Re: Home Audio and Windows Vista

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney-99@hot-mail-com>]

> Apple will prove no better. Still Vista has a serious flaw in that you
> cannot playback HDTV as a digital signal because of DRM.

This is not entirely true.  Yes, signals that deliberately attach DRM flags
to them are going to present problems.  But not everything will using those
flags.  I record 1080 signals from OTA and others are recording them from
QAM-encoded digital cable and playing them back just fine.  Granted, none of
those signals is being sent with any DRM restrictions.

> Open source Unix will prove a better option. FreeBSD, Fedora, OpenSusie,
> even Solaris.

No, they won't.  If content is delivered with the DRM flags then only tuners
capable of decoding them will handle them.  And the drivers for said tuners
won't be released to linux, et al.  At least nowhere near anytime soon.
Eventually some enterprising souls will figure a way around it.  But Joe
Average Customer won't be prepared to make the goat sacrifice necessary to
get the damn thing configured (aka mythtv).

Eventually the whole weight of incompatibilities and customer outrage will
cause the whole DRM fiasco to fall flat on it's face.  But between now and
that time do NOT expect to record DRM-flagged content on anything OTHER than
Vista anytime soon.  That excludes XP, w2k, MacOS as well.

DRM is not a good thing but, if anything, Vista's AHEAD of the game.

-Bill Kearney