Decreased Playback Quality

Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a "constrictor" that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high-quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected content present, the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts it, "slightly fuzzy", a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale (see the Quotes for real-world examples of this). In fact the specification specifically still allows for old VGA analog outputs, but even that's only because disallowing them would upset too many existing owners of analog monitors. In the future even analog VGA output will probably have to be disabled. The only thing that seems to be explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided that Macrovision is applied to it (see the Decreased System Reliability section for further discussion of Macrovision problems with Windows).

The same situation occurs with home theater buffs who screwed up and bought the wrong thing, from an industry that is confusing the hell out of consumers. Almost every time we are in a major retail outlet that sells HD sets and players, we run into someone who doesn't know YPbPr from peanut butter or HDMI from hair-gel. Again, this isn't a Vista specific dilemma. Nor is the alluded to Macrovision situation either, though we personally have encountered snags with Macrovision, just never on a PC.

The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) "fuzzy with less detail" [Note G].

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

The Microsoft specs say that only display devices with more than 520K pixels will have their images degraded (there's even a special status code for this, STATUS_GRAPHICS_OPM_RESOLUTION_TOO_HIGH), but conveniently omit to mention that this resolution, roughly 800×600, covers pretty much every output device that will ever be used with Vista. The abolute minimum requirement for Vista Basic are listed as 800×600 resolution (and an 800MHz Pentium III CPU with 512MB of RAM, which seems, well, "wildly optimistic" is one term that springs to mind). However that won't get you the Vista Aero interface, which makes a move to Vista from XP more or less pointless. The minimum requirements for running Aero on a Vista Premium PC are "a DX9 GPU, 128 MB of VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0, and minimum resolution 1024×768×32", and for Aero Glass it's even higher than that. In addition the minimum resolution supported by a standard LCD panel is 1024×768 for a 15″ LCD, and to get 800×600 you'd have to go back to a 10-year-old 14″ CRT monitor or something similar. So in practice the 520K pixel requirement means that everything will fall into the degraded-image category.

(A lot of this OPM stuff seems to come straight from the twilight zone. It's normal to have error codes indicating that there was a disk error or that a network packet got garbled, but I'm sure Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things like "display quality too high").

Now that Vista is available, video cards with HDCP and HDMI are available for PC's. HDMI bearing displays are available as well. There's certainly not a wide choice of either of these available. Yet. Primarily because there's not been a need to ameliorate. The assertion above that "everything will fall into the degraded image category", is categorically false. We don't see how any reasonable person would even begin to assume this could be true. Only protected HD content played in a disapproved environment would experience this sort of degredation, but this is an unavoidable consequence of dealing with both HD formats, and NOT unique to Vista's implementation.

Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. Vista's content-protection means that video images of premium content can be subtly altered, and there's no safe way around this - Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem (Philip Dorrell has created a neat cartoon that illustrates this problem). Microsoft claim that this hidden image manipulation will only affect the portions of the display that contain the protected content, but since no known devices currently implement this "feature" it's hard to say how it'll work out in practice (what happens currently is that Vista just refuses to play premium content rather than downgrading it).

Since no known devices currently implement the feature, you cannot objectively say how it will work out period. (editors note: my daughter draws better cartoons than Phil, though I did get a chuckle out of it.)

An interesting potential security threat, suggested by Karl Siegemund, occurs when Vista is being used to run a security monitoring system such as a video surveillance system. If it's possible to convince Vista that what it's communicating is premium content, the video (and/or audio) surveillance content will become unavailable, since it's unlikely that a surveillance center will be using DRM-enabled recording devices or monitors. I can just see this as a plot element in Ocean's Fifteen or Mission Impossible Six, "It's OK, their surveillance system is running Vista, we can shut it down with spoofed premium content".

I think we covered how potentially wrong this conclusion might be a few paragraphs up by expounding on the concept of playing protected content simultaneously with non protected content. Any decent video hardware capable of properly supporting Aero Glass and DirectX10 (which we can do here with now inexpensive video cards that were released in 2004) can easily handle multiple VMR (Video Mixing Renderer) display surfaces discretely. Again the assertion seems to imply that the "premium content" downgrade process will globally affect everything, and this just doesn't appear to be true. It's not necessary, for instance, to downgrade an entire PC's display system to 640x480 or some other ridiculous resolution to downgrade a video stream being played.

The silly thing about the industry's obsession with image quality is that repeated studies have shown that what really matters to viewers (rather than what they think matters) is image size and not quality. Sure, if you take the average consumer into a store and put them in front of the latest plasma panel they'll be impressed by the fact that they can count each individual hair in Gandalf's beard, but once he's leaping about wrestling with the balrog this detail becomes lost and the only differentiator is image size. You can find a good discussion of this in The Media Equation by Stanford professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. In one experiment on visual fidelity they showed a film using the best equipment they could get their hands on, and again using a fifth-generation copy on bad tape and poor equipment. There were no differences in users' responses to the two types of images (see the book for more details on this). You can see an example of this effect yourself if you can set up a machine with a CRT and an LCD monitor. Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for a minute or two. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty? Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?

Conversely, image size is a huge differentiator: The bigger the better. So in practice a degraded image on a huge VGA monitor (or by extension anything with a lower-quality analog input) will rate better than a non-degraded image on a much smaller LCD monitor, assuming you can find an example of the latter that Vista will actually output an HD image to. Of course convincing consumers of this is another matter.

The overwhelming success of on line video services like Youtube (much to the chagrin of the content industry) seems to indicate that consumers merely want what they want. Quality and image size issues are secondary to desire. In the case of home television sets, screen size rather than "image size" is the big selling point. And let's not forget the overwhelming majority of so called "high definition" sets natively support no higher than 720p. It will be a while before 1080 resolution displays are the mainstream. Hopefully all the hardware snafus along the way will rectify themselves over the next several YEARS this is going to take.  Governments, manufacturers, and plain old market economics are dictating the slow crawl here, not Vista. At least Vista got the whole DRM chain right on their end of the equation, even if it's a chain that utterly sucks.