Disabling Of Functionality

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content. Instead of hearing premium high-definition audio, you get treated to premium high-definition silence.

A quote from Microsoft on the subject...

"Windows Vista does not require S/PDIF to be turned off, but Windows Vista continues to support the ability to turn it off for certain content -- a capability that has been present on the Windows platform for many years (editors note: going back to that OS we all hated, Windows ME). Additionally, in order to support the requirements of some types of content, Windows Vista supports the ability to constrain the quality of the audio component of that content. Similar to image constraint for video, this quality constraint only applies to the audio from content whose policy requires the constraint, not to any other audio being played concurrently on the system. As a practical matter, these audio restrictions are not widely used today."

In a nutshell, this isn't anything "new", nor is it specific to Vista except perhaps in the context of timeframe. Will some upgraders be disappointed? I'm sure they will. Will any new home theatre PC's shipping with Vista fall prey to this conundrum? Only if their manufacturers are utterly retarded. Besides, in a larger sense this is far less of an issue than it seems, as home PC users are most definitely NOT buying into the whole Home Theater PC premise in droves. It's something that Microsoft, as well as Apple, Sony and every other commercial PC vendor on earth wants to happen. Ironically, it will be because of Vista's catering to the mandates of the content industry, that we will probably see the Home Theater PC concept actually work.

Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon", released as a Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to play it under Vista (I'm just using SACD as a representative example of protected audio content because it's a well-known technology, in practice Sony has refused to license it for playback on PCs). Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista would disable it, and you'd end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

Wait a minute batman! This is an "example in practice" that you even admit isn't valid because "Sony has refused to license it for playback on PC's". Pink Floyd rocks though, we'll agree to that.

Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video.

And we visit Microsoft's Q&A session link once again...

"Will Component (YPbPr) video outputs be disabled by Windows Vista's content protection?

Similar to S/PDIF, Windows Vista does not require component video outputs to be disabled, but rather enables the enforcement of the usage policy set by content owners or service providers, including with respect to output restrictions and image constraint."

It's more accurate to say that component video will not be allowed when playing back high definition disc formats. Toshiba and Sony both make is fairly clear that an HDMI capable set is required for their non-pc based HD Home Theater experience without limitations too.

But what if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good chance that you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really does support HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did. As the site that first broke the story in their article The Great HDCP Fiasco puts it:

"None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today 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 1920×1080 resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money [...] If you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920×1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your money".

(The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled cards made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia). ATI was later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this deception. As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive for PCs, it had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive couldn't actually play Blu-Ray disks in HD format:

"Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible".

It's no secret that the whole "HDCP Capable vs HDCP Enabled" fiasco spun by the marketing wonk's at ATI and Nvidia was utterly dumb, and they deserve all the bad press and legal trouble they've received  for being so obtuse. However, none of these cards with the specious claim noted above were cards that had HDMI interfaces either. Confusing and deliberately obtuse? Yes. But I thought we were talking about Vista?!?

In fact so far no-one has been able to identify any Windows system that will actually play HD content in HD quality, in all cases any attempt to do this produced either no output or a message that it was blocked by content protection. While it's not possible to prove a negative in this manner, it's certainly an indication that potential buyers may be in for a shock when they try and play premium content on their shiny new Vista PC.

Buyers are already in shock trying to play HD content period, less on a Vista box. Well, the few people who are actually buying HD content (fewer still who plan on doing anything meaningful with it on the Vista platform). Still, it's possible to build a Windows system quite easily that will function and play HD content at this point. If the author intends to continually update his article, he should at least make a footnote to this here, as it's not something that just happened today. It will cost a bloody fortune because PC HD disc drives are prohibitively expensive for now, because HDMI bearing PC displays are hard (but not impossible) to find in the marketplace, and because there are only a few video cards that have HDMI ports. If you want to "have it your way" go to McDonalds, or wait a while for the hardware situation to mature. It's safe to say the reason why the hardware situation hasn't matured isn't because of Vista. Indeed Vista will likely catalyze this potential market.

The same issue that affects graphics cards also goes for high-resolution LCD monitors. One of the big news items at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007), the world's premier event for consumer high-tech, was Samsung's 1920×1200 HD-capable 27″ LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 275T, released at a time when everyone else was still shipping 24″ or 25″ monitors as their high-end product [Note F]. The only problem with this amazing HD monitor is that Vista won't display HD content on it because it doesn't consider any of its many input connectors (DVI-D, 15-pin D-Sub, S-Video, and component video, but no HDMI with HDCP) secure enough. So you can do almost anything with this HD monitor except view HD content on it.

And this is Vista's fault how exactly? Or is it perhaps Samsung's fault for not simply implementing HDMI knowing full well it was going to be a requirement for HD long before this monitor was ever announced less actually available for sale, and one that Vista isn't alone in enforcing. Perhaps its use as an HD content display wasn't a priority of Samsung's. No matter how much we might hate it, DRM and content protection are innate to both of the competing HD formats, whether we're talking about Vista, XP, OSX, or standalone players.

If you have even more money to burn, you can go for the largest (conventional) computer monitor made, the Samsung's stupidly large (for a computer monitor) 46″ SyncMaster 460PN. Again though, Vista won't display HD content on it, turning your $4,000 purchase into a still-image picture frame (oddly enough, this monitor has been advertised as "HDTV ready" by retailers even though you can't display HD images on it, although in practice the term "HD-ready" has been diluted close to meaninglessness - 10-year-old 14″ CRT monitors have a higher resolution than many "HDTV-ready" TVs).

So Vista is responsible for this one too.....hold on..we need a notepad...

In order to appropriately protect content, Vista will probably have to disable any special device features that it can't directly control. For example many sound cards built on C-Media chipsets (which in practice is the vast majority of them) support Steinberg's ASIO (Audio Stream I/O), a digital audio interface that completely bypasses the Windows audio mixer and other audio-related driver software to provide more flexibility and much lower latency than the Windows ones. ASIO support is standard for newer C-Media hardware like the CMI 8788. Since ASIO bypasses Windows' audio handling, it would probably have to be disabled, which is problematic because audiophiles and professional musicians require ASIO support specifically because of its much higher quality than the standard Windows channels (you can get more information on Vista's audio architecture and the changes from XP in this post from Creative Labs).

It's been fairly clear long before Vista went RTM that all of the aforementioned changes to the Windows Driver Model were in place. We're not quite sure what ASIO has to do with protected content in any event, nor do we understand why the author thinks that Vista will "probably have to disable any special device features" such as ASIO. This is an assumption clearly; otherwise the word "probably" would not have been used. Besides, the very Creative Labs link used ostensibly as an assertion of the conclusions the author reached clearly shows a block diagram of the Vista audio driver model. If you are like us and have decent vision, you will see OpenAL and ASIO still having access to the driver.

We don't imagine any professional musicians or recording engineers are going to DRM infect their master recordings while they're in the middle of editing anyway.