Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Hollywood Buys Windows Vista

Posted in Computers & Technology, Law, Microsoft, Spread IE by Elliott Back on August 9th, 2005.

According to this article from Freedom to Tinker, the DRM portions of Windows Vista impose unrealistic restrictions on the hardware pci-e bus because of a need for encryption. Hollywood requires a “High Bandwidth Cipher” such as AES or another cipher that has met approval by “three of the major Hollywood studios.” Unfortunately, as even evil Microsoft knows, older systems with limited memory or bandwidth on that bus won’t be able to cope:

In the limit, this lack of local memory means that, for example, to decode, de-interlace, and render a frame of HD may require that an HD frame be sent backward and forward over the PCIe bus many times — it could be as many as 10 times.

Finally, they just come out and say it:

Depending on the hardware implementation, the on-chip cipher engine [which wouldn't be necessary absent the "robustness" requirements] might, or might not, go fast enough to encrypt the 3 GByte/sec (in each direction) memory data bandwidth.

Because Hollywood pays us lots of money, we’re going to make bad design choices with huge technical implications.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 at 7:45 pm and is tagged with major hollywood studios, data bandwidth, hardware implementation, local memory, high bandwidth, technical implications, memory data, design choices, interlace, gbyte, lots of money, robustness, aes, hd, encryption, hollywood, freedom, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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