Vista Issues

I am having problems with the way Vista handles security and content protection. I hope someone here can help me.

My laptop comes with an HDMI connection. This is great for using my computer and watching movies on a big screen. The computer part is really fun. Playing movies, however, is a problem. Commercial movies will only play for about 20 minutes and then the "copy protection failed" error would come up. Unencrypted movies will play without any problem. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that this is the way Vista attempts to protect contents. Does anyone else have this problem? How do I play a commercial dvd all the way through?

Vista wants to protect files too. Wordzap is a word game I like to play to keep my mind sharp. It has a bunch of word lists (text files) in various languages. When you play the game, the program uses these lists to display the words and definitions. Under XP, I am able to edit these text files -- adding words, definitions, etc. I can even replace the original file with a new one.

Vista won't let me do such thing. I can edit the files, but the program won't display the changes. Vista keeps the original file hidden somewhere and will only use that file. It has rendered me powerless.

Does anyone know how to override these security annoyances in Vista? Thanks for your help.

 

Your HDMI is probably not working because your receiver (TV, LCD) doesn't support HDCP. This is M$'s way of protecting HD content.

As far as the text files go, see if you can locate the text files on your computer. Once you find them you need to "take control" of them. Select one and right click on it and go to properties. Click on the Security tab and highlight and Group or user names that don't have a gray checkmark in the Full control box below. Select full permission and you should be able to change this. Let me know how it goes.

 

Well, HDCP doesn't really come into play for standard DVDs. That is only used for HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray discs (which you will probably run into problems trying to play those too by the way). Since you're using standard DVDs (CSS encryption), you probably have some kind of problem with a driver. To be honest, Vista has so many ways that it tries to "protect" media content, that it could be anything. It could be drivers, or it could be random code issues. Maybe your hardware isn't considered "secure" by Vista. Maybe your TV or your laptop is using a different HDMI revision than the other. Hell, your computer could even be getting strange power spikes/drops that are sending funny signals to the hardware drivers that Vista is detecting. There are just simply too many things that can trigger this in Vista that it's really hard to pinpoint the cause. I would start with drivers though. If you have an nVidia graphics card this could be an issue.