Archived from groups: alt.video.ptv.tivo (
More info?)
Randy S. (rswitt@NOSPAM.com) wrote in alt.video.ptv.tivo:
> Interesting, so in that case (since the data travels straight from the
> tuner card to the PCI (or PCI-E once PCI-E tuner cards are available)),
> the DRM would *have* to be built-in to the tuner card itself! Simplest
> way would probably be to encrypt the data some way that only the
> approved driver would be able to decrypt.
Correct. The usual way to do this is to have the encryption/decyrption
hardwired into the silicon of the card, then when you want to decrypt, you
feed it to the card, which then does the output. There is no other
non-standarized way to get around the "unencrypted over a public bus"
requirement, and that's one of the BF issues...there aren't any real
standards on the protection, just requirements.
> The ramifications of that are complex. Would Microsoft then refuse to
> support Tuner cards that did *not* have built-in DRM?
Well, since Microsoft requires software decoding to support their current
DRM for MCE, and *only* hardware decryption and decoding in a special card
would allow compliance, it seems that they'd seriously have to change their
setup. This is mainly because MCE allows recording of analog with any
codec installed on the computer. MCE really wasn't designed to handle
pre-compressed data as the broadcast.
The best possibility is a public-key system where the tuner card encrypts
to the video card's public key. That would still require a change in the
way Microsoft does things, but not as much, since they do have support for
hardware-assist decoding in the video card. They'd just push everything
(including the decryption) to the other card.
This would even allow a setup where you could enter a small number of
public keys to have the data encrypted to, and allow playback on any one
of 10 (for example) devices. This certainly protects the spirit of the
broadcast flag ruling (which is no wide unencrypted distribution), while
allowing a user to use the material.
This would require some standardization among manufacturers, and they
wouldn't like it much, because they want to lock you in. I'd expect that
the reality would be tuner/video combo cards with completely proprietary
encryption methods.
> Of course this is all academic since the BG got voted down, unless they
> find some backdoor way of getting in reinstituted.
They will try to get Congress to vote it in, but I think that the fact that
every new scripted show this year is *still* HDTV might sway Congress to
think that the copyright owners don't really care as much as they say...
they just want to have their cake and eat it, too.
--
Jeff Rife |
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