QuickTime 7.5.7 allows SD iTunes playback over DisplayPort

It shouldn't really stop anything from playing. SD content should be let straight through, and HD content should be degraded to SD on the fly.

There shouldn't be any difference at all. HD is not worth more than SD, certainly not from a piracy point of view. This is the content industry pretending there is more value in HD than there actually is, and overreacting to protect it in an ineffective and batshit insane manner.

Apple is complicit in all this as well, they implemented the system for iTunes, they sell the content and make some amount of money on it, and such content makes their own hardware more attractive.

Wait, what? Of course it is. Doubly so, since BD+ is kind of a hassle at present time, so the easiest way to store the files on your computer is through piracy. Also, if you didn't remember, the iTunes store is pretty much the only legal way to watch HD shows and movies on a Mac.

ascii:

HDCP doesn't necessarily connect to the resolution, though. For that, you need to have the Image Constraint Token (ICT), and even many Blu-ray movies don't use that.

HD should be degraded to SD on the fly? How about "HDCP shouldn't exist at all."?

Based on the comments so far, I'm sure some of you will think that I've "drank the kool-aid," but I don't really have a problem with this. Sure, I wish there was no such thing as DRM; but I'm also practical enough to understand why it's necessary. Just think, if all of those greedy music thieves (surely none of us here) had never started the mass theft of music during the Napster days, perhaps we wouldn't be dealing with this mess now. Yes, media companies are pure evil, etc, etc; but we've demonstrated that we can be trusted either.

So it's here to stay. Apple had to add it to the video output sooner or later. There really was no choice in the matter except to give up on video sales altogether. And I'm sure those of you who own Apple stock wouldn't like that. To me the REAL mistake Apple made was not telling us it was there so we could make informed buying decisions.

I figured a mistake had been made, and this update seems to confirm that. Apple hadn't intended the DRM to be enforced...yet. Sounds like they are laying the ground work for HD movies on Macs, not just on AppleTV. And since I use a mini as a HTPC, I would welcome that and would purchase an updated mini with DisplayPort. I assume if/when Apple announces HD movies on Macs, they will need to also educate us on exactly what the hardware requirements will be (ie, will HD movies play on my DVI-based MacBook Pro?).

Apple should be careful about trying the patience of their customers. Once bitten, they are difficult to win back.

That was quick.

Where is it? its not on their downloads page, it isn't available via the updater either? have they pulled it? is it only available on the newer platform?

kaiwai, if you mean the new Unibody MacBooks to be the "newer platforms", then yes, it is only available for them, as they are the only Macs with DisplayPort and therefore HDCP.

Or do you mean something else by that?

This obsession with control predates Napster by a long shot. I first encountered it in the early seventies when a girl was told to stop jamming in a restaurant while waiting for her friends to finish eating. Neither she nor the owner had paid the proper "tax" to permit "public" performances.

Oops, you are right - I didn't read the article properly. It is surprising that they upped the version to 7.5.7 from 7.5.5 hence I assumed it must include more than just the single feature.

I think that you let the entertainment/content industries off way to easy. After all, Napster thrived in a vacuum of usable solutions offered by those companies.
Countless music titles were either unavailable in digital format at all and what was available could only be used via ridiculous DRM-based rental schemes.
Apple & iTunes changed all that and established the standards under which music is sold today.

Similar mindless consumer-unfriendly schemes are being employed today for movie distribution.
You can only buy movies digitally in SD, rent only a month after SD sales started and only rent HD.

The single reason: Maintain physical DVD (SD/HD) sales that provide higher margins. Even then digital copies on BD are only SD and then often even limited in the time they can be viewed.

Considering of how old HD standards actually are and the FCC digital broadcast mandate in US, it is a joke to consider HD a premium.

Don't get me wrong, I don't support piracy but technologies like HDCP have absolutely zero value to consumers and the lack of HD digital content is appalling in view of the available technologies to support them.

It's important to remember that if you look past the "money-grabbing distributors" (they're not all like this, I assure you) the person who really loses out through piracy is the artist. A company can easily spread their losses across their back-catalogue but the artist often uses royalties as a living. It's like working in a shop, and every time someone shop-lifts, the boss takes it out of your wages.

I happen to own royalties in a movie so I know what it's like. I don't agree with how the latest batch of DRM has been implemented but I agree with DRM in concept. I think that no matter what, someone will crack it so it's not really worth investing billions in, but it's important that it's difficult for the average man in the street to do.

Just curious but what does their competition offer?

The problem is that it doesn't really help with regards to stopping piracy. Anyone who wants to pirate something knows to look on torrent sites, where someone else has already done the hard work of breaking the DRM. The only thing this DRM does is annoys legitimate consumers with restrictions.

If DRM actually did make life hard for the pirates, I might be able to see some value in it. But sadly it doesn't: once one guy has broken it (or got around it somehow) then no-one else needs bother. And there will always be that one guy -- someone who likes a challenge, and is clever enough to succeed.

Amorya

Not really. Movies and TV shows can be recorded over the air, in HD, on a Mac. I've been doing such for one or two years.

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/main...oduct1.en.html

Even people who pay for these movies tend to say that DVD is good enough. HD is nice yes, but most people don't consider it to be the holy grail of upgrades compared to the vhs to dvd transition.

That means most people are perfectly fine with SD content, particularly DVDs. So are pirates. That means this unnecessary "protection" of HD content is irrational, because they aren't protecting SD content to the same degree.

I'm quite serious, HD content isn't worth more, especially to pirates. I assure you people are just as happy to pirate a 480p copy or even a 320p copy, and HDCP isn't doing a damn thing about that.

That's quite a lot of hyperbole. You could even in Napster's day rip a CD to a digital format just as easily as you can today. After all, how do you think all that music got onto Napster in the first place?


How did you come to the backward conclusion that physical sales have a higher margin that downloads? With the cost of preparing the menus and bonus features, pressing discs, packaging the discs, shipping to stores, it's pretty obvious that downloads end up with a much higher margin when all they have to do is pass a couple of files off to the download service (it's probably more than that, but it's obvious there should be a lot less effort involved in prepping a download).

The reason they want to protect physical sales is because brick and mortar stores use DVDs as loss leaders to drive sales to other higher margin items. Thus, B&M stores will offer steep discounts that lead to huge sales numbers for discs. No company offering downloads except Vudu has any real need to push digital video downloads because they are just a side-business used as another feature bullet point on their products. Last year, sales of physical HD content (Blu-Ray and HD DVD) was double that of digital downloads, and HD sales were just a blip on the scope when compared to standard DVD sales.

Then of course there's the fact that there are millions of potential customers that don't have an internet connection capable of downloads. And millions more that just have no interest in fussing with downloads when they just pop a disc into a player.


Despite being fairly old tech, HD is still just coming out of its infancy especially in the US. Also, what does the FCC mandate have to do with HD? Absolutely nothing, there's no requirement to switch to HD in it, only to digital.


I won't disagree with the fact that HDCP has no value to the consumer. But it does have value to the movie studios. No, it (and the other forms of DRM) won't stop large-scale piracy. It's not meant to, it's meant to curb the casual piracy that has helped to send CD sales into the toilet. It's meant to limit how easy it is for Joe Public to say to his friend, "Sure, I'll make you a copy of that." It's meant to make it hard enough that the average user will decide its just easier to go buy a copy.

In all the years I've owned DVD, the DRM involved never got in the way of me enjoying the movies on the disc the way that Apple's Fairplay has with music. I can't play those movies on any non-Apple product. I can easily take that DVD out of my Sony PS3 and go upstairs and enjoy it on my Pioneer DVD player. In the year and a half I've bought Blu-Ray discs, the DRM has never gotten in my way.

And if you, like me, don't consider an "HD" source that has 1/10th the bandwidth of Blu-Ray to really be "HD" at all, then there is no way at all to do it on a Mac. The iTunes' store's "HD" is a little better than upconverted SD, but not much, and it's certainly not in the same ballpark as Blu-Ray.

I wonder how many people are happy with the alternative to DRM:

- The police kicking in doors, searching our homes, and arresting housewives and children
- The government shutting down popular online services used for legitimate purposes
- Universities having to work for the police in sniffing their networks and forced to provide RIAA-friendly services
- The TSA demanding our passwords to search through our most private files

The RIAA will pursue both DRM and the police-state options until one is found to be most effective. If DRM can be made seamless and match a modern definition of fair use, then it will become the default for ordinary law-abiding citizens and then, maybe, we can go back to being treated like law-abiding citizens.

I think the transition from SD to HD is being used as a kind of ground zero for HDCP implementation. Once DRM has become the default, then distributors will start to compete on the ease of use factor, an area where Apple excel.

Knowing the RIAA, I really doubt that they're going to stop there. DRM has never been shown to be effective in what its proponents say anyway.

You are lumping HDCP in with the other DRM forms and they are much much different, particularly if we are talking about casual piracy. HDCP is an attempt to lock EVERYTHING down, 100% with no holes whatsoever. This is the only conclusion that makes sense, why? because joe public doesn't have the technical skill or even the patience to sit there and capture full uncompressed digital frames over a DVI line along with the 5.1 channel digital track, then put them into some kind of editor and sync the two, re-compress it and hand it out to a friend. The scenarios one can come up with that are at all plausible in which joe public is being stopped from casual piracy by HDCP are all equally absurd, because that isn't what HDCP is for. HDCP is an irrational overreaction to a non-existent problem, users capturing digital HD content casually in their houses and passing them around. Whats more, AACS and BD+ are both broken from a standpoint of preventing these things from ending up on the internet, and in fact will be broken most of the time even for preventing casual piracy, so there is not now, nor will there ever be a need for people to go to the trouble of capturing DVI signals just to give copies to friends.


DVD never bothered me either because it just trys to keep the movie on the disc, it doesn't try to limit who can play it, doesn't limit your resale rights, doesn't suddenly stop playing because your monitor is too old etc.

That is only true because the DVD CSS encryption was hacked long ago, and DVD players are cheap. When DVDs first came out I was a Linux user, and even though I had a DVD drive in my computer, I couldn't watch DVDs on it because of the encryption. DVDs definitely attempt to limit who can play them, its just that their efforts were long ago foiled.

Sure, but that is much different than literally linking a copy of a movie to one person, which is what fairplay does. You can sell the DVD to someone after watching with no problem. Can't do that with fairplay stuff, can't even loan it to someone.

Good point. I was lumping HDCP and FairPlay-type DRM together. One (Fairplay, CSS, etc) attempt to prevent you from sharing the digital file, the other (HDCP) prevents you from capturing a stream. Once you've broken the first method and free software tools become available (ie, Handbrake for CSS) it's trivial to begin illegally sharing the content. But even if HDCP is broken, or didn't exist in the first place, there is still a huge barrier to overcome. At a minimum, you'd likely need to obtain some specialized hardware to capture the stream. That alone would probably stop most "casual theft."

I for one would like to know what Apple's overall strategy is. For music, it appears they are moving to no DRM at all. This makes sense because pretty much all music is available on CDs which can be easily ripped, and even the slowest internet connection is adequate to download pirated music files. No DRM, higher quality than on illegal download sites and a reasonable price makes DRM-free music a viable business model.

Video is a different story. Even VHS tapes have Macrovision. So we've been living with DRM on video for quite some time. But with VHS and DVD, it was exchangable, resellable, bequeathable. And you could take it to a friend's house to watch. This is where it all really breaks down. After I've accumulated $100s in purchased video it all expires when I do!

I'll buy the occassional TV show if I've missed an episode (only because there is no option to rent TV shows). And I have no problem renting movies regardless of any DRM restrictions since it's cheap and disposable. But I'll continue to only purchase movies on disc until they've figured out the portability and transferability of the content. Which, BTW, has little or nothing do with the HDCP!

Talk about fatalism. We're not doomed to choose between broken DRM-schemes or police state dystopia. And even if DRM could be made into a seamless experience(which I find quite unlikely), what makes you think that the RIAA would hand over its power and dismantle its threats, its lobbyism, its corporativistic strong-arming? Simply, there would soon be a new threat emerging. It is completely possible to tame the beast that RIAA has become, given enough political will. DRM has already failed as a business model for music and will probably do so for video, too. Streaming/renting might be different, or it might not.

So if I am not mistaken, users will now be able to watch everything they could before HDCP was introduced, plus users with new macbooks and a hdcp compatible monitor will be able to watch high def movies from their computer.

From what I understand, users were never able to watch the high def itunes movies on their computer, they could only do that through apple tv. If they can do that now, that's a good thing.

While I hate HDCP, it doesn't make sense for Apple to hold out if everyone else complies with it. It would only mean that mac users would not have access to high def content. Of course adding HDCP also signals a certain bag of hurt coming to the mac fairly soon (maybe).

HDMI (and the full DisplayPort spec) is capable of delivering both audio and video simultaneously, thus there would be no need to resync as you stated. Really, without HDCP, all it would come down to is plugging the cable into any number of devices capable of recording audio and video. Not the rocket science you are trying to turn it into.

It all comes down to making it harder to pirate things. Yes, for the hard-core pirates it won't matter, but for the casual DRM/copy protection of whatever type may make some difference. Even it's only a 5% difference, that's still an improvement.

Even if it stops nothing, HDCP should be transparent to about 99% of the populace. Just like the copy protection on DVD and Blu-Ray is transparent to 99% of the people. And the 1% it isn't transparent to are exactly the people the movie studios don't want it to be transparent to. If Apple had implement HDCP correctly, it would have been transparent and not stopped people from playing videos on older monitors either. Which is exactly what this update fixed, Apple's messed up implementation.

[QUOTE=cmf2;1343539]So if I am not mistaken, users will now be able to watch everything they could before HDCP was introduced, plus users with new macbooks and a hdcp compatible monitor will be able to watch high def movies from their computer.

From what I understand, users were never able to watch the high def itunes movies on their computer, they could only do that through apple tv. If they can do that now, that's a good thing.

[QUOTE]

No HD movies on Macs yet, not even with the new MacBooks. But this is probably laying the ground work for it. Perhaps a January MacWorld announcement?

Joe Public doesn't know such devices exist, doesn't know where to get one and probably couldn't operate one even if he had it. I have never seen a device actually capable of capturing the uncompressed frames and putting it on something usable. If we are talking about HD here, thats hundreds of gigabytes of video alone.

Then you have the issue of what to do with that huge file, it does in fact have to be recompressed somewhere, and at that point syncing it to the audio is an issue if a minor one.

Joe public can't do that stuff. Give joe public a 1.5tb drive with an uncompressed digital copy of an HD movie and he wouldn't know what to do with it, and thats AFTER getting around the capture problem.

It's a non-existent problem, joe public, nor hardcore pirates, were ever going to be going this route for any sort of piracy, not casual, not internet based, not commercial. It is in fact easier to crack the encryption and get the original copy off the blu-ray disc, and it is much easier to get around fairplay, so implementing HDCP for iTunes stuff is simply absurd, no one was ever going to try to capture it in the first place.

Where are the rights of the consumer though? Why can I not copy my movies to my computer for my personal use? Of course I can get around copy protection with handbrake, but that is not my point. It shouldn't be there in the first place, I should be able to insert my movies and import them in itunes just like I do with CD's. If DRM is to be effective, it must stop everyone from copying it, it only takes one copy to become a torrent, which is then available to everyone. In the end, DRM only makes things tougher for the paying consumer, with a negligible (imo) reduction in the number of people copying the product.

I do not agree that a 5% reduction (if that's what it is) in people stealing the media is worth the tradeoff of the freedom of the paying consumer (even if it is transparent to most). That 5% decrease in pirating will not represent a 5% increase in sales as most people will simply not aquire the media at all if they can't get it for free.

On the topic of HDCP, it will never be transparent. There is a licensing fee, so that cost will always be passed on to the consumer. When did watching the media you lawfully purchased become a privilage?

Unfortunately, as I said in my last post, Apple has little choice but to comply, or else mac users will not get to see content in high definition.

[QUOTE=Wiggin;1343549][QUOTE=cmf2;1343539]So if I am not mistaken, users will now be able to watch everything they could before HDCP was introduced, plus users with new macbooks and a hdcp compatible monitor will be able to watch high def movies from their computer.

From what I understand, users were never able to watch the high def itunes movies on their computer, they could only do that through apple tv. If they can do that now, that's a good thing.


Good to know, I do believe that will be the direction they go though, as it makes sense.

Eitherway, I don't download from itunes due to the other forms of DRM. Until it is gone, I will continue to purchase physical media.

HDMI/DisplayPort deliver uncompressed, demuxed audio and video. You would either have to store a boatload of uncompressed data (where I suspect you might have sync issues when you went to put the A/V back together) or resync and recompress them on the fly. Maybe not rocket science, but non-trivial given most people's home computer hardware.

Last I checked, hardware to capture just digital video off of DVI was not cheap and limited in the resolution it could capture. No integrated audio support, and they tended to do frame-by-frame capture, so you'd have to put the frames back into a more typical format.

If you have a list of "any number of devices capable of recording audio and video" from HDMI, please post.

you do realize that in some cases, Apple isn't given a choice. if the record labels and studios want something and don't get it they can always pull out of itunes. which would hurt Apple seriously and the content companies know this.

not unlike ATT being allowed to change the rules on iphone set up and force activation at time of purchase. Apple likely doesn't care that much since they don't see the bulk of the monthly fees but their deal with ATT puts them in a tight spot on the issue and they have to give in.

DRM is irrelevant. It doesn't work, never will work.
There is already a major shift in social consciousness towards digital freedom. Freedom of information, freedom to hear music, freedom of humanity.

The days of suing 5 year old girls because they sang 'Happy Birthday', are over.

The best and brightest musicians are doing it themselves now. Besides, who listens to top 40 RIAA crap anymore? Or to the radio for music?
Video equipment is getting better and better, cheaper and cheaper, and special effects can be done on a home computer. Small movie studio's are popping up all over the place.
Like Metallica, Hollywood is becoming more and more irrelevant. Video games are taking over movies as a source of entertainment.

All that DRM does is continue to drive people towards a new shift in consciousness. People want music back. They are pissed that it was hi-jacked by big business. Just look at what they did to online radio.

Besides, people have better things to do then read 50 pages of disclaimers to watch a movie. Disclaimer on your OS, Disclaimer on iTunes, Disclaimer on setting up iTunes account, Disclaimer on renting iTunes movie. Disclaimer on dvd software, disclaimer on Quicktime software, disclaimer on movie, disclaimer on 'Handbrake' or Mac the ripper if you want to watch it on your ipod, disclaimers on everything.

Much easier to download a torrent and ignore the disclaimers. Besides, what municipality has the funds to hire police to investigate and kick down doors to arrest women and children for downloading a song?

The cat is out of the bag, and there is no chance he's going back in.

I was with you up until this sentence. Unless you're referring to useless popcorn action summer blockbuster trash, what the hell are you going on about? I'm a gamer myself, but "games are taking over movies"? That's either a load of ignorant nonsense or just a very frightening prospect.