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[Nerevar]

Shamelessly stolen from slashdot

Hardware: Toshiba HD-DVD Player Planned to Enforce HDMI
Television
Posted by timothy on Monday July 11, @10:40PM
from the thou-shalt-not dept.
CCat writes "Digital Spy reports that at a recent Toshiba road show in the U.S., Toshiba demonstrated their upcoming HD-DVD specification. The most interesting thing for people buying TVs at the moment is that Toshiba has stated that their HD-DVD Player will ONLY output high Def on the player's HDMI output (plus other digital connections) with the analog output downrezed to 480 lines. Prior slashdot disussion talks about the copy prevention angle and HDCP guidelines."

We've been talking about it for a while, but looks like it's finally becoming a reality. All the early adopters of HDTV technology (those who bought HDTVs without an HDCP-protected input) are going to get screwed out of the next generation of DVD products. I'd imagine Blu-Ray will also require HDCP-protected output for HD streams if they want to get any studio support whatsoever (or even keep the studio support they already have). Only a matter of time. Hopefully this will spur some productive discussions about DRM and how poorly megacorporations treat consumers these days.

 

[Jeffahn]

Workaround will be available the day after the release.

...

 

[Blimblim]

I'm quite sure there will be some way to use component output on some players, just like there is some convenient way to disable the region lock on a lot of recebt dvd players out there (see samsung HD850/HD950, they even allow non protectect component HD output)
Hell, some upconverting dvd players can even output directly to HD-SDI outputs, some people use it for high quality upconverting, but others could use it as a very easy (and almost cheap) way to capture these streams without any loss.

 

[shantyman]

I smell class action lawsuit...

 

[mrklaw]

Workaround will be available the day after the release.

...

there are already workarounds.

I don't understand, but then that never gets in the way of corporate decisions.


By all means protect the digital output. If its DVI, protect using HDCP to prevent perfect copies.

but why not still allow analog outputs? Piracy is still possible, but they'd need to capture it, convert from analog back to digital, and almost inevitably lose quality.

Any reason they can't use macrovision over HD component?

 

[chinch]

that is a bummer. it's absurd but yet unsurprising.

it would be better if they downressed to 540p not 480p as that would look ALOT better on HDTVs.

FYI - there are no known "workarounds" that have been demonstrated to work.