April 13, 2006
Tim Lee at Tech Liberation Front points out an interesting aspect of the new MovieBeam device — it offers its highest-resolution output only to video displays that use the HDMI format.
(MovieBeam is a $200 box you buy that lets you buy 24-hour access to recent movies. There is a rotating menu of movies. Currently video content is trickled out to MovieBeam boxes via unused broadcast bandwidth rented from PBS stations. Eventually they’ll use the Internet to distribute movies to the devices.)
This is a common tactic these days — transmitting the highest-res content only via HDMI. And it seems like a mistake for Hollywood to insist on this. The biggest problem is that some HDTVs have HDMI inputs and some don’t, and most consumers don’t know the difference. Do you know whether your TV has an HDMI input? If you do, you either (a) don’t have a high-def TV, or (b) are a serious video geek.
Consider a (hypothetical) consumer, Fred, who bought an early high-def set because he wanted to watch movies. Fred buys MovieBeam, or a next-gen DVD player, only to discover that his TV can’t display the movies he wants in full definition, because his TV doesn’t do HDMI.
Fred will be especially angry to learn that his MovieBeam box or high-def DVD player is perfectly capable of sending content at higher definition to the inputs that his TV does have, but because of a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo that Hollywood insists upon, his set-top box deliberately down-rezzes the video before sending it to his TV. Just imagine what Fred will think when he sees news stories about how pirated content is available in portable, high-def formats that will work with his TV.
The official story is that HDMI is a security measure, designed to stop infringers. It’s been known for years that HDMI has serious security flaws; even Wikipedia discusses them. HDMI’s security woes make a pretty interesting story, which I’ll explore over several posts. First I’ll talk about what HDMI is trying to do. Then I’ll go under the hood and talk about how the critical part of HDMI works and its well-known security flaws. (This part is already in the academic literature; I’ll give a more accessible description.) Finally, I’ll get to what is probably the most interesting part: what the history of HDMI security tells us about the industry’s goals and practices.
Officially, the security portion of HDMI is known as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HDCP. The core of this security design is the HDCP handshake, which takes place whenever two devices communicate over an HDMI cable. The handshake has two goals. First, it lets each device confirm that the other device is an authorized HDCP device. Second, it lets the two devices agree on a secret encryption key which only those two devices know. Subsequent communication over the cable is encrypted using that key, so that eavesdroppers can’t get their hands on any content that is distributed.
In theory, this is supposed to stop would-be infringers. If an infringer tries to plug an authorized video source (like a MovieBeam box) into a device that can capture and redistribute video content, this won’t work, because the capture device won’t be able to do the handshake — the authorized video source will recognize that it is unauthorized and so will refuse to sent it content. Alternatively, if an infringer tries to capture content off the wire, between an authorized source and an authorized TV set, this will be foiled by encryption. That’s the theory at least. The practice is quite different, as I’ll describe next time.
Originally posted by Ed Felten from Freedom to Tinker, remediated by yatta on Apr 13, 2006 at 06:07 PM
Just wondering if you'd be interested in bloging / podcasting about Matrixstream's cutting edge video on demand and IPTV Technology ( TV over broadband ). This is a technology that allows the consumer to receive a potential for unlimited VOD / IPTV content up to 1080P in H.264 codec over any broadband connection on a PC Player or set top box for TV ( IMX1020 1080P High definition STB - the world's first 1080P H.264 STB ) If you'd like to see pictures and video's of the this new STB you can go to www.matrixstream.com/presskit . Let us know if your interested.
Yours Truly Aaron Keogh
Tel: 604-291-7727
E-mail: aaron@matrixstream.com
Website: www.matrixstream.com
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drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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Just wondering if you'd be interested in bloging / podcasting about Matrixstream's cutting edge video on demand and IPTV Technology ( TV over broadband ). This is a technology that allows the consumer to receive a potential for unlimited VOD / IPTV content up to 1080P in H.264 codec over any broadband connection on a PC Player or set top box for TV ( IMX1020 1080P High definition STB - the world's first 1080P H.264 STB ) If you'd like to see pictures and video's of the this new STB you can go to www.matrixstream.com/presskit . Let us know if your interested.
Yours Truly Aaron Keogh
Tel: 604-291-7727
E-mail: aaron@matrixstream.com
Website: www.matrixstream.com
Posted by: Aaron Keogh at April 16, 2006 07:48 AM