Filed under: Video, iTunes, Bad Apple, Macbook Pro, MacBook
MacBook Pro users getting bitten by HDCP
Yesterday, our buddy David Chartier at Ars and Sam Oliver at AppleInsider both publicized an issue that's been burning up the support boards for a while now: iTunes video rentals and purchases in HD are flagged for HDCP control, and in cooperation with the new Mini DisplayPort connector on the MacBook and MacBook Pro unibody models, those movies and TV shows are refusing to play back on non-compliant external displays.
In this case, 'compliant' means HDMI or recent-vintage DVI, but even monitors or TVs that support HDCP may not properly negotiate with the DisplayPort connector to give iTunes and QuickTime the all-clear signal (if so, quitting and relaunching iTunes once the display is hooked up may clear the playback hold). Equally annoying: HDCP is only supposed to apply to 'high-value' digital streams, meaning standard-def purchases and rentals on the iTunes store should be out of scope... but some reports indicate that both the HD and SD instances are flagged, blocking playback on anything but the laptop's internal display or a straight-thru HDMI connection. Argh!
While Apple TV users with unconventional output setups have been dealing with this aggravation since the beginning of the year, MacBook and MBP owners have largely steered clear, even as the HD content on iTunes became available for playback on the laptops. Now that the hardware and software have come into sync on the unibody models, Apple's compliance with HDCP -- a necessary but appalling condition of the content companies that deliver the HD movies and TV shows -- is beginning to close out the 'analog hole' and cause real aggravation for laptop owners with legitimate use cases. Talk about a bag of hurt.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Steven Leigh said 5:14PM on 11-19-2008
This is exactly why I will not purchase video that contains DRM. I would much rather rip my own DVDs or just plain not watch it on my Macbook than have to deal with these issues.
Once the movie industry has gone through the same silly process the record companies had to go through, they will come to the same conclusion the record companies came to: if you give your customers what they want instead of locking out and suing them, they might actually purchase your products.
Let's hope it doesn't take the movie industry as long to learn this lesson.
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William Hook said 5:19PM on 11-19-2008
"This is exactly why I will not purchase video that contains DRM. I would much rather rip my own DVDs"
You won't buy stuff with DRM but you'll buy DVDs, which I presume you mean commercial Hollywood movies, which, yep, have DRM.
Nice contradiction there. :)
Neil said 5:49PM on 11-19-2008
@William Hook
Come on dude, don't be a jerk. Seeing that DVDs are extremely easy to rip these days I think his statement was clear and reasonable.
Ted said 6:00PM on 11-19-2008
It's easier and faster to use Requiem to decrypted purchased movies than it is to rip DVDs.
Stucco said 11:00PM on 11-19-2008
@Ted- My sincere thanks for mentioning Requiem. I have not purchased from iTunes since they broke Hymn a long time ago. I had given up that this functionality would ever come back. Cheers!
Tim said 4:52PM on 11-21-2008
William, the thing is that DVDs have really old and easy to crack DRM (CSS). Even old computers can crack the DRM fairly quickly, and open source video players often just use the DeCSS code to crack the DRM on the DVDs on the fly to watch the video, letting the standard Linux box with a few packages act as a region free DVD player.
The main reason DVD ripping isn't more rampant is because transcoding takes a long time, while a CD can be ripped and converted to MP3/ACC tracks in a few minutes. However, thanks to CUDA and, later, OpenCL, it will be easier to use the many floating point cores inside graphics cards, along with the existing power in CPUs, to transcode DVDs to Divx, H.264, or whatever codec you like really quickly. There is already a Windows only program called "BadaBoom" which has been found to convert video with an Nvidia 280 GTX five times faster than a top of the line quad core Intel CPU. There will be a DVD ripping revolution soon, once GPU processing is widely available, and programs are written that make it easier to convert DVDs. It's already really easy to get movies from a torrent site, but now it'll be possible to copy a DVD in about half an hour or so. This will be really nice for people with portable video devices, because now they can take their existing movie/TV series collections and convert them for their devices more easily.
The latest laptops from Apple really confirm this, as they all have recent Nvidia GPUs and it seems it'll be possible on the MacBook Pro to use both cores for CUDA, and I suspect that Hybrid SLI will be enabled once Snow Leopard is released, since Snow Leopard is meant to use OpenCL both to speed up the OS and make the resources available to programs that aren't even directly related to graphics.
Oliver Breidenbach said 5:18PM on 11-19-2008
We tried to connect an external display with HDMI (but apparently no HDCP) by way of a mini DisplayPort to DVI adaptor and then an DVI to HDMI cable and the display would not be recognised by the MacBook Pro.
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geocom said 5:28PM on 11-19-2008
Yep, DRM is easily removed from your DVD's (thanks Mactheripper). I've yet to hear of any HDCP hack that will allow me to play my vids.
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biscuitbox said 5:36PM on 11-19-2008
For DVD's there is MTR so goodbye DRM, this is about a hardware cartel - forced into spending money to buy specific hardware. The end user has the final say because you can stick 2 fingers up at ANYTHING with DRM and force change. Don't buy and when sales plummet the manufacturers will see it our way. nuff said.
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Ty said 5:37PM on 11-19-2008
So, it seems clear to me that the only reliable way to ensure that what you downloaded is playable on your system is to... pirate it.
Nice work, entertainment industry!
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LinuxMercedes said 6:00PM on 11-19-2008
Yup, Ty. Sad, but true, as explained in:
http://www.xkcd.com/488/
Ted said 5:59PM on 11-19-2008
I don't understand why the movies even require HDCP. None of them are 1080p. When you play a Blu-Ray disc on a PC that doesn't have an HDCP monitor, it scales the movies down to 720p.
Shouldn't, then, these movies be able to be played on any display at their 720p resolution?
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Jeremy said 6:13PM on 11-19-2008
I think article just about sums it up...
http://www.maccomedy.com/new-macbook-copy-protection-prevents-anyone-from-viewing-anything/
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Mystic said 6:29PM on 11-19-2008
The Studios require HDCP, NOT Apple!!! It's like blaming apple for the Fairplay DRM on iTunes music when the store was first launched. Basically it's DRM or nothing for now. I'm so tired of the blame being put on the wrong place.
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Wheels said 11:55PM on 11-19-2008
Dude, it's David Chartier, what do you expect? If someone can be wrong somehow, he'll focus like a laser on that somehow.
Yes, DRM sucks...blah....blah....blah. If you want to play the game of selling content, you have to deal with DRM - as Apple is. If there is a problem, it might not be Apple's fault. And if it is their fault, they'll more than likely fix it.
Nothing, and nobody, is perfect.
ICEBrk said 6:32PM on 11-19-2008
Yet another example of paying customers suffering for playing by the rules. When will companies stop punishing those that play by the rules, they should be providing incentives to pay for the content, not give me another reason to go the way of captain hook.
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Iain said 6:38PM on 11-19-2008
I spend thousands of dollars on equipment to enjoy the products these guys make, and I get that they want to protect stuff they are proud of. That they have worked their lives for. But what really bugs me is that because someone somewhere sometime may try to somehow make illegal duplicates against the wishes of these producers, that the expensive hardware and software I have bought becomes, for some odd reason, absolutely useless. And not because it is incapable of showing me this content, but because someone, somewhere, sometime, somehow may make illegal copies of that work. I dunno somehow that just bothers me. Really I think it is the part of me spending thousands of dollars for equipment that was supposed to just work but now, it just doesn't.
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Steve said 7:23PM on 11-19-2008
Apple iTunes content needs a icon [HDCP] High Definition Content Protection. The consumer needs to be informed. Informed prior to purchase. I have a brand new Sharp HDCP Compliant TV .. and I an running into this with my new MBP!
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Diggory said 7:44PM on 11-19-2008
My parents have already fallen foul of HDCP - the HDCP chip in their Sony Bravia TV has fried itself after two years and their HDTV satellite box (Sky HD) refuses to output to it via HDMI.
Luckily the satellite TV box and TV both have component connections which I used instead. More recent iterations of the same Sky box have had them removed (to prevent 'piracy'.)
They had no idea what was going on - all they knew was that they couldn't watch TV any more.
DRM - if it works perfectly then it's a minor irritation. Of course nothing works perfectly in the real world, and then it becomes a real headache.
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Scoo said 7:44PM on 11-19-2008
This is like gun control, the law-abiding are the only ones being inconvenienced.
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