OT: Deciding on a new graphics card

[Fyron]

You can freely run Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies on a Vista computer, presumably in any software player since the DRM tasks are off-loaded to the OS and drivers... The problem is actually being unable to play such movies on other OSes lacking HDCP support (at least, if the movie studios ever actually enable the image constraint token et all to make it relevant). We're right back to the misguided alarmism.

How were any of the pre-Vista DRMs opt-out? Not buying protected content? Running other software to bypass the copy protection mechanisms to play/rip unauthorized protected media? Able to play any sort of unprotected media without issue? Sounds exactly the same as Vista... The only difference is that the various WMA DRMs, Fairplay, DVD's CSS, etc. have been broken for a while now, and AACS is just now being cracked reliably (BD+ is still uncracked thus far).

The primary problem with the protected media path is that it was a colossal waste of development resources, since it will be bypassed by the "pirates" anyways. Fault MS for it all you like, but it will quickly become irrelevant the day BD+ is cracked. Just like CSS, just like DVD-Audio's protections, Fairplay, WMA, etc. I'm certain MS understood this, but they couldn't afford the black mark of having their media center unable to support the latest media tech..

Strongly object to DRM, certainly, but Vista's (and Nvidia and ATI now) support for DRM-protected content is hardly any different from anything in the past (or from what Apple must be working on for OS X).

Heck, should we fault MS for providing the auto-run support that allowed for the Sony rootkit on a music CD debacle? If they weren't trying to push control on all of us in collusion with Sony, we would never have had that problem!

SJ:
Huh? We're talking about pirated disks here (poorly done ones that didn't have the AACS and BD+ stuff cracked, but still). A legitimate disk will work whether it was paid for or not... But believe you me, if the movie studios could find a way to do that, they certainly would try.

[PvK]

"We're right back to the misguided alarmism." Eh, it seems to me that rather we have two perspectives, and you just keep mis-labeling mine. Your perspective seems to be that "whether the user can play Blu-ray and HD-DVD or not" is a central issue, while I don't want my OS and hardware designed to shut off or degrade if some security code isn't happy. I want the right to program native code (or run whatever third party native code program) that communicates directly with hardware that is designed to let me freely read and output digital signals (e.g. for audio/video). I don't want to be forced to run software/hardware designed to limit what I can do, report on what I'm doing, or shut down systems if my computer seems to be doing something someone else's program hasn't approved.

"How were any of the pre-Vista DRMs opt-out?" Yes, I mean by running other software, or telling Media Player not to connect to the Internet to verify licenses etc. Is not Vista different from pre-Vista in that now it complies with a secret and potentially changeable spec which has the potential to disallow your media hardware to function? Maybe you can run other software on Vista now, but what if the HDCP support decides to update to include checking for unauthorized player software and disables/impairs your media hardware?

"I'm certain MS understood this, but they couldn't afford the black mark of having their media center unable to support the latest media tech.." MS can afford to do whatever they want, and they could very well have taken a stand for users being able to own and operate computers without media-industry sabotage designed into the OS and hardware, and could have led others in the rejection of such crap. Instead they signed right up. Seems to me it goes pretty well with their corporate strategy of trying to own and control how things work and remove such control from users, to slowly adjust users to accepting that people are just users, not owners or actual programmers, and software is a service.