| Saturday, February 18, 2006 |
| The Devious ATI: HDCP Secretly Removed |
ATI putting some sneaky scheme on his business practices. Apparently most products that are HDCP ready are silently removed from its HDCP features. Yet there were no press release or information regarding this.
According to the Microsoft specification, high-definition video content that is transported using a DVI signal must be encrypted with HDCP. If HDCP is not present, regardless of whether an attempt at copying is made or not, the video is scaled down to low resolution to deter copying. For a manufacturer that wishes to use HDCP technology on its products, a signup with Digital CP is required. Upon a signed agreement, the manufacturer must pay the committee an annual fee of $15,000 and a royalty fee of $0.005 per product sold. This allows a manufacturer to provide DVI/HDCP support, sufficient for high-resolution output. If a manufacturer wants to implement HDMI, a DVI-compatible connector, an additional $15,000 annual fee to HDMI is needed along with $0.04 per product. To actually implement HDCP protection, unique keys are required on a per product basis which is provided by the committee and requires implementation at the manufacturing level. According to NVIDIA, an extra chip is required that stores unique decoding keys.
Until now ATI still unreachable, Instead, ATI's website has been changing gradually to remove any previous mention of "HDCP-ready" and specifications have been replaced with a more generic "HDMI interoperable" spec.
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posted by Forsaken Angel @ 2/18/2006 08:06:00 AM  
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