Big Blu-Ray/HD-DVD problem spreads to Windows Vista:
Jordan
Introduction
You want to know a secret? None of the current ATI or NVIDIA graphics
cards will support the full capabilities of Windows Vista.
But let's start from the beginning. This story starts with my
upcoming LCD Monitor Round-Up. As you know, a good monitor should last
several years and outlive every other component in your PC, other than
perhaps a keyboard or a mouse. So, when it came time to do another
review of LCD monitors, my attention turned towards "Windows
Vista-ready" monitors: those with HDCP. After all, it makes no sense
to recommend a monitor that will go obsolete in just a few months.
At the time I started my article, there were only 10 PC monitors with
DVI/HDCP support (we're reviewing 5 of them). I was disappointed, but
what was surprising is that many of these monitor manufacturers
weren't advertising their HDCP support. For monitors, HDCP support is
the most important feature for having a "future proof" solution.
What is HDCP?
HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an
Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This
content protection system is mandatory for high-definition playback of
HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. If you want to watch movies at 1980x1080, your
system will need to support HDCP. If you don't have HDCP support,
you'll only get a quarter of the resolution. A 75% loss in pixel
density is a pretty big deal - Wouldn't you be angry if your car
was advertised as doing 16 mpg, and you only got 4 mpg? Or if you
bought a 2 GHz CPU and found out that it only ran at 500 MHz?
As part of the Windows-Vista Ready Monitor article, I was going to
publish a list of all of the graphics cards that currently support
HDCP. I mean, I remember GPUs dating as far back as the Radeon 8500
that had boasted of HDCP support.
Turns out, we were all deceived.
GPU Support for HDCP
Although ATI has had "HDCP support" in their GPUs since the Radeon
8500, and NVIDIA has had "HDCP support" in their GPUs since the
GeForce FX5700, it turns out that things are more complicated -- just
because the GPU itself supports HDCP doesn't mean that the graphics
card can output a DVI/HDCP compliant stream. There needs to be
additional support at the board level, which includes licensing the
HDCP decoding keys from the Digital Content Protection, LLC (a spin-off
corporation within the walls of Intel).
After some investigation, Brandon and I determined that there is no
shipping retail add-in board with HDCP decoding keys. Simply put, none
of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP.
I did not believe this at first. Surely, I was misinterpreting the
content of the emails I was receiving. After all, everyone is hyping up
H.264 support and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray playback. When I go to
http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1900/specs.html I see HDCP support
listed. Am I supposed to know that the board doesn't support it
because I can go to
http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx1900/radeonx1900xtx/specs.html and
see that HDCP is omitted? If that's the case, am I supposed to know
that the board has "48 shader processors" when it's only listed
in the GPU specifications page?
What we've confirmed
We've been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons
support HDCP. If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT
graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray
movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, you've just wasted your
money.
NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of
board manufacturers. We contacted all six of NVIDIA's Tier-1 board
partners. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the
market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP
support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs
expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the
future, you've just wasted your money.
How can these companies be so oblivious? Playing Devil's Advocate, I
thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, by the time Windows Vista
comes out, most people are going to upgrade their GPU. If the HDCP
support was very expensive, then paying for the HDCP license now would
be like paying for something you don't use. So I dug around for HDCP
licensing costs. Turns out, that the answer is available at the HDMI
website. HDCP licensing requires a $15,000 annual fee and a per-device
fee of $0.005, i.e. a fraction of a cent. That's not too expensive.
There goes that argument.
Upgrade path for HDCP?
Video cards are the only components in a PC that have gone up in price
over time. Yet manufacturers are trying to sell video cards that
don't support HDCP? The technology has been around for years.
Microsoft made it public in March 2005 that HDCP would be required for
Windows Vista and reiterated it again in April 2005 - certainly the
video card manufacturers were given this info before the public were.
Moreover, what about companies who are already paying the $15,000
annual company fee because they produce HDCP-compliant products for
televisions?
Despite my discovery that HDCP licensing is fairly cheap, I'm still
trying to find an answer. There must be a silver lining somewhere.
Maybe, just maybe, existing cards can be retrofitted for HDCP support.
Maybe it's simply a matter of a BIOS flash where each board gets its
own serial number. If that were true, the worse case scenario would be
that customers would pay a few bucks for the HDCP license.
Turns out that this was also wishful thinking.
An ATI representative said: "People will not be able to turn on HDCP
through a software patch since the HDCP keys need to be present during
the manufacturing. We are rolling out HDCP through OEMs at this time
but we have not finalized our retail plans yet."
As I pressed for more information about potential retail plans (i.e.
trade-in programs, whether existing boards already have traces for the
HDCP hardware where it can be plugged in), I got only a vague response:
"We cannot get into more detail at this time, as any further
discussion would get into our trade secrets. However, we do promise to
give you a full update on our retail plans once they are finalized."
I'm not going to speculate on whether ATI's reticence is because
they're trying to downplay a big fiasco, or if they're trying to
keep their super generous solution secret to throw off the competition.
There's actually no way to know.
Well, what about NVIDIA? They were actually very direct: "The boards
themselves must be designed with an extra chip when the board is
manufactured. The extra chip stores a crypto key, and you cannot
retrofit an existing board after the board is produced."
Wow. You can pick your favorite expletive.
The blame game
Blame Canada?
As ATI is a GPU and board manufacturer, I'm disappointed that
Built-by-ATI video cards lack HDCP support. Think about it. The GPU
engineers are smart enough to know that their GPUs need to support
HDCP, but their board engineers aren't? Is it even possible to build
a GPU without thinking about the board that has to go along with it?
ATI is extremely reticent to give us any more details about "Retail
Plans." Maybe ATI owners will get lucky, and ATI will have some sort
of free upgrade program. Maybe ATI owners will get shafted, and buyers
of X1900XT's are going to find themselves with a video card that
cannot play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray at 1920x1080. Who knows?
Blame Santa Clara?
What about NVIDIA? Personally, I think they have the least blood on
their hand for two reasons. One, they aren't a board manufacturer.
That excuse alone wouldn't be good enough for me though.
What really gets them off the hook is that NVIDIA has been offering
their board manufacturing partners designs with HDCP support since May
2005. Likewise, NVIDIA has actually shipped HDCP-enabled GeForce 6200
and 6600's in Sony Media Center PCs. Those boards just aren't
manufactured at retail. In retrospect, they did their part. It was the
board manufacturers who failed us. I don't need to name names,
because they ALL failed us.
Blame the other Santa Clara company?
HDCP is the brain-child of Intel, and now belongs to a spin-off
company, Digital Content Protection, LLC. They're the ones who profit
off all of the licensing fees. If HDCP licensing were cheaper, might we
have seen more PC products with HDCP support? Possibly. It still seems
to me that HDCP has relatively benign pricing when it comes to
licensing. It's half a cent per item. If you compare that to licensing
fees for HDMI, you'll see that while both have the same $15,000 annual
fee, HDMI licensing is 4 cents/per unit (if you use the maximum
discount as an example). Should we blame Intel for creating HDCP in the
first place? I don't think so. HDCP was a technology made in response
to Hollywood's requests. Blue laser technology can only go so far
without content.
Blame Hollywood?
HDCP is an artificial requirement - there's no reason why HD-DVD or
Blu-Ray needs content protection. Although the movie industry is among
the wealthiest of all industries, Hollywood has made things tougher in
their paranoia of software piracy. Can we blame Hollywood for demanding
HDCP? Maybe a little bit, but they're not responsible for this
current fiasco. Movie studios have done their fair part to make
high-definition home video a possibility. From the get go, Hollywood
made it clear that content protection was going to be necessary for
high-definition video and they gave the electronics industry ample
warning. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are coming in 2006. Television
manufacturers have been putting HDCP into HDTVs from as far back as
2002. While Hollywood is certainly responsible for pressuring Microsoft
into requiring HDCP for Windows Vista, they set their ground rules
early on.
Is it our fault?
Think about it. If consumers and reviewers didn't use the terms GPU
and graphics card interchangeably, this wouldn't be a problem. When
it was disclosed that Microsoft required HDCP for high-definition
HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback in Windows Vista, everyone turned their
attention to monitors, assuming that GPUs would support it. We all know
the what happens when you assume. Likewise, why didn't reviewers
investigate if features in a GPU actually made it to the board level?
Most importantly, we as consumers never clamored for HDCP support.
So in a way, even consumers are at fault, right? No way. Only the truly
twisted would claim that the victims brought it upon themselves. Do any
of us "ask" for Direct3D or OpenGL support? It's a given.
Consumers never demanded HDCP support because it was already thought to
be there.
Alan's thoughts
This is a tough situation. The PC world simply isn't ready for
high-definition video playback via HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. There failures
occurred at so many different levels. I've probably burned a few
bridges in this article, and I probably won't be reviewing any video
cards in the near future. Nonetheless, this was a train that had
already left the station. Keeping quiet about the problem wouldn't
have stopped the customer outrage when Windows Vista was released. The
solution to this problem isn't technical. It's political. I hope
that board manufacturers will own up to the challenge and explain their
actions to their customers. There's still time to come up with a
solution.
Brandon's thoughts
Without a doubt, this is huge, startling news. As much as ATI and
NVIDIA have been promoting H.264 decoding with their latest GPUs,
it's pretty shocking to see that apparently none of the shipping
retail cards on the market have been built to take advantage of it. To
add insult to injury, it appears that a line of Sony GeForce 6200s and
6600s offer HDCP support, yet the latest high-end GeForce 7800 GTX
cards don't. How's that for irony?
While some of you may not plan on upgrading to Vista at the end of this
year, this is eventually going to affect you if you ever planned on
watching hi-def movies on your PC in the future. Microsoft will
eventually end support for Windows XP; already, their Games Division is
planning Vista-exclusive titles such as Halo 2. It will only be a
matter of time before other software developers follow suit, forcing
anyone who's remotely interested in gaming to upgrade to Windows
Vista.
Anyone with a GeForce 6/7 or Radeon X1K card who was planning on buying
a BD-ROM or HD-DVD drive later this year for their PC may want to hold
off on that purchase. Quite frankly, this article should affect the
purchasing decisions of potentially anyone in the market for a new PC
or graphics card right now that's even remotely interested in
watching hi-def movies on their PC sometime in the future.
Swam Mollen
and play High Defenition video outside of broadcast networks on
Sattelite and PVRs, then both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are doomed as
mass-market products.
Dan
"Jordan" <lu...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:1139876942....@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Jordan
Agreed. The big companies will see the usual early adopter, hard core
crowd and everyone else will go... "Hey, my DVDs are good enough..."
- Jordan
Jeremy Reaban
>
> Introduction
>
> You want to know a secret? None of the current ATI or NVIDIA graphics
> cards will support the full capabilities of Windows Vista.
Duh. That's hardly a secret.