The FUD has already begun.....

*sigh* The FUD has already begun

http://lifehacker.com/5154968/windows-7-seemingly-blocks-audio-capture

Note that this was an issue even in windows vista, mostly due to certain audio device drivers *cough* Sigmatel *cough* turning off stereo mix.....

 

Yeah I already have this issue in .Vista. I never thought it was a DRM thing, I figured my sound drivers just didn't support it.

 

What's even worse? The socalled "finder" of this "flaw" got on SlashDot...but the article he wrote is vague, and there's no real proof

Sigh, and it's frustrating when people pick up on stories without actually seeing if it's factual in any way shape or form.

 

i tend to not read slashdot anymore. their window-bashing got so ridiculous lately.

the audio thing never really affects ordinary use cases. coming from music business, it never affected even non-normal use-cases.

the resting drm is no problem. there is a secured path for blueray playback. else, we would cry we can't watch blueray. i don't like drm and never will. but i see no problem from microsoft supporting it. else, we couldn't use the os for a lot of things because they would have to disable at a much greater level.

 

This was MS's golden opportunity to shout 'we have dumped DRM - if you want to watch HD you can install a special Hollywood ankle bracelet from our site. Otherwise your OS serves you (and only you) again!!!'

Instead they chose to stuff in the same old Hollywood malware into their next flagship venture by design. So people who don't like it on principle and/or don't have the time/inclination to research the mechanics of it, will distribute plenty of FUD...

 

it's no malware stuff. stop believing in fud yourself, varadero.

 

Right, DRM is a brilliant feature that all users were begging MS for. Video degradation if one piece of your hardware, software etc is non-HDCP, but nevertheless fully legal and paid for. Great.

Your own operating system overriding your commands to follow a broadcasting company's 'do not record' flag. What the...?? While the pirates down the road from where I live have nothing HDCP compliant and I can promise you are not suffering any degradation on their 1080p. Yesterday they emailed me an invitation to watch a film seeing as I'm having trouble with my 2 year old monitor! I'm glad you like this set up, and would be even more interested to know why, what it gives you and me, the people that buy their stuff rather than torrent it (no-one has any DRM issues on mininova ).

I personally don't want my OS deliberately limiting my enjoyment in favor of a third party corporation, however well intentioned the cause (although even record companies themselves agree DRM as it is won't work). Where is the FUD in what I say? Please, point out the sentences that are baseless and misleading. I apologize for the use of 'malware' in the earlier post - that was wrong - I was trying to keep the message short, but most people (excluding yourself) probably know what I meant by the word.

The point I was making is this: As long as MS chooses to police its users and incorporate code that serves another industry, people who do not like this idea or understand how it works will love all stories that make it sound like some Big Brother conspiracy. If MS says 'you, the user, are free to choose if you want to be policed - ie, you don't want HD, then leave it, if you do want HD download our DRM from microsoft.com and enjoy your BR'. If that happened, how could it even be possible to distribute FUD???

 

It's much, much simpler to have the mechanisms in place. Far more people would groan having to download an add-on to enable the functionality.

 

Exactly. "Mom and Dad" would have a field day trying to get their Blu-Ray disc player on their Vista based computer to work. Average Joes and Janes want to follow the "path of least resistance" to get what they want, they want it to "just work." Compare that nature to most of us on NBR who love to get into the nitty gritty parts of our computers, who love tinkering with settings and want to know exactly what is running at any given time.

 

I don't mind the DRM stuff too much but I wish there were better diagnostic tools bundled with it. I owned (well, still own) a Toshiba G35-AV650 which one or two of you may know was the first HD-DVD laptop sold. Let's just say getting playback working, and through HDMI, was one heck of a challenge. Sometimes I'd get a random "copy protection error" message, othertimes I'd get a blank signal to my projector. With essentially no diagnostic tools, it made it very hard to figure out exactly where a failure was occurring! That was with XP MCE and HD-DVD; I experience similar things now with Vista and BD.

On the video side, outside of all sorts of complications playing protected content, I really have not had any issues playing regular unprotected content.

On the audio side, I'm not so sure... my understanding is that XP and Vista are definitely doing some mangling to the audio stream in the name of DRM even when playing unprotected content, but what mangling is being done, I don't know. I don't have audio gear of sufficiently high quality that I can notice the difference

 

Hmm, you've got a point. Maybe then stick it as an option when you install (custom v standard). The problem is that if you put something which works against the user (if you don't 'punch the right buttons') by design (and is linked to implied theft of intellectual property) the FUD will go on. This will hurt MS for sure. Alternatively have it as a separate install DVD.

I mean what's worse? Download/install separately the DRM if you want it, and thereby stop the FUD brigade cold, or make it mom and pop friendly and have half of Slashdot seeing KGB conspiracies under their keyboards? I still think MS has a big perception issue with DRM and needs to swallow a bitter pill if it wants to marginalize the FUD to the tinfoil hat whack job fringe... As it is, even blue chip CIO's resent the implicit lack of trust in the DRM system and feel compelled to vote against the software with their wallets.

 

The straight up issue is that MS cannot allow playback without the decryption and protection mechanisms in place. If anyone deserves blame, it's the movie industry pushing it. MS is simply trying to deliver features to customers who would otherwise complain about not having. As far as any other content goes, these mechanisms do nothing to stop you from playing it. I'm building a hefty library of lossless music from my CDs and I'd be pretty upset if I wasn't allowed to play it.

 

Yep

10 char

 

OK movie industry may be to blame (though I wonder how much bargaining power they had with the one OS monopolist...), but we're talking about how to stop FUD. If DRM has somehow become the pet hate issue for all MS OS's Vista on, with about 60% of IT sites bashing it for being some kind of thought control code developed by Nazi exiles working at the Pentagon, and that secretly spies on users, reporting all their sinful downloads, then you have to react, or continue to watch panic buying of XP on ebay and non-gamers going Linux.

It is a feature, but so is a PVR, yet MS doesn't throw that into the OS code. Why must this feature be in the OS at all cost? If this feature is so widely misunderstood, and hated (sometimes on principle) by such a vocal (possibly quite large) percentage of customers, I reckon as MS you've got no choice. Keeping the feature would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. MS writes the OS! How hard can it be to display a message saying "you have inserted a BR DVD into your player. Windows can play that for you, however due to customer pressure, Microsoft has put the required code for this is on install disk 2. Please insert disk 2 now if you wish to proceed, and your BR will be ready to play in about 3-4 minutes".

If this feature stays in there by design, we will keep seeing things like we saw last week on Slashdot. Any sound stutter will have about a third of users ranting and flaming on just about every IT blog that exists. If MS leaves it like that, then it needs to really beef up the PR machine against the FUD, or will have no sympathy from me if the FUD goes on.

My own viewpoint on this is that if the DRM is so bad technically as to inconvenience only the legitimate users, while the pirates laugh away at your naive stupidity in buying genuine (because the torrent always works fine) then it needs to be reworked or ditched on those grounds. Just my 2c

 

problem is, you can't (in, NO WAY) playback a blueray or hd-dvd without quality loss without the save path (a.k.a. DRM). the os HAS to support it, else it's not legal. there could be no legal app adding support except if it would to exactly that to your vista/win7 that it does have built-in right now.

and in my case, using windows to playback hd-disks was the least hassle. ordinary players mess up much more than windows.

and, in any case, i own and love anydvd, legal here

 

yes, but fact is, it isn't. use up-to-date gpu drivers, plug in the hdmi cable, connect to beamer/tv, and it works. most of the time, just like, sort of, ANYTHING in the computer and entertainment business i've seen a lot who didn't got their ps3 working correctly at first. no drm sucks back then. just ", that firmware doesn't really work". which is the right thing: a bug report.