They all pass the buck, Netflix claims it is Microsofts DRM at fualt, Microsoft passes the buck to nVidia for not supporting their DRM by writing a DRM driver for the ti4200 series.
Any other TV output card is fine, my 6200, 6100, 7300, 7900, ironically a geforce4 MX series will probably work, as the on-chip TV encoder is likely supported by the Same DRM equipped driver that the MX4000 uses.
DRM has decided that TV output on a ti4200 is "unprotected", thus if I even have a TV output enabled on the card all video playback in WMP11 is halted. I want to allow my mother to watch Netflix online on her TV, fine I think: I have a ti4200 and a nice little mATX Socket 754 system, that will play Netflix online just fine.Įxcept for DRM. I am not currently interested in paying to have my equipment functionality reduced. Wouldn't it be more logical to have an HDMI to go to the Audio device, and another to go to the TV? Is that even possible? If the HDMI cable leaves the video card, and then travels to the audio card, and then to the TV where the audio is sent to a tuner, or to the tuner where the video is sent to the TV, it starts getting freaking ridiculous in short order.
Now we have these wonderful audio codecs to give us the benefits of fully uncompressed audio without the incredible space requirements, but there is indeed a problem: decoding them on a PC. While they make audio come out of all speakers, generally the original 5.1 audio track produces better sound in that it is less muffled and more distinct. Dolby ProLogic IIx and DTS Neo6 generate one or more additional channels of audio from existing surround sound channels the downside is that these methods never sound good. The support for 8-channel speaker setups is also a boon, because currently the way people with 8-channel audio setups get those extra two channels is by some form of matrixed audio.
While we're not quite there on the video side, the fact that we can store and playback the original audio track from a movie is an incredible feat and a feather in the cap of technology in general. These standards are lossless, which is great. Copyright Dolby Laboratories.īoth Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD MA improve upon their DVD counterparts by: 1) being lossless (when decoded properly, you get a bit for bit identical copy of the audio the studio originally mastered for the movie), and 2) currently supporting up to 8-channels of audio (aka 7.1 surround sound: right, left, center, left surround, left rear, right surround, right rear, and LFE/subwoofer channel both specs actually support greater than 8-channels but current implementations are only limited to 8).Ī standard 7.1 channel audio setup. Blu-ray discs are either 25GB or 50GB in size meaning we can store more data and higher quality data at that, for both audio and video.Ī standard 5.1 channel audio setup. Dolby Digital and DTS were both still supported, but now there were three more options: Dolby Digital TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio and uncompressed LPCM.ĭolby Digital and DTS, as implemented with the original DVD standard, had two flaws: 1) They were lossy codecs (you didn't get a bit for bit duplicate on disc of the audio the studio originally mastered when making the movie), and 2) they only supported a maximum of 6-channels of audio (aka 5.1 surround sound: right, left, center, left surround, right surround and LFE/sub channel).ĭVDs could store 4.5GB or 9GB of data on a single disc, so using lossy audio codecs made sense. Just as video encoding got an overhaul with the use of H.264 as a compression codec, audio on Blu-ray discs got a facelift of its own. In the days of DVDs the studios used either Dolby Digital or DTS encoding for their audio tracks, but with Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) the stakes went up. Audio takes up a lot of space and studios keep trying to pack more data onto discs so most multi-channel movie audio is stored in a compressed format. Movies ship with multi-channel audio tracks so that users with more than two speakers can enjoy what ultimately boils down to surround sound. The Necessity: Enabling 8-channel Audio on Blu-ray Discs So without further ado, I present you with a “quick” (in Anand-terms) explanation of what 8-channel LPCM over HDMI is and why it matters. Honestly, it took my recent endeavors into the home theater world to really get an understanding for what it is and why it’s important. Intel has quietly toted 8-channel LPCM support as a feature of its integrated graphics chipsets since the G965, yet I’ve never done a good job explaining what this feature is and why you should even care. More specifically, you’ll see this as a feature listed with AMD’s Radeon HD 4800 series and more recently the 4600 series. In several recent reviews I’ve talked about the importance of supporting 8-channel LPCM over HDMI.