On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Von Fugal <v...@fugal.net> wrote:
> I stand corrected about HDCP. My father in law was buying a TV a few
> years ago, and I told him to look for TVs that did not say they had
> HDCP, and it was my understanding that they were available and
> becoming more so. Maybe they just stop advertising HDCP and put it in
> the ridiculous tiny print. Oh well.
That would be exceedingly bad advice, because such a TV wouldn't work
with DVD or BluRay players via HDMI. Probably not cable/satellite
boxes, either. HDCP causes issues (switching can become a problem if
renegotiations aren't triggered properly, necessitating power-cycling
of equipment to get it to sync up again after a switch) but it's
required for all DVD and BluRay discs that use their respective
content protection schemes, which is pretty much all of them that your
average consumer is likely to buy. The analog outputs are still
permitted to output full resolution, so you can avoid the HDMI thing
entirely if you want (as long as you get devices that will do
full-resolution over component output), but if anyone ever enabled the
ICT for a BluRay disc you'd be stuck with lower resolution for that
disc.
A few years ago, there were probably TVs available that didn't do
HDCP, but they probably had DVI ports instead of HDMI. I think HDCP
can work with DVI, but devices with DVI rarely support it, AFAIK. I
doubt there are any current displays with HDMI ports that don't do
HDCP, though.
--Levi
/*
PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net
Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug
Don't fear the penguin.
*/
