Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Playback Under XP

An anonymous reader writes "In the last few weeks the first HD-DVD and Blu-Ray drives for PCs have slowly trickled onto the market. Up to now, it has not been clear what system requirements you need to actually be able to play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. The operating system was the main cause of concern; many rumors cropped up that the new generation of video discs would not work under Windows XP. Hardware.Info put the question to Cyberlink, the company behind Power DVD, if the lack of a protected videopath in Windows XP would make it impossible to enable HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback. They have answered the questions, and provide a complete checklist of what you need to play Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies in HD resolutions on your home PC."

1 goat, 1 long knife

[also-rr (980579)]

...and a penatagram to use for the sacrifice Personally I hope that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD _never_ get cracked, or at least if they do it's never ported to Windows in an easy to use fashion. It's hard to think of any other way to get the formats dropped faster.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[jmorris42 (1458)]

> Personally I hope that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD _never_ get cracked, or at least if they do it's never ported to Windows in an easy to
> use fashion. It's hard to think of any other way to get the formats dropped faster.

You mean like DVD was dropped? Nope, once they commit billions to pushing a format that have to follow through. At least once it hits a critical mass. If the crack doesn't appear until after millions of players are fielded and thousands of titles are released they are stuck.

Since Vista dropped the requirement for TPCM we have all known the next gen DVD formats were going to get cracked. As soon as a software based player is available it is toast. And I'll tell ya something else. Mplayer won't need a dual core CPU and a 256MB video card for playback either.

Regular DVDs could be played back with a 1X DVD drive, a Pentium 90 and a video card with hardware scaling and color space conversion (i.e. xv support). A little back of the envelope math tells me a fast single core Intel or AMD cpu is more than enough. If your video card can do scaled video and colorspace on 1920x1080 windows you should be in the ballpark. If you have XvMC support you should be golden. HD video isn't THAT many more bits or pixels per second, despite what the marketing would have you believe.

Besides, I still don't understand your thinking. If it isn't cracked I ain't buying in. Didn't buy DVD until DVD Jon make it usable. So if this stuff ain't cracked it can all rot in hell for all I care.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[CastrTroy (595695)]

The dual core and 256 MB of video RAM does seem a little steep. I currently watch lots of quicktime trailers at 1080p, and haven't noticed any dropped frames with an AMD 3200+ and an ATI x550 (128 mb). I don't even see how dual core would come into it. I highly doubt that the number of cores will make a difference if you're just running a single process to display the video.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[benwaggoner (513209)]

A QuickTime trailer is typically H.264 Main Profile @ 10 Mbps CBR. HD DVD supports VC-1 or H.264 High Profile @ up to ~27 Mbps, plus picture-in-picture video overlay, plus subtitles and graphics, plus up to three 7.1 audio tracks mixed in realtime (main audio + commentary + UI effects).

Ther's a LOT more going on with these formats than just playing back a single moderate data rate file! Look at the above, and you can see why multiple threads + GPU decoder and rendering asssist are extremely helpful.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[benwaggoner (513209)]

Well, many of us will mainly be watching the movie and main audio at any given time, but a vendor hardly would go to market with a player that didn't support big features of the disc (well, Blu-ray lets you do that by having a couple of different profiles, but not HD DVD). That'd be like having a DVD player that didn't support subtitles. To get a HD DVD logo for a player, you need to support the interactive features.

I gather you haven't seen any of the IME (In Movie Experience) titles. For example, on Bourne Supremacy, on the fly you can have a video commentary track, where the director or producer will pop up as a picture-in-picture to give a face to the narration. Lots of very cool things along these lines will be coming in later titles, and its stuff you'd want to be able to access. And we're talking real-world titles - there are clearly the bits available to do it.

Also, HD DVD absoutely mixes multiple audo sources in real-time, and this is used in real titles. They were required to be premixed on DVD, but not on HD DVD. This is a good thing, since you don't have to waste bits on doing the base audio when doing commentary tracks. This is also why audio decoding is moving out of recievers into the players, and the players output mixed PCM over HDMI as the optimum output mode.

You're dramatically underestimating the load of rich media playback, and overestimating the load of decryption. And I'm not aware of any software players that'll be doing any sort of reencryption in software, or why that would be needed.

I imagine free players like VLC will eventually support playback of non-AACS HD DVD discs. But they'll have similar decoder requirements. We're definitely talking about using GPU compositing, GPU codec decode assist, etcetera.

And we're not even talking about Blu-ray, which has higher max codec complexity, plus it has to run a Java VM and another encryption layer...

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[Darkforge (28199)]

Personally I hope that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD _never_ get cracked, or at least if they do it's never ported to Windows in an easy to use fashion. It's hard to think of any other way to get the formats dropped faster.

Besides, I still don't understand your thinking. If it isn't cracked I ain't buying in.

That was the grandparent post's whole point. If (in a magical fantasy land) the formats didn't get cracked, no one would buy in, and the formats would rot, which would be a good thing.

With that said, I think everybody agrees that the formats certainly will be cracked, so, meh.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[jmorris42 (1458)]

> That was the grandparent post's whole point. If (in a magical fantasy land) the formats didn't get
> cracked, no one would buy in, and the formats would rot, which would be a good thing.

Why would it be a good thing?

Fact: DVD is near the end of its life for a high quality movie format. Disney titles for the kids? Another ten years, just like VHS is still clinging to life if that niche. A format to drive a 50" HD monitor? No.

Fact: Any new format will have all the DRM the industry thinks it can get away with.

Fact: The original plan was for Vista to be a TPCM only horror, and for HD content to only be playable on PCs with TPCM (ie. Vista and OS X on Intel). Hollywood had banked everything on that and was betrayed. (Nobody ever wins in a 'partnership' with Microsoft.)

Fact: If either/both of these new formats catch on they will be good enough to last 10-20 years, like DVD's eventual lifespan will probably end up and about like VHS's reign.

Fact: If both fail, by the time Hollywood is ready to try again we might not be lucky enough to get something so crackable.

Fact: If Hollywood has TPCM it is possible they might actually design something that can't be cracked. Or at least not cracked effortlessly, as DVDs are now. Microsoft's failure with Vista is our opportunity, we should seize it.

Re:1 goat, 1 long knife

[indil (911425)]

Too late. [kaist.ac.kr] High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection [wikipedia.org] (the Blu-ray and HD-DVD DRM) was broken years before it was ever put on the market. As expected, the industry has pulled the rug out from under itself by using a custom and unproven (and incidently, unsecure) encryption algorithm. Apparently, they had a requirement to keep the hardware gate count <= 10,000. According to the cryptanalysis, the following are possible for HDCP-compliant devices:

• Eavesdropping on any data
• Cloning any device with only their public key
• Avoiding any blacklist on devices
• Creating new device keyvectors

And all you need to do that are 40 devices. You can extract their keys and quickly calculate the master key, which can then be used to circumvent the DRM.

From the paper:

An attacker can reverse engineer 40 different HDCP video software utilities, he can break open 40 devices and extract the keys via reverse engineering, or he can simply license the keys from the trusted center. According to the HDCP License Agreement, device manufacturers can buy 10000 key pairs for $16000. Given these 40 spanning keys, the master secret can be recovered in seconds. So in essence, the trusted authority sells a large portion of its master secret to every HDCP licensee. With the master secret in hand, one can eavesdrop on all device communications, spoof any device, and clone any device, all in real time. One can produce a device that, by parroting back the KSVs of its peers, cannot be disabled by any blacklist. With a reasonable amount of computation, an attacker can also produce new device keys not on any key revocation list.

What you need to watch HD-DVD

[slightcrazed (973882)]

A shit-load of cash and a bunch of new hardware, apparently. Seriously, I need a DUAL CORE CPU just to watch a fricken HD DVD? Are you serious? What is a new HD DVD set top box going to look like, a cray supercomputer?

Re:What you need to watch HD-DVD

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

What is a new HD DVD set top box going to look like, a cray supercomputer?

Nope. It's going to look like a 2.5GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and a USB card running Red Hat. [geekswithblogs.net]

What a deal!

[shawnmchorse (442605)]

I would only need to purchase a whole new computer, video card, and monitor to support playback of movies in somewhat higher resolution. Hold me back...:p Do they really think that introducing new hurdles like HDCP and a "secure video path" to be able to watch this stuff will encourage people to buy and actually use it? Or do they just not care?

Re:What a deal!

[winnabago (949419)]

Hell, my computer can't even run the diagnostic utility that supposedly tells me how deficient I am. Guess my answer is "no".

Re:What a deal!

[Trailer Trash (60756)]

In a year or two the standard $500 pc from dell will have all of this stuff built-in, and the vast majority of people will neither know nor care that their pc has special hardware that enables this playback. These same people today don't know that their dvds can't be copied legally.

Just to gauge the reaction, I explained the DMCA to my mother one day in plain English and she was aghast. People who don't hang out on here all day tend to not know these things.

Re:What a deal!

[Babbster (107076)]

I don't understand these recommendations at all. First off, as others have noted, HD playback is indeed possible with single-core CPUs. Second, the video card shouldn't have to have 256MB Of memory - video cards have supported resolutions higher than 1920x1080 ("1080p") for years, so video memory should be a minor concern. Finally, unless the HD-DVD and Blu-ray consortia are putting extra restrictions on PC playback (over and above those on current HD-DVD and Blu-ray players hooked up to TVs), HDCP won't be an issue until a content provider decides to enable the ICT flag - no current releases do, and supposedly the major studios have an agreement amongst themselves not to do so for at least a few years.

In short, I find all of this information suspect and most likely just a way to get people to buy more new hardware. Since Cyberlink makes most of their money from OEM deals, they have a large incentive to do so.

Who cares?

[Quiet_Desperation (858215)]

You have to need psychotherapy to even consider buying into this format war.

I'll wait until there's a format where, when I push the Menu button after inserting a disc, I DON'T get "operation prohibited by disc". Prohibit my shiny white ass, disc makers!

Re:Who cares?

[truthsearch (249536)]

Your disc player will respond, "Bite my shiny metal ass."

"Is my computer BD/HD ready?" command-line tool:

[mypalmike (454265)]

echo "No"

Re:"Is my computer BD/HD ready?" command-line tool

[nine-times (778537)]

dammit. apparently my computer isn't BD/HD ready.

Surely no-one's going to buy a bluray...

[niceone (992278)]

.. after it just killed that aussie TV guy?!

Re:Surely no-one's going to buy a bluray...

[syousef (465911)]

No you've got it confused. BluRay vs Sting Ray.

One is a dangerous thing that will rip out your heart with a poisonous barb given half a chance, and the other is a harmless-if-not-provoked sea creature.

Cripes.

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

What's powering the damned players? Is this all OS overhead and panicky DRM safeguards, or are they actually churning out set-top boxes with dual cores, flux capacitors, and proton packs?

My Checklist

[segedunum (883035)]

To enable HD resolution playback of an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray videodisc your monitor, graphics card and the driver you use have to be compatibe with the HDCP standard.

Bugger. That's me out in the first round. I'm not going to replace my good equipment, and especially my fantastic 19" CRT monitor, just to get 'high resolution' videos to play.

Graphics cards are even worse, there is only a handfull of cards out there that sport HDCP support.

Yes, and even those you buy yourself might have HDCP, but they won't have it switched on. However, many OEMs 'in the know' like HP, do. Sounds like lock-in to me.

The purchase of a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player will therefore have no added value to a normal DVD player without HDCP.

Fantastic. I'm sorry, why do I need to monkey about getting high definition content on my PC again, and why would I want to pay more money for HD discs over DVD when there's no benefit whatsoever? That sounds like a lovely way to get a new format to take off. Not.

I downloaded that checker and bugger, I can't play high definition disks. I'm...really...devastated.

Re:Very irresponsible journalism

[BalanceOfJudgement (962905)]

We will get Blu-ray and HD-DVD Windows support when the media and software companies decide we're finally allowed to watch the content we rightfully and legally purchased

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Break open the bank, folks

[Lumpy (12016)]

funny part is that non drm HD quality and resolution mpeg4 content can play on paltry Celeron 2.4ghz processors with 512 meg of ram and a crappy video card.

I demo real HD content on a HTPC next to a HDDVD to a customer and they love the HTPC's picture over the HDDVD player. BluRay is not even HD quality yet as they do not have dual layer discs available yet so they are EDDVD instead of HDDVD.

Jon says he will

[in2mind (988476)]

Does anyone know if the DRM/encryption in BD/HD has been cracked yet? Is DVD Jon working hard on this

AFAIK Not yet. But DVD Jon has said in his blog that he will. check his site

http://nanocrew.net/2006/01/08/deaacscom/ [nanocrew.net]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060116-5989 .html [arstechnica.com]