Protected HD content and your PC

The sophisticated content-protection technologies of Blu-ray and HD-DVD present a number of challenges for the open architecture of a PC.

Both drives will demand new video playback software, and major players such as Cyberlink’s PowerDVD and Intervideo’s WinDVD have announced support for the new formats. These have to be much more sophisticated and responsible than normal software DVD players though.

They need to decrypt the content-protection systems before decoding the video and audio formats.

During this time, the player must implement temporary resistance from both hardware and software attacks. There’s no standard for this, so it’s up to each company to develop its own system.

Next the software player needs to determine whether the graphics and display have a secure connection and to do this it must communicate with the graphics driver.

The handshake between the driver and software player must also be secure and Microsoft has developed a system-level bridge, the Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP).

This is currently present in both XP Service Pack 2 and the most recent Windows XP MCE 2005 Update 2. The graphics driver also needs to support COPP, and this is available in ATI’s Catalyst 5.8 and Nvidia’s 77.77 drivers onwards.

The graphics driver tells COPP what kind of video connections are available, then COPP passes the details to the software player.

If the driver reports secure digital connections supporting HDCP on both the card and display, the player will output the full high definition data.

If the driver reports non-HDCP or analogue ports, the software player will either downsample the data to standard definition or show nothing at all.

While graphics chipsets have been ‘HDCP-ready’ for some time, the cards require HDCP authentication keys.

Most PC monitors, despite having DVI inputs, do not support HDCP. It is not possible to update an existing graphics card or monitor to support HDCP.

So to watch protected Blu-ray or HD-DVD content on your PC, you’ll need a new optical drive, a compliant software player, an OS supporting COPP, a graphics driver supporting COPP and a graphics card and display which both fully implement HDCP.

And in order to decode the highly compressed (but likely to be standard) H.264 video format, you will also need at least a 3.6GHz dual-core processor.