Few monitors and virtually no graphics cards are HDCP-Ready

As the launch of HD DVD and Blu-ray products draws near, a lot consumers are going to be disappointed to find that their TV, PC monitor or graphics card will not be compatible with the equipment if it does not fully support HDCP.  When it comes to high definition TVs, any TV that is HD-Ready or HDCP Ready will be fine, however no CRT monitors and very few TFT displays currently available are HDCP Ready. 

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For PC playback of HD content that uses HDCP, the matter gets much worse since four conditions must be met for HDCP to validate.  Its Eeprom size be adapted and also be flashable, its GPU must be capable of real-time encoding and the manufacturer has to pay ~$1 to obtain a HDCP compatibility table from the consortium per card.  Unfortunately no manufacturers at present have met all these conditions due to the lack of HD protected content.  As a result, even though most graphics cards such as current ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards are HDCP compliant, they are not HDCP ready and thus will not allow the viewing of HD protected content in its full resolution.   At present, no BIOS updates are available to make any graphics card HD-Ready. *

On the other hand, even without a HDCP Ready monitor or graphics card, it may still be possible to watch HD copy protected content, but with tight to extreme restrictions.  Microsoft's recommendation to incompliant hardware is either show a black screen or a picture with its resolution cut by 2 with some slight noise added, along with a message displayed to explain that the security requirements are not met and then show a black picture a moment later.  Microsoft has relaxed the restriction on VGA due to it widespread use, however even still it will only allow up to a 960 x 540 max resolution picture to be shown, which is just a touch better than standard definition. 

The good news is that we will be able to watch HD movies on our computers. The bad news is that it will require a supported Player (Blu-Ray?), video card and monitor, which don't exist: yet.

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Only a hand full of monitors (not TVs) available today are HDCP ready. There are no players or video cards. This means if you just ran out and bought the latest and greatest video card/monitor combo; it won't work. The manufactures excuse is that no one wants to pay extra for it. Of course, no one knew they wanted it. It is the manufacturers job to tell use why we should want it? What does this mean for all of us without HDCP ready equipment? It means we either won't be able to watch the movie we bought on our computer or it means we'll have to watch it at a reduced resolution. Microsoft recommends 50% of the source material; I suspect 540p will become the norm.

An in-depth article on these issues with HDCP can be read on BeHardware here.

Hopefully something will be done at least about the graphics card issue as most consumers are not going to fork out on another graphics card simply to get a HDCP-Ready card, particularly if they forked out a lot on their current graphics card.  For those who also have a monitor that is not HD ready, upgrading to a HDCP-Ready monitor and graphics card may end up costing more than the Blu-ray or HD DVD drive itself! 

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* Update: 
According to an X-bit labs article, it will be possible to
activate HDCP support on most HDCP compliant graphics cards with an appropriate BIOS if made available, however as someone must pay the cost to the consortium for the encryption keys used in the BIOS, chances are that this will be a purchasable option.

Feel free to discuss about HDTV, Blu-ray and HD DVD on our Satellite, HD-TV, Blu-ray and HD-DVD Forum.

Source: HD Beat

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