Vista si "hardware robustness rules"

[SoNic]

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&message.id=16734#M16734

Vista includes various requirements for "robustness" in which the content industry, through "hardware robustness rules", dictates design requirements to hardware manufacturers. The level of control that the content producers have over technical design details is nothing short of amazing. As security researcher Ed Felten quoted from Microsoft documents on his freedom-to-tinker web site about a year ago:

"The evidence [of security] must be presented to Hollywood and other content owners, and they must agree that it provides the required level of security. Written proof from at least three of the major Hollywood studios is required".
So if you design a new security system, you can't get it supported in Windows Vista until well-known computer security experts like MGM, 20th Century-Fox, and Disney give you the go-ahead (this gives a whole new meaning to the term "Mickey-Mouse security"). It's absolutely astonishing to find paragraphs like this in what are supposed to be Windows technical documents, since it gives Hollywood studios veto rights over Windows security mechanisms.

Maybe Mickey Mouse doesn't want creative releasing working drivers. lol

here is more relating to the driver problems and why a hacker is doing what creative doesn't have the balls to do.

I'll put my comments in (*in here*)

Will the Windows Vista content protection board robustness recommendations increase the cost of graphics cards and reduce the number of build options?
Everything was moving to be integrated on the one chip anyway and this is independent of content protection recommendations. Given that cost (particularly chip cost) is most heavily influenced by volume, it is actually better to avoid making things optional through the use of external chips.

(*Microsoft intends to put creative out of business along with all card manufactures. It's as clear as day. This is why AMD merged with ATI. Microsoft dosn't want any graphics cards or sound cards at all. Microsoft wants everything software and on the CPU*)

While it's certainly tempting to quote the Slashdot response "Whose ass was this assertion pulled out of?", I'll provide a bit more context. This comment, that the overhead of Vista's content protection will lead to cheaper hardware, comes from a Microsoft product manager responsible for the content protection. An ATI product manager responsible for producing the actual hardware says:

"These costs are passed on to the consumer"

"This cost is passed on to all consumers"

"This cost is passed on to purchasers of multimedia PC's"

"Costs are passed on to consumers"

"Costs are passed on to consumers, especially early adopters"

I'll let you decide who to believe.

(Another problem with this unification of hardware is that it leads to problems like the erroneous triggering of content-protection measures that's described in Decreased System Reliability).

Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?
Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality.

Note the careful use of the term "additional functionality" rather than "enhanced functionality". Vista's content protection actually provides reduced functionality (as the main body of the writeup goes into in great detail), so the comment is pretty much confirming what's in the writeup. Vista users have already complained about the excessive CPU usage of a Vista component called "Media Foundation Protected Pipeline" (here's a screenshot of it in action), complaining of it pegging the CPU at 100% load on startup and then staying at 10-20% CPU during playback. One user complained of it consuming 50% of the CPU on his 3GHz Pentium 4 machine under Vista, while there had been no problems under XP. Another user observed that this process also runs for DivX and XviD files, implying that it's always active even if no premium content is present. Another DRM-enabled piece of Windows audio, the somewhat problematic AudioDG Vista audio engine host, has similar resource problems.

The exact nature of this Media Foundation Protected Pipeline is somewhat mysterious, the executable image is mfpmp.exe but there's no file of that name present in Vista which implies it's being generated on the fly by another executable. The process only shows up with Windows Media Player, not with other players like VLC or WinAMP, and even then only when certain content like MP3s or video is played. It doesn't show up for older/simpler content like WAV files, but then again it does show up for non-protected content. Karel Donk has done some further testing with this and reports that:

"While playing an MP3 file in WMP, I ended the "mfpmp.exe" process, and then sound stopped, but WMP still worked. I then pressed stop in WMP and then Play again and the MP3 file started playing, but this time through wmplayer.exe itself. It probably detected something wrong with the "mfpmp.exe" and fell back to another playback path I think. Can't be sure. A few seconds later, "mfpmp.exe" did appear again, but with 0 CPU usage as the file was playing through WMP. I had to restart WMP in order for the MP3 to play again through "mfpmp.exe"".
(Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present).

A way to put Microsoft's response into perspective is to rephrase the question to "Will viruses increase CPU resource consumption?", to which the answer is also "Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality" (like spamming, phishing site hosting, and so on).

What about S/PDIF audio connections? [...] Will Component (YPbPr) video outputs be disabled by Windows Vista's content protection?
Similar to S/PDIF, Windows Vista does not require component video outputs to be disabled, but rather enables the enforcement of the usage policy set by content owners or service providers, including with respect to output restrictions and image constraint.
So that would be a "Yes" then. This is another one of the sections that seems likely to have had Waggener Edstrom influence.

Will echo cancellation work less well for premium content?
We believe that Windows Vista provides applications with access to sufficient information to successfully build high quality echo cancellation functionality.
The reason why I brought up the issue of echo cancellation in the first place is that a document by Dave Marsh, the same person who wrote the above text, states that content protection interferes with echo cancellation. The above text says that it doesn't. These statements can't both be right.

Will Windows Vista audio content protection mean that HDMI outputs can't be shown as S/PDIF outputs?
It is better if they show as different codec types, as it allows the difference to be reflected in the UI, thus providing the user help with their configuration and creating a better user experience. The user wants to know the difference between HDMI and S/PDIF, as they are different physical connectors.
From reading the slashdot comments on this, it's nice to see that I wasn't the only one who immediately thought of Orwell when they read this reply:

War is peace!
Slavery is freedom!
We have always been at war with the consume^H^H^H^H^H^Hpirates!

This is another one of these twilight-zone comments that seem to crop up again and again when discussing Vista's content protection. The HDMI designers had very good reasons for making HDMI's audio S/PDIF-compatible, as discussed in the section Elimination of Unified Drivers above. Arguing that creating an artificial difference between the two because it gives users more control is like arguing that manual gearboxes are better because they provide more control — this may (technically) be the case, but unless you're an F1 driver you're probably not going to appreciate this very much. Less is more. War is peace.

(A further twilight-zone DRM comment comes from Macrovision, the company that made the copy-protection system that prevented a film-maker from viewing his own movies, which claimed that DRM increases not decreases consumer value. John Gruber has helpfully provided a translation of Macrovision's comments from PR-speak into plain English that you and I can understand).

Do content protection requirements mean that graphics chips have to provide hardware acceleration for video decode?
No. The Windows Vista content protection requirements do not require that graphics hardware include hardware acceleration for decode for many years, but such support is highly recommended to improve the user experience for HD content.
Like the comment about echo cancellation above, my source for this is also the original document by Dave Marsh. Here's the text straight from the original document:

"It is a PVP-UAB requirement that discrete graphics chips implement at least iDCT and Motion Comp decode acceleration for MPEG2 and Windows Media® Version 9/VC-1".
As with the comments on HFS and echo cancellation, those statements can't both be right.

[tcalexander]

Eu unul mă bucur de fiecare dată când se introduce câte un feature din ăsta de rahat în Vista - încă un cui bătut în propriul coșciug. Să le fie de bine și ălora de la Muciosoft și ălora care dau banii pe un OS jepat.

[Foxter]

Ce pot sa zic, cei ce prefera sistemul de operare Windows ar fi bine sa isi cumpere cat mai pot XP. E foarte improbabil sa mai bage si SP4 la XP (in SP4 ar fi bagat probabil content protection ca feature).

Personal Vista nu va intra niciodata  pe sistemul meu de acasa, prefer viteza maxima in locul Eye Candy iar prudenta mea nativa inlocuieste cu succes protectia antiprost (User Account Control).

[nicolin]

Ce pot sa zic, cei ce prefera sistemul de operare Windows ar fi bine sa isi cumpere cat mai pot XP.

Not a bad ideea.

[alecs1]

Rulz. Hardware-ul desenat după SO (unul dintre cele mai prostuţe).