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Vista Prevents Users Playing High-Def Content
Zorvan
Member CommonPosts: 8,912
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135814/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws
Vista Prevents Users Playing High-Def Content
Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs.
Jon Brodkin, Network World
Content protection features in Windows Vista are preventing customers from playing high-quality video and audio and harming system performance, even as Microsoft neglects security programs that could protect users, computer researcher Peter Gutmann argued at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston Wednesday.
"If there was any threat modeling at all, it was really badly done," Gutmann, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said while giving a talk on Vista content protection. "Once the enemy is the user and not the attacker, standard security thinking falls apart."
Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes that say "graphics OPM resolution too high." Gutmann calls this "probably the most bizarre status code ever."
While Microsoft's intent is to protect commercial content, home movies are increasingly being shot in high definition, Gutmann said. Many users are finding they can't play any content if it's considered "premium."
"This is not commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users' own content," Gutmann said. "The more premium content you have, the more output is disabled."
Gutmann, who wore a white T-shirt marked with a Windows Vista logo during his presentation, first issued his criticisms several months ago with a paper titled A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.
Gutmann's paper called Vista's content protection rules "the longest suicide note in history."
Microsoft acknowledged that quality of premium content would be lowered if requested by copyright holders, the BBC reported. Microsoft defended its copyright protections after Gutmann's paper came out, saying they are common features of many playback devices, the BBC article says.
The protections allow copyright holders to prevent video from being played in high definition unless users have equipment that supports the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management system developed by Intel. If PC users have graphics cards with video connections that don't support HDCP, they are out of luck.
High-definition audio is also blocked in many cases, Gutmann said Wednesday.
"It's taking this open architecture that IBM created 25 years ago and making it closed again," he said.
In a 132-slide PowerPoint presentation, Gutmann outlined numerous features of Vista that he says are frustrating customers and programmers. New functionality related to content protection makes it hard to develop new drivers, he said. When ATI was finally able to ship Vista drivers, they crashed Windows, and Dell and Gateway had to delay Vista upgrades because they couldn't get working drivers, he said.
Gutmann said hardware costs will increase because vendors can't provide Vista-approved security functionality unless Hollywood studios like MGM, 20th Century Fox and Disney grant written approval saying the content security meets their standards.
A Vista function known as "tilt bits" -- like the tilt sensor in pinball machines -- requires hardware and software drivers to report every minor glitch, even ones that cause no problems, Gutmann said.
"Every otherwise unnoticeable minor glitch is suddenly surfaced and turned into a showstopper," he said.
Separately, all the extra encryption required to meet Vista's content protection standards means some computer components can never enter power-saving mode, he said. Thus, when you play a movie your CPU keeps running at full steam, he said. The extra power demands make it hard to reduce electricity usage.
"It's a bit of an extreme claim, but you could say Windows Vista causes global warming, because it's burning so much power with all this nonsense," Gutmann said.
The encryption requirements render high-end graphics processing units less effective, he said, because the best of those products emphasize graphics performance over content protection. On Vista, US$100-video cards can thus outperform those that cost $1,000.
Gutmann argued that Microsoft placed content protection above all other priorities when building Vista, perhaps to gain favor and money from Hollywood. Microsoft should have instead focused this effort on security features that protect users, Gutmann said, such as encrypted paging to protect user secrets, protected content domains that keep out malware, and anti-debugging techniques to prevent rootkit hooking.
New Zealand's government, which has argued that digital rights management fails to address the rights of people and government, appears to be the only government worldwide to express public concern about Vista's content protection standards, Gutmann said.
Comments
Like i said Vista is just a way for Microsoft to control PC users, however there will always be ways to work around their security.
The first computer that I was given during school had Windows ME on it. From that point forward I vowed never to purchase a computer with an operating system on it which hadn't been at least tested by users for 6 or so months.
Everything I've heard about Vista has been either negative or an argument which consists of the line "I know that ______ sucks about Vista, but ________ is cool...sort of...but it is on XP pretty much /cry"
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
Never paid for windows before (Although I do have a legal Xp copy for some odd reason...)
And I'm not going to pay for Vista,
it's a piece of garbage and shouldn't have gone retail for another 2-3 years.
Microsoft needs to get their act together before Linux goes all to commercial and starts supporting things like DX10 and such,
after that I recon Microsoft as a whole are screwed.... FREE owns Hundreds of Dollars any day of the week.
Played so far: 9Dragons, AO, AC, AC2, CoX, DAoC, DF, DnL, DR, DDO, Ent, EvE, EQ, EQ2, FoMK, FFO, Fury, GW, HG:L, HZ, L1, L2, M59, MU, NC1, NC2, PS, PT, R:O, RF:O, RYL, Ryzom, SL, SB, SW:G, TR, TCoS, MX:O, UO, VG, WAR, WoW...
It all sucked.
I think that is the most colorful post I have ever seen........Retro spoke my feelings on any new OS.....6 month....minimum
Yeh i never paid for windows before too lol :P Windows 2000 and before i just downloaded them or got a fake copy from work. However with Windows XP pro i just stole from work.
Yep, this is one of the things that bothered me about Vista before I bought it. However, I don't have an HD DVD player so I haven't ran into problems. The DRM downgrades HD content into DVD quality, and that's all that I can get out of my system at this time anyway.
It's common knowledge that Vista has slower performance than XP. Whether it's from the DRM crap or not I'll leave up to others to decide as I'm certainly not qualified to say.
What I can say is that I can view HD streams without a problem, and my audio and video files play just fine.
Worth the money? No, not in my opinion. If you can live without DX 10, and you're not the type of nerd that needs the most recent "stuff" (that would be me), then don't bother with Vista until you have to.
I suppose that performance won't be as much of a concern once I go quad core, add at least 1 more GB of ram, and upgrade my video card. When you think about it though that's some serious hardware just to make the O/S run smoothly. It borders on the absurd.
It's pretty, but it's not $200 (or $400 for the boxed version) pretty.
~Mysk
So far I haven't really had any problems with it. One nice feature it has is you can play DvD movies without a TV tuner card and encoder. In Windows XP you couldn't do that. It also supports the use of multi core CPUs where as Windows XP doesn't. I guess it has it's ups and downs. I must say it does look a lot nicer then XP IMO.
Doesn't XP Pro support multi/dual core?
Doesn't XP Pro support multi/dual core?
Not from what I've read. You can use a duel core CPU with XP as I've done that, but the OS doesn't take advantage of it apparently.
Doesn't XP Pro support multi/dual core?
Not from what I've read. You can use a duel core CPU with XP as I've done that, but the OS doesn't take advantage of it apparently.
Hmmm... ah! I know someone who still uses XP, so I'll ask them to take a screen shot of their task manager.
It may be that XP does not recognize multiple physical processors but may use both cores on a single dual core processor. It's a bit convoluted if you ask me.
Next statement of facts you'd like to make?
I'm actually talking from experience with regards to being able to play DVDs. Perhaps you don't need to have a TV tuner card, but you do need some form of DVD encoder/decoder for Windows Media player to play DVDs. I know because I couldn't play any DVDs in Windows XP without additional software. Vista has everything built in from the start so you don't have to search for or buy additional software to allow you to play DVDs through your PC.
As far as the multicore I'll see if I can find an article, but I recall reading Vista is the first OS built on a kernal that utilizes multiple cores. Note that I say utilize. Windows XP may utilize up to two cores, but it's not coded to take advantage of them buy sharing the processes of the OS.
No difference between the two, other than Vista being more "user friendly" (i.e. dumbed down to the point where it makes all the decisions for it's user, including what you may see and what you may not). The only use for Vista is for total internet newbs, to protect the rest of us from their security mistakes. 'Course, we didn't need Vista for that. "Parental Control" features were invented a long time ago.
I don't think anything in your post is correct, where do you get your info? XP Pro supports Multi/Duo Cores and there is even a 64-Bit version. XP also plays DVDs just fine on both my DVD drives. The only thing missing is DX10, but I'm not too worried about that yet.
World Builder GM
Hero's Journey
www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/bridgman02april15.mspx
Decompressing MPEG-2 requires a lot of computing power. DVD players contain a chip specifically designed to decompress MPEG-2 data. However, modern PCs have enough computing power to decode MPEG-2 entirely by software. For a couple of years now, computers equipped with DVD drives have contained DVD decoder software capable of playing DVDs. These decoders were provided by the PC or DVD drive manufacturer. Until Windows XP, you also needed a DVD player application, but Windows Media Player for Windows XP now fully supports DVD playback, as long as a compatible DVD decoder is installed.
www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/plugins.aspx
Windows Media Player becomes a full-featured DVD player when combined with a DVD decoder (MPEG-2 decoder) with features such as full-screen video playback controls, DVD chapter listings, and integrated cover art.
For Windows Vista
If you're running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate, DVD capabilities are included as part of the operating system. If you are running Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, or Windows Vista Enterprise, you can enhance your DVD playback experience by purchasing a DVD decoder pack or by upgrading to a more powerful edition of Windows Vista.
www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Hardware-Considerations-Windows-Vista.html
Although the current beta won’t install on a dual core, 64-bit processor (at least not for me anyway), I still recommend investing in dual core machines if you are thinking of running Vista when it is released. The reason for this is because when Microsoft created Windows XP, they did so under the assumption that most people would run it on a machine with a single processor. Even though Windows XP supports machines with multiple processors, you really only see a benefit if you are running multi-threaded applications.
Vista is different though. Vista is designed in such a way that the operating system itself can realize a real performance gain from having multiple processors or a dual core processor.
The title is extremely misleading. Vista doesn't not "stop" you from playing HD content. There's just a draconian prerequisite required by content producers for HD content to be played in it's full quality, and that is requiring all components along the signal path to be HDCP compliant. So your gfx and monitor needs to support HDCP. The same applies with consumer electronics such as home theater setups.
Although I'm AGAINST DRM and any form of "content protection", all MS is doing is simply providing the means for you to play HD content. If they didn't, they'll be another group of people blaming them.
I believe what is important for most people here is if our games would have a performance increase on multi-core/processor setups, and that is entirely up to the game itself, not the OS.
Which takes all of 30 seconds to download, so again, how is Vista better in this regard? Because you det to skip 30 seconds of download?
I believe what is important for most people here is if our games would have a performance increase on multi-core/processor setups, and that is entirely up to the game itself, not the OS.
Thats true, but I was just pointing out that it's something XP doesn't have. There are actually a lot of things Vista OS does that XP does not if you look at them very closely. Because VIsta does more it requires more power, but thats the same with most games or software. The utilization of the multi cores should help balance things out a bit though.
Which takes all of 30 seconds to download, so again, how is Vista better in this regard? Because you det to skip 30 seconds of download?
That is provided you can find one for free. I'm sure there are some available, but being that it comes installed on Vista is helpful for the user as they don't have to try and track down a decoder IMO.
Windows Media Player is far from ones only option to play DVDs, I would like to add.
VLC or Media Player Classic also do a great job. I personally prefer Media Player Classic and use it on my machine, after installing K-Lite Codec Pack, which yes comes with a fist full of decoders.
As far as the OPs post goes, I also am staying well away from Vista... well as much as possible... I do have to boot it up in a VM to test stuff, but that's as close as it gets. I do not like the concept of others deciding what to do with my sh*t. Everything on my machine I would qualify as premium because it's what I want on my machine, who are these companies to decide. Hanging on to straws, that's all they are doing. If I didn't need to use Photoshop on a daily basis I would be sitting in a different OS right now, and only dual booting back to XP when I happen to play a game.
And on the multi-core systems, and multi threaded systems, lets be perfectly honest: How many users do you think utilize this anyway? I don't think my Mom and Pop need 4 cores to use "The Internets" or "The Email" or "The Solitare". Vista is a beast of overkill. I know I have very often made great use of multi-cpu systems since back when I had my first one, a Dual 300mHz P2. 3DSMAX and the various renderfarms I've worked at have always benifuited greatly from these, but this really isn't an normal operation.
Am I the only one who thinks the glass windows aren't remotely cool as far as a usable interface goes? Having a glass title and blury stuff behind it does not make it easy to identify the window title. I dunno, dropshadows and unified menu bar in OS X is one thing, but blurry-glass title bars is just not practical, although pretty.
Read the article again. Recording your home movies in HD format and being unable to play them without the OS downgrading them, has nothing to do with "draconian prerequisires by content producers".
But how many of them are really necessary? I don't know anyone who has had a hard time getting DVD's to play. And Vista doing more requiring more power... but doing what? In a practical world, it should do exactly what previous OS's do: Allow you to manage files, programs, and manage your system resources.
I think the point the OP was making is Vista, and Microsoft in making it, have decided that Vista should be doing more than manage your system for you, they are getting into the policing business essentially. It's telling you what you can and can't play, but not objectivly (it is just a machine after all).
This reminds me of a news thing I read a while back where Walmart were denying people to print photographs because they looked too professional, and thus they must have stolen them. Digital photos that is. This is exactly what Vista is doing and it's not right.
Oh, to the decoders bit again, unless your getting a handme down computer, you'd be hard pressed to even get a computer with the DVD drive that didn't come with a decoder preinstalled for XP. And people that buy DVD drives come with one on disk. Usually a crappy one like Interactual player or something.