Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are lumbering into electronics retailers, and most people still happily buying regular DVDs since (a) they’re cheaper, (b) the new players are very expensive, and (c) most people don’t have a TV set that can even do HD playback. There’s one thing nobody in a store or on a commercial talks about with these formats, the HD cable boxes, HD TiVo’s, and the high-definition HDMI connections most players and TVs use to show them. The brand new, super strong copy protection they all carry and how it causes problems.

Good old DVD copy protection was cracked very easily quite a long time ago, leading to dozens of mostly-illegal programs that let you rip your DVDs into files and, if you’ve got something as nice as a PSP, take them on the go after some further processing. The content guys didn’t like this, so they made sure both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray format used some really strong copy protection. Really strong, and built into not just the disc but the way the video signal gets out of your device and what device shows the signal, like your HDTV.

The great Security Now podcast recently tackled describing the copy protection in these new HD formatted discs (both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD use the same type) and during their discussions about its inclusion in Microsoft Windows Vista — which looks like a total nightmare waiting to happen — talked about how the cables themselves have to actually have some level of intelligence to talk to displays and make sure both sides of the HDMI cable aren’t going to be compromised, letting a descrabled signal go out to be copied. That’s the long answer.

ArsTechnica digs into this topic pretty concisely, talking about how people with HD cable boxes, HDTV sets, and PS3′s using HDMI connections to HDTV sets are occasionally having problems with sound and video. It turns out that sometimes some HDTV’s don’t respond fast enough to the cable box or PS3′s frequent, HDCP-industry-required queries to the device trying to be sure it’s still there and still keeping the content secure. Ars calls this turning Joe Consumer into the beta testing department for new technology, and I have to agree.

The author, Ken Fisher, echoes the findings mentioned on Slashdot last week with his own HD Tivo and cable box problems. You have to unplug and replug the device in to get it working again.

My very expensive, 1080i-capable TV set is about 4 years old now and has DVI-in capability, and I’m really wondering now if I can even use an HDCP to DVI converter and watch an HD movie or play a PS3 game on it without problems. I know I’ll need to send out sound another way since DVI doesn’t carry sound data while HDMI does, so losing sound isn’t my concern. Having the playback or game decide my TV set isn’t secure and stop playing video back is.

Suddenly the 360 and Wii not having an HDMI output doesn’t look like such a bad thing, does it.