The IGP Chronicles Part 1: Intel's G45 & Motherboard Roundup

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• sprockkets - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

  Except the fact that you needed a firmware update on the home theater receiver is just bulls****.
  
  Thanks DRM!
  
  I can't wait till VLC gets native blue ray support! At least we have Sly-Soft!

• DoucheVader - Friday, September 26, 2008 - link

  Hey if it wasn't for a vast majority of people copying stuff, we wouldn't have DRM. I am sick of the complaints. We as consumers created this problem.
  
  Most things that have DRM are to protect someone's bread and butter. How would you like it if every time you got paid there was some money missing?
  
  
  

• - Saturday, September 27, 2008 - link

  Your point might be valid if DRM worked, but can you point out a single mainstream home theater medium on which the DRM means anything to the pirates?
  
  DRMed CDs? Ha. Those just pissed off consumers when they inevitable didn't play in some players and/or contained bad software. Often defeated with the frickin shift key.
  
  DVD? People have tattoos of the DeCSS source code it's that damn short. Amusingly the longest lasting DRM scheme, with 2.5 years between the first DVD movie release and the release of DeCSS.
  
  HD-DVD? 253 days, not even a full year after the format first shipped its AACS protection system was cracked. Under three weeks later the first copies start showing up on private trackers.
  
  Blu-Ray (AACS)? The same AACS crack applied to it, and about two weeks after the first HD-DVD copies showed up Blu-Ray was right behind it. Launch to first pirated movie: 225 days.
  
  Blu-Ray (BD+)? Slightly harder than AACS apparently, but titles did not ship with it until October 2007 so the cracking community got off to a late start. AnyDVD HD supported decrypting all BD+ titles roughly 5 months after the first titles shipped and copies again showed up soon after.
  
  I'm less familiar with DVD-Audio and SACD, but my understanding is that there hasn't been a direct "crack" of their respective encryption but instead PC-based players and/or sound drivers are modified to just write the decoded bitstream to the hard drive. This works quite well for audio, as in most cases the compression (if any) applied on the disc is not wanted and the uncompressed PCM stream is exactly what the user desires. For obvious reasons that is not feasible with video.
  
  Once these protections are broken, they do nothing to reduce piracy and only remain to prevent fair-use backups by technologically illiterate users and/or to annoy consumers with crap like these HDCP issues.
  
  It doesn't even matter to the pirate crowd whether the cracks are public or private, as long as someone can do it that means the files will get out, and once they're out they're out.