A DVD Smorgasbord, A HDCP Circumvention: Video Observations on a Late Friday Afternoon

You'd think that by now, over 10 years into the red laser DVD era and with both Blu-ray and HD DVD jockeying for next-generation optical disc advantage, there'd be little opportunity for red laser DVD market differentiation and success. Look, for example, at how many tier-1 consumer electronics suppliers are intentionally winding down their equipment programs, convinced that the era of being able to secure a fiscally sufficient profit margin has come and gone. And look at how many tier-1 semiconductor suppliers have also thrown in the towel, for the same fundamental reason.

You'd think….but in at least one case, you'd be wrong. OPPO Digital has shipped me review units of two of the three players currently in its equipment stable, and so far I've been pretty impressed with them, matching my past read-throughs of others' reviews. OPPO's products provide an intriguing mix-and-match plethora of capabilities, which I've tried to summarize in the following high-level feature table:

Note, in the context of my early-January audio/video interfaces cover story and its online addendums, the following DRM-centric observations:

• None of the players will output a higher-than-480p resolution variant of a CSS-protected video source over an analog connection.
• The DV-981HD bumps up the DV-970HD's peak HDMI output resolution to 1080p, but in the process it 'sunsets' all analog video connections.
• The DV-971H is the odd-ball of the lot, discarding SACD capability and back-stepping to DVI. Faroudja (aka DCDi) video processing appears to be the only feature that justifies its $50 incremental pricetag over the DV-970HD.

I've always found the no-upscaled-CSS-content-over-analog-video limitation of OPPO and others' players to be a bit amusing. The source material is 480-line, after all; if the movie studios are (rightly) confident that 'true' 720p and 1080i video content such as that found on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs is visually superior to the interpolated-pixel 'digital zoom'-like content generated by an upscaling red laser DVD player, why won't they let folks (like me) with 720- and 1080-line sets that don't have the necessary digital video inputs enjoy upscaled material hassle-free? The answer, of course, is that upscaled 480-line source material is 'good enough' for lots of folks, and the studios don't want those folks making high-def copies of that upscaled material. But with CSS circumvented many years ago, isn't it a bit of a moot point? Then again, Blu-ray and HD DVD's AACS has now been hacked, too….

I'm not aware of any (discovered) loopholes that unlock upscaled video over component outputs on the DV-970HD or DV-971H, or that disable HDCP on the DV-970HD or DV-981HD, as are possible with my Samsung DVD-HD841 and V Inc. Bravo D1 via remote control key-press combinations. But where there's a will, there's always a way, even if you have to get it from a country without such a puritanical perspective on fair use rights. Back in August of 2005, I told you about a device that, while it purported to act as a DVI repeater, also happened to strip out any HDCP bits in the stream. DVIMAGIC is no more, but thanks to the folks at the QJ blogs, I've just learned of its heir ascendant.

HDfury includes a HDCP-cognizant HDMI input and spits out DRM-free analog RGB video. Granted, high-quality A/D-converting and capturing a high-def RGB beefy bitstream requires a fair bit of hardware and software heavy lifting (do the math yourself, if you don't believe me…24 bits per pixel, times the number of pixels per frame, times the number of frames per second, will give you the per-second payload). But as the mass storage interfaces hands-on project that I'm now wrapping up and you'll learn about on May 10 suggests, it's definitely possible. Time , it seems, is not on the movie studios' side (no it's not).