just a punk

You didn't get it... I meant this:

"Decreased Playback Quality

Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a “constrictor” that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high-quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected content present, the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts it, “slightly fuzzy”, a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale (see the Quotes for real-world examples of this). In fact the specification specifically still allows for old VGA analog outputs, but even that's only because disallowing them would upset too many existing owners of analog monitors. In the future even analog VGA output will probably have to be disabled. The only thing that seems to be explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided that Macrovision is applied to it.

The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) “fuzzy with less detail” [Note G].

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

The Microsoft specs say that only display devices with more than 520K pixels will have their images degraded (there's even a special status code for this, STATUS_GRAPHICS_OPM_RESOLUTION_TOO_HIGH), but conveniently omit to mention that this resolution, roughly 800x600, covers pretty much every output device that will ever be used with Vista. The abolute minimum requirement for Vista Basic are listed as 800x600 resolution (and an 800MHz Pentium III CPU with 512MB of RAM, which seems, well, “wildly optimistic” is one term that springs to mind). However that won't get you the Vista Aero interface, which makes a move to Vista from XP more or less pointless. The minimum requirements for running Aero on a Vista Premium PC are “a DX9 GPU, 128 MB of VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0, and minimum resolution 1024x768x32”, and for Aero Glass it's even higher than that. In addition the minimum resolution supported by a standard LCD panel is 1024x768 for a 15" LCD, and to get 800x600 you'd have to go back to a 10-year-old 14" CRT monitor or something similar. So in practice the 520K pixel requirement means that everything will fall into the degraded-image category.

(A lot of this OPM stuff seems to come straight from the twilight zone. It's normal to have error codes indicating that there was a disk error or that a network packet got garbled, but I'm sure Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things like “display quality too high”).

Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. Vista's content-protection means that video images of premium content can be subtly altered, and there's no safe way around this — Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem (Philip Dorrell has created a neat cartoon that illustrates this problem). Microsoft claim that this hidden image manipulation will only affect the portions of the display that contain the protected content, but since no known devices currently implement this “feature” it's hard to say how it'll work out in practice (what happens currently is that Vista just refuses to play premium content rather than downgrading it).

An interesting potential security threat, suggested by Karl Siegemund, occurs when Vista is being used to run a security monitoring system such as a video surveillance system. If it's possible to convince Vista that what it's communicating is premium content, the video (and/or audio) surveillance content will become unavailable, since it's unlikely that a surveillance center will be using DRM-enabled recording devices or monitors. I can just see this as a plot element in Ocean's Fifteen or Mission Impossible Six, “It's OK, their surveillance system is running Vista, we can shut it down with spoofed premium content”.

(The silly thing about the industry's obsession with image quality is that repeated studies have shown that what really matters to viewers (rather than what they think matters) is image size and not quality. Sure, if you take the average consumer into a store and put them in front of the latest plasma panel they'll be impressed by the fact that they can count each individual hair in Gandalf's beard, but once he's leaping about wrestling with the balrog this detail becomes lost and the only differentiator is image size. You can find a good discussion of this in The Media Equation by Stanford professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. In one experiment on visual fidelity they showed a film using the best equipment they could get their hands on, and again using a fifth-generation copy on bad tape and poor equipment. There were no differences in users' responses to the two types of images (see the book for more details on this). You can see an example of this effect yourself if you can set up a machine with a CRT and an LCD monitor. Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for a minute or two. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty? Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?

Conversely, image size is a huge differentiator: The bigger the better. So in practice a degraded image on a huge VGA monitor (or by extension anything with a lower-quality analog input) will rate better than a non-degraded image on a much smaller LCD monitor, assuming you can find an example of the latter that Vista will actually output an HD image to. Of course convincing consumers of this is another matter)."

Just a quote for the same article: Personally I don't want the operating system that regarding the S/PDIF link to the amplifier/speakers. If I paid the money for a good album, I want to listen it in a highest quality. Don't you?

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Obey the Cowgod