a 32 bit PC.”
Meanwhile, to be signed, “a device driver has to be approved by a special testing bureaucracy, according to criteria set up by Microsoft,” says Ed Felten, on his Freedom to Tinker blog, contnuing:
Optional signing of device drivers is a fine idea. Bad device drivers have caused many headaches for Windows users, so it’s good to give users more control over which drivers are on their systems. Users have to make choices about which drivers to install, and a Microsoft-sponsored stamp of approval, as provided by the signing process, helps users make that decision. All of this is helpful, as long as it is ultimately the user who decides what is safe to use on his computer.
But the reality is that lots of good and useful drivers are unsigned, because companies don’t want to subject themselves to the certification process. Competent users accept unsigned drivers all the time — my two-month-old Windows XP laptop has a few dozen unsigned drivers, many of which were pre-installed by the manufacturer.
In short, moving to 64-bit Vista, to get next-gen DVD playback with Windows, means giving up your current computer and some of your current peripherals and applications. You can be compatible with next-gen DVDs, or you can be compatible with the other stuff you use. Your choice.
Or you could just get one of the other Windows-compatible DVD player applications. According to an anonymous Microsoft source quoted at BoingBoing, Hollywood’s objection to next-gen DVDs on Vista-32 applies to Microsoft but not to third-party player applications like WinDVD and PowerDVD. Those apps will be allowed to play next-gen DVDs on Vista-32 and WinXP, even in the presence of unsigned drivers. If the goal is to stop piracy, this decision makes no technical sense. If unsigned drivers are a threat to DRM, it doesn’t matter whether those drivers are attacking a Microsoft-brand player application or a third-party application. So why did Hollywood refuse to license only Microsoft?
The BoingBoing source offers two hypotheses:
This leads folks at Microsoft to conclude either:
A) The studios don’t understand the technology enough to see these risks clearly, or
B) They just want to screw Microsoft
The studios all have tech consultants, and many of them are not fools, so A seems unlikely. B also doesn’t seem completely likely. It’s probably the usual: human stupidity rolled up in a big ball.
The stupidity-ball explanation is always a contender in cases like this, but I wouldn’t rule out A or B either. Yes, the studios have tech consultants, but they had equally good consultants when they chose the horribly misdesigned CSS as the encryption scheme for first-gen DVDs, which suggests that they don’t always listen to the consultants.
There’s an interesting connection to antitrust policy here. Microsoft’s business strategy is apparently to tie Media Player to Windows. Antitrust authorities, in Europe at least, didn’t like this, and so Microsoft is claiming that Media Player is an Integral Part of Windows and not just a nice application that is designed to work well with Windows. (Recall that they tried the same argument for Internet Explorer in the U.S. antitrust case, and the U.S. courts didn’t buy it.)
This may affect the DVD cartel’s decisionmaking in at least two ways. First, if they fell for the line that Media Player is not just another pretty app, they may have concluded that it made sense to hold Media Player accountable for the Windows “bug” of allowing unsigned drivers. This makes no sense from a content security standpoint, but remember that these are the same people who thought CSS was a good idea.
Another possibility is that the DVD cartel is implementing its own antitrust policy, encouraging competition in the market for Windows-compatible DVD players by neutralizing Microsoft’s tying strategy. Having acquired quasi-governmental power to regulate the design of DVD players and the structure of DVD-related markets, the cartel would naturally want to prevent any player vendor from accumulating market power.
All of this brings us back to Tim Wu’s paper about the drawbacks of putting one small group in charge of a whole economic sector. Markets may make good decisions — if they’re competitive — but there’s no guarantee that a single entity will make good decisions. That’s especially true if we put a small group of movie executives and lawyers in charge of technology design.
(Thanks, Bugatroid)
Also See:
APC Magazine – Microsoft cuts ANOTHER feature: full HD playback in 32bit Vista goes, August 24, 2006
Ed Felten – Next-Gen DVD Support Yanked from 32-Bit Vista, August 25, 2006
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August 29th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Yet another example of DRM being there to help the media companies and not the consumer.
August 29th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
So first they say you’ll have to have a HDMI compilant monitor, that is to say that video data goes from the disc to the monitor fully encrypted. And now you also have to update your CPU to 64 bits or be left out?
I’ll tell you what will happen. A 17-year-old 32-bit lovin’ punk will crack it up and make it work not only Linux but also for Win32, that’s what.
History repeats itself. You’d only expect the cycle to be longer.
August 29th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
when was drm ever there to help the consumer? it’s never been that way… the companies only use “to aide the customer” line because it makes for nice puff pieces. The truth of the matter is DRM has never and will never be in place for the betterment of society. It’s only an attempt to line a few movie exec’s pockets
August 29th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
http://deaacs.com/ seems to be down. What happened?
August 29th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Unsigned malware my @$$. These a-holes have a lot of nerve calling unsigned software “malware”. Vista is the biggest stinky pile of malware I’ve ever see. If the public has any brains they will reject this whole load of crap for the money grubbing thiefware it is.
August 30th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Well naturally M$ wants only signed drivers as they get a little piece of licensing fees for every recognized driver. I long ago turned off the warnings about unsigned drivers recognizing that most software companies that aren’t out to take you for a ride don’t want to pay for licensing fees as they are nothing but an un-necessary cost.
I also as a personal preference don’t want media player. The spyware is now integrated into the OS and I neither care for that nor the idea that every time I turn around I would be hunting for yet more codec. I’m quite happy with VLC that doesn’t need codec and it has ended my codec hunt and at the same time has eliminated the incompatibilities that go with installing to many codec packs.
As it stands now, I rather like the 32 bit apps for the choices offered. You can bet it will be a few years for most software makers to come up to speed on the 64 bit apps and in the meantime it will mean that computer users are once again getting the shaft through strictly corporation turf-guarding.
August 30th, 2006 at 2:01 am
“I’ll tell you what will happen. A 17-year-old 32-bit lovin’ punk will crack it up and make it work not only Linux but also for Win32, that’s what.”
I really hope you’re right. I bought a couple of Dell 2405FPW LCD monitors at the beginning of this year (24 inch widescreen with DVI, 1920×1200). Really love them a lot, but as it turns out they have no official support for HDCP, the DRM copy protection that is required for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and never will even though I’m sure it would be a simple upgrade for Dell to do (instead they released the 2407FPW and expect folks to buy that). I’d like to boycott both formats and will for a time probably, but once the hardware and media is cheap enough, it’s going to be hard to resist buying one for the huge storage capacity. And, if I’m going to spend the money for that, then I might as well get full use out of my drive and watch high definition content as well, which by the way really does look awesome on this monitor (like the 1080p movie trailers from Apple using Quicktime Alternative). But I won’t be able to without buying completely new monitors, and who the hell is going to be stupid enough to buy these Dell’s off of me so that I may recoup at least some of the money I spent? I’m pretty much screwed, and now this story comes along on top of it. Well, I say SCREW THEM ALL. If someone does crack this idiotic DRM, I’ll be the first in line to use it if that is what it’s going to take to enjoy MY purchases. People who want to enjoy high-def content should NOT have to buy/build completely new PC’s, as well as replace all of their displays, simply so they will be able to enjoy the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hardware and content they’ve PAID FOR. I don’t give a rats ass about the DMCA or any law like it. This is about FAIR USE, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lay back and allow these greedy ass hats to take that away from me. I think this particular DRM shows better than ANY in the whole history of DRM just how insanely greedy the whole damn industry is. I hope they all burn in hell for it too, exactly like they deserve.
PS: WTF? It keeps saying that my string is invalid, yet I KNOW that I am typing it in correctly. Does the stupid thing time out or something? When I go back it keeps giving me the same string. Bad enough that you can’t tell what half of the alphanumeric character are (1lI, O0, 9g, 8B, 5S). Guess I should start writing my posts outside of Firefox, or give up posting at all. p2pnet isn’t the only good place to hang out after all. Going to try one more time, then I’ve giving up for good…
August 30th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
While I would not touch those links above for fear of malmare and I don’t doubt that the cartels would love for you to have a good dose to report back what is on your computer, I think the string has reduced the above yoyo to only making one post at a time instead of the whole forum filled with crap. I regret that it has brought about the necessity of the string entry for the rest of us valid members as he tries to either make a buck or give you something you don’t want.
I would never, ever, reward the behavior of the above with a click for costing the rest of the membership the PNA because of his actions in this persistent and idiotic attempt to spam.
PS…5th attempt to enter this message because of vague string visuals.
August 30th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
While I would not touch those links above for fear of malmare and I don’t doubt that the cartels would love for you to have a good dose to report back what is on your computer, I think the string has reduced the above yoyo to only making one post at a time instead of the whole forum filled with crap. I regret that it has brought about the necessity of the string entry for the rest of us valid members as he tries to either make a buck or give you something you don’t want.
I would never, ever, reward the behavior of the above with a click for costing the rest of the membership the PNA because of his actions in this persistent and idiotic attempt to spam.
August 30th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
One of the big reasons MS OS have been so successful in the past is it’s ability and flexibilty to support hardware. The support for the big players will still be there in Vista, but it looks like a big chunk of the small timers will get squeezed out. Just one more reason to move away from Windows (or at least never upgrade to Vista malware…).
August 30th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
I personally think that both Blu-Ray and HDDVD will fail. I can buy an incredible amount of hard drive storage for comparatively little money. Most video cards have DVI’s now and can easily connect with any kind of monitor. Setting up a home network with a NAS or RAID is fairly easy and if you pair that with P2P why would you buy a clunky DRM infested expensive system?
One of the big problems with the entertainment industry is that they are incredibly backward thinking. The MP3 revolution is killing the CD. And frankly, I don’t think it will be long before DIVX or XVID kills the DVD. Hollywood better start some forward thinking or the people will leave them eating dust.