James Delahunty
14 Feb 2006 13:44
An interesting blog entry over at Boing Boing focuses on how computers made by the likes of Dell and Sony will be really the only computers capable of playing back high definition movies on next generation discs. Many consumers have already gone out and bought high end video cards that claim to be "HDCP compatible" but in the case of Blu-Ray and HD DVD movies, this is simply not the truth. The problem is that HDCP compatibility is controlled by an inter-industry consortium of giant consumer electronics companies and Hollywood studios.
This means that any of you who decide to build a PC from scratch with an expensive high end video card, will be angry to see the content on your HD discs being "locked out" by HDCP. Only systems designed from the ground up by OEMs (such as members of the consortium) will be able to gain access to these videos.
We've been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons support HDCP. If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money.
NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of board manufacturers. We contacted all six of NVIDIA's Tier-1 board partners. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your money.