HDCP protection is now activated. Consequences... (page 1: HDCP protection is now activated. Consequences :)

HDCP protection is now activated. Consequences :

Approximately one year ago, we published an article, that might have scared some of you, HDCP : a nightmare for graphic cards and monitors , concerning the upcoming risk of the activation of a new protection norm for HD movies, HDCP, which stands for High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection. Manufacturers’ announcements following this article were pretty reassuring. They said that the risks were limited, everything was already more HDCP compatible than we thought, and that either way it wouldn’t be activated for years. Answers were so sincere that we thought for some time that we raised the alarm needlessly. Now, not only is HDCP protection activated for Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs, but we also found out this was also the case of the new Sony PlayStation 3, and the HD-DVD player of the Xbox 360. As soon as a digital signal is sent out of these peripherals, HDCP protection is activated and the signal is blocked if the display (or graphic cards or both) isn’t compatible with the norm.

What we feared for monitors and TVs is finally a reality. There is HDCP on one side and ICT (Image-Constraint-Token) – a downscaling – on another, and finally the alternative to come back to analog signals. Here is what is really happening monitor by monitor, or to be more accurate, input by input:

To find out what the result will be according to your equipment, we have put together several players and displays to try all possible combinations:

On the software side, we used the 6.5 and 7 Ultra versions of PowerDVD.

Here were the results observed: