Then the push will come from the studios to get rid of component video and DVI. (They are already fully underway with DVI, almost all new TV sets have HDMI instead, which is backwards compatible with DVI.) Uncertain how that battle will go.
Just wanted to clarify here; I presume you were just simplifying for clarity's sake, but wanted to point out that HDMI does not mean DVI + copy protection: DVI+HDCP means DVI + copy protection, while HDMI basically means DVI+HDCP+Audio+BidirectionalCommunications (to negotiate formats, send IR signals, etc) with a new connector. So nothing about HDMI is really about copy protection -- it just happens that the version of DVI that HDMI is based on already included copy protection (HDCP) -- and AFAIK, nearly all currently-for-sale displays which have DVI input already have DVI+HDCP (as do many or possibly most video sources with DVI output, i.e. HD tuners and some DVD players).
If anybody doubts this, a bit of searching reveals $30 dongles that take HDMI as input and send DVI output, simply by stripping out the 'unneccessary' bits of HDMI; no decryption involved, since the encrypted video stream is the same between the two.
Also note that there's been a lot of suggestion that HDCP is quite readily crackable, quite possibly already effectively cracked; there's just not yet a good motivation to distribute the cracks ala libdvdcss, since nobody could yet do anything useful with the unencrypted DVI stream anyhow. It's a slightly fuzzy area since the industry(*) could fight back against *some* kinds of cracks by using key revocation -- but key revocation is an entirely untested technology, and is likely utterly, laughably impractical in the real world.
(*)I'll leave determining *which* industry as an exercise to the reader.
So even if full-resolution component video and 'vanilla' DVI become a thing of the past, using DVI+HDCP or HDMI -- currently the state-of-the-art connector, with no suggestions of anything higher-tech on the horizon -- and MPEG2 encoders which, as Brad suggested, Moore's law will inevitably bring us -- will mean that HD input to our Myth boxes will be a real possibility long-term, with likely the only 'hack' being obtaining a 'libhdcp' the same way you obtain 'libdvdcss' now (and, worst-case, the use of an external HD tuner box used the same way cable tuners are used by many now). Of course, it would be nice if even this turned out not to be necessary for our fair-use manipulation of the datastream, but if it does, it's not the end of the world.
Of course, for OTA or unencrypted cable, using a GnuRadio card
<http://comsec.com/wiki?UniversalSoftwareRadioPeripheral> and ATSC (or QAM) software codec could result in a more elegant solution even in a post-broadcast-flag era; but that doesn't necessarily work for encrypted cable signals, and its legal status for OTA remains to be determined (though it would have to be a pretty flaky legal decision to make that hardware illegal).
Even better would be if the EFF and others succeeded in getting the ridiculous broadcast flag struck down in court (well, more specifically, the FCC's self-granted oversight over the entire data chain and hence the entire technology industry). And/or maybe a cable tuner PCI card that took a CableCard and delivered clear MPEG2 bitstreams or, hell, even uncompressed frames... hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
-spc
-- /- Sean Cier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -\ ( Everyone should believe in something; I believe I'll have another pint ) \- http://www.PostHorizon.com/scier -/ _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
