"Vorlonagent" <nojtspam DeleteThis @otfresno.com> wrote in message
news:T3Cvh.1960$4H1.968@newssvr17.news.prodigy.net...
|
| "J--" <james4177 DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote in message
| news:1170036088.652050.319620@a34g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
| > When I saw that the Double XP weekend coincided with the free trial...
| > I couldn't resist. I hauled everyone's computer downstairs and hooked
| > them into the LAN (don't usually allow my daughter's access to the
| > internet), I DL'd the client once, got 2 codes from the filefront site
| > and logged the 4 of us onto CoV (my wife has an account as well).
|
| Events completely conspired to shut me out of play this weekend.
|
| My birthday is next Sat, so birthday stuff was moved back so as to not
| conflist with the super bowl. That took up Friday night and all of
| Saturday.
|
| I am starting a new job at EA (helping with the retread of Ultima Online)
| and I needed to find a place in Redwood City. Going up on a weekday was
out
| of the question as I would be confronted with rush hour traffic either
| coming or going or both. That was my sunday.
|
| I got back 6:00 sunday night and was was immidiately hijacked by a freind
| eager to get his new GeForce 7600 GT card installed in his computer. The
| card had problems trying to work with CoH and I ended up fighting with it
| for a a couple of ours with no resolution. It looks like some kind of
| incompatibility, but I have a 7600 GS in my machine and it's happy as a
| clam. After fighting with it again today, I decided to sent it back since
| it was still in Newegg's money-back time window. Once-bitten, the
| replacement is going to be a ATI Radeon X1800.
|
| I finally got a little time to play and managed to get Dr Akagi levelled
to
| 33.
|
| --
Congratulations on getting the Electronic Arts job. I no longer will
purchase any products from them, but that is a few years old boycott for
their selling software that was non-functional and contained anti-consumer
copy-dysfunction that would refuse to allow the paid for software to run if
a Virtual CD emulator was detected. I would make certain that a personal
lawyer reviews your employment contract for illegal clauses (Electronic Arts
has gained a reputation lately for shoddy employment practices and even
worse business practices).
If your friend is using Microsoft Vista, that could be the core source
of the problem. It deliberately disables resolution quality to "plug the
analog hole". In short, the reviews I have read state, "Windows Vista may
be the most expensive suicide note in history."
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
Peter Gutmann, pgut001 DeleteThis @cs.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Disabling of Functionality
------------------------------------
Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be
sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in.
Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF
(Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for
example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound
reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio
provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF
doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled
when playing protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a
pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output,
you won't be able to use it with protected content.
Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's “The Dark Side of the Moon”, released as
a Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you
want to play it under Vista. Since the S/PDIF link to your
amplifier/speakers is regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista
disables it, and you end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead
of Pink Floyd.
Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content
protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component
video. But what if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that
supports HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good
chance that you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really
does support HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market
actually supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did.
As the site that first broke the story in their article The Great HDCP
Fiasco puts it:
“None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today 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 [...] 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”.
(The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled
cards made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia).
ATI was later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this
deception. As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive
for PCs, it had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive
couldn't actually play Blu-Ray disks in HD format:
“Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that
support HDCP, this isn't yet possible”.
In fact so far no-one has been able to identify any Windows system that will
actually play HD content in HD quality, in all cases any attempt to do this
produced either no output or a message that it was blocked by content
protection. While it's not possible to prove a negative in this manner, it's
certainly an indication that potential buyers may be in for a shock when
they try and play premium content on their shiny new Vista PC.
The same issue that affects graphics cards also goes for high-resolution LCD
monitors. One of the big news items at CES 2007 was Samsung's 1920x1200
HD-capable 27" LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 275T, released at a time when
everyone else was still shipping 24" or 25" monitors as their high-end
product [Note F]. The only problem with this amazing HD monitor is that
Vista won't display HD content on it because it doesn't consider any of its
many input connectors (DVI-D, 15-pin D-Sub, S- Video, and component video)
secure enough. So you can do almost anything with this HD monitor except
view HD content on it.
If you have even more money to burn, you can go for the largest
(conventional) computer monitor made, the Samsung's stupidly large (for a
computer monitor) 46" SyncMaster 460PN. Again though, Vista won't display HD
content on it, turning your $4,000 purchase into a still-image picture frame
(oddly enough, this monitor has been advertised as “HDTV ready” by retailers
even though you can't display HD images on it, although in practice the term
“HD-ready” has been diluted close to meaninglessness).
In order to appropriately protect content, Vista will probably have to
disable any special device features that it can't directly control. For
example many sound cards built on C-Media chipsets (which in practice is the
vast majority of them) support Steinberg's ASIO (Audio Stream I/O), a
digital audio interface that completely bypasses the Windows audio mixer and
other audio- related driver software to provide more flexibility and much
lower latency than the Windows ones. ASIO support is standard for newer
C-Media hardware like the CMI 8788. Since ASIO bypasses Windows' audio
handling, it would probably have to be disabled, which is problematic
because audiophiles and professional musicians require ASIO support
specifically because of its much higher quality than the standard Windows
channels (you can get more information on Vista's audio architecture and the
changes from XP in this post from Creative Labs).
Indirect Disabling of Functionality
As well as overt disabling of functionality, there's also covert disabling
of functionality. For example PC voice communications rely on automatic echo
cancellation (AEC) in order to work. AEC requires feeding back a sample of
the audio mix into the echo cancellation subsystem, but with Vista's content
protection this isn't permitted any more because this might allow access to
premium content. What is permitted is a highly-degraded form of feedback
that might possibly still sort-of be enough for some sort of minimal echo
cancellation purposes.
The requirement to disable audio and video output plays havoc with standard
system operations, because the security policy used is a so-called “system
high” policy: The overall sensitivity level is that of the most sensitive
data present in the system. So the instant that any audio derived from
premium content appears on your system, signal degradation and disabling of
outputs will occur. What makes this particularly entertaining is the fact
that the downgrading/disabling is dynamic, so if the premium-content signal
is intermittent or varies (for example music that fades out), various
outputs and output quality will fade in and out, or turn on and off, in
sync. Normally this behaviour would be a trigger for reinstalling device
drivers or even a warranty return of the affected hardware, but in this case
it's just a signal that everything is functioning as intended.
[skipping down]
Decreased Playback Quality
-----------------------------------------
Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires
that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal
quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done
through a “constrictor” that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality
one, then up- scales it again back to the original spec, but with a
significant loss in quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display
fed from a high- quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected
content present, the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts
it, “slightly fuzzy”, a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked
up for $2 at a yard sale (see the Quotes for real-world examples of this).
In fact the specification specifically still allows for old VGA analog
outputs, but even that's only because disallowing them would upset too many
existing owners of analog monitors. In the future even analog VGA output
will probably have to be disabled. The only thing that seems to be
explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided that
Macrovision is applied to it.
The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the
audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) “fuzzy with less detail”
[Note G].
Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to
graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on
(deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the
legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can
hobble on crutches.
The Microsoft specs say that only display devices with more than 520K pixels
will have their images degraded (there's even a special status code for
this, STATUS_GRAPHICS_OPM_RESOLUTION_TOO_HIGH), but conveniently omit to
mention that this resolution, roughly 800x600, covers pretty much every
output device that will ever be used with Vista. The abolute minimum
requirement for Vista Basic are listed as 800x600 resolution (and an 800MHz
Pentium III CPU with 512MB of RAM, which seems, well, “wildly optimistic” is
one term that springs to mind). However that won't get you the Vista Aero
interface, which makes a move to Vista from XP more or less pointless. The
minimum requirements for running Aero on a Vista Premium PC are “a DX9 GPU,
128 MB of VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0, and minimum resolution 1024x768x32”, and
for Aero Glass it's even higher than that. In addition the minimum
resolution supported by a standard LCD panel is 1024x768 for a 15" LCD, and
to get 800x600 you'd have to go back to a 10-year-old 14" CRT monitor or
something similar. So in practice the 520K pixel requirement means that
everything will fall into the degraded-image category.
(A lot of this OPM stuff seems to come straight from the twilight zone. It's
normal to have error codes indicating that there was a disk error or that a
network packet got garbled, but I'm sure Windows Vista must be the first OS
in history to have error codes for things like “display quality too high”).
Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded
output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where
high-quality reproduction of content is vital. Vista's content-protection
means that video images of premium content can be subtly altered, and
there's no safe way around this — Vista will silently modify displayed
content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations
discernable only to Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem (Philip
Dorrell has created a neat cartoon that illustrates this problem). Microsoft
claim that this hidden image manipulation will only affect the portions of
the display that contain the protected content, but since no known devices
currently implement this “feature” it's hard to say how it'll work out in
practice (what happens currently is that Vista just refuses to play premium
content rather than downgrading it).
An interesting potential security threat, suggested by Karl Siegemund,
occurs when Vista is being used to run a security monitoring system such as
a video surveillance system. If it's possible to convince Vista that what
it's communicating is premium content, the video (and/or audio) surveillance
content will become unavailable, since it's unlikely that a surveillance
center will be using DRM-enabled recording devices or monitors. I can just
see this as a plot element in Ocean's Fifteen or Mission Impossible Six,
“It's OK, their surveillance system is running Vista, we can shut it down
with spoofed premium content”.
(The silly thing about the industry's obsession with image quality is that
repeated studies have shown that what really matters to viewers (rather than
what they think matters) is image size and not quality. Sure, if you take
the average consumer into a store and put them in front of the latest plasma
panel they'll be impressed by the fact that they can count each individual
hair in Gandalf's beard, but once he's leaping about wrestling with the
balrog this detail becomes lost and the only differentiator is image size.
You can find a good discussion of this in The Media Equation by Stanford
professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. In one experiment on visual
fidelity they showed a film using the best equipment they could get their
hands on, and again using a fifth-generation copy on bad tape and poor
equipment. There were no differences in users' responses to the two types of
images (see the book for more details on this). You can see an example of
this effect yourself if you can set up a machine with a CRT and an LCD
monitor. Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for
a minute or two. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty?
Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?
Conversely, image size is a huge differentiator: The bigger the better. So
in practice a degraded image on a huge VGA monitor (or by extension anything
with a lower-quality analog input) will rate better than a non-degraded
image on a much smaller LCD monitor, assuming you can find an example of the
latter that Vista will actually output an HD image to. Of course convincing
consumers of this is another matter).
>> Stay informed about: CoV Weekend... 
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