At 10:18 PM 10/3/2007, Rob Dennison wrote: >Hi, > >What I understand is that in the name of protecting the entertainment >industry's profits. All "high performance" VISTA I/O "adapters" like >sound cards and their drivers are going to be certified by VISTA as being >as hacker proof and unable to make copies of I/O. This amongst other >things means they must be certified capable of simplex operation only.
This isn't precisely true. First off, the primary issue is with video, particularly at higher resolutions (HDTV, for instance). What happens is that there is a driver software/physical hardware matching process that goes on to make sure that the hardware is still the same as installed. And, the data paths are typically encrypted, so that a bus monitor can't copy the data stream. This is basically under control of the user applications, though. If the user application wants to control access, it has to have the keys, etc. There's nothing stopping you from making a totally uncontrolled application that plays/records your own content at whatever resolution you want. What you might encounter trouble with is if you try to do this *simultaneously* with protected content, because the OS has to arbitrate among the streams. Watching a DVD-HD simultaneously with PowerSDR might prove problematic. There are some current/beta drivers out there that do not properly implement the interaction, and choose the "lowest common denominator" sort of response, i.e. shut it down. I would expect that these will get fixed, since there is great consumer pressure to do so. There's also been a lot of chit chat along the lines of "OMG! the kernel polls the driver/hardware every 30th of a second (i.e. one video frame time) to make sure it's still secure"... As if there aren't already a bazillion other little polling things going on in XP and you're running on some legacy 8 MHz 80286 where this is an issue. >Fortunately no I/O driver capable of "high performance" has yet been >certified. My interpretation of this is that as drivers become certified >your VISTA windows will be updated in the middle of the night. What >untold mischief this will cause is yet to be discovered. This is somewhat an unlikely scenario, providing you are moderately cautious about configuring automatic updates. No different than today's WinXP automatic updating. It *is* possible that Vista Home, intended for naive entertainment consumers, might have default configurations that are less appropriate than, say, Vista Premium, or a flavor that is oriented towards business (businesses generally won't tolerate autonomous updates that might break a mission critical application). >Hang on to your hats (oops I mean XP copies!) > >Rob _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
