What's the status of HDCP support?

Hi,

unfortunately HDCP does not work yet, and I'll explain some details below about the exact problems:

The main problem with HDCP support is that the Linux graphic card drivers have huge differences to the Windows equivalent when it comes down to DRM and HDCP. On Linux all the HDCP functionality is missing, not only in the open-source drivers (such features are often not documented, and noone wants to implement them anyway) but also in the proprietary graphic card drivers. So basically Linux lacks this whole feature, and currently cannot provide the same "protection" of the video data like on Windows. This problem is closely related to a second one, COPP (Certified Output Protection), which is also missing completely in Linux drivers. This is an intermediate layer, which is used to activate HDCP support, and to verify that the user really has an output device matching all their restrictions.

We do not get much help with this problem as Microsoft spent a lot of effort to prevent anybody to simulate their DRM stuff without getting in some kind of trouble. There are a lot of different companies which earn their money by protecting this DRM system like Microsoft, the graphic card manufacturers and the content providers. We can not simply tell Silverlight that the display uses HDCP when this is not possible, without someone trying to sue us. The reason why you did not find anything else about this, beside my forum post in the nvidia forum, is that nobody wants to talk about this in public either (we btw. received an unofficial answer through some other way).

We refer to this problem/bug internally as the 6030 bug, which is already there since a long time:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/pipelight/+bug/1235918
(Not every page allows SD without COPP/HDCP support, some just error out with error code 6030, thats the reason for the name.)

The current status is: We've evaluated a lot of possibilities, like implementing the missing features ourself in the driver (-> not possible without the help of experienced graphic card driver developers and most open source developers don't like stuff like HDCP), running the missing part just with the Windows drivers (-> Wine too incomplete for that) and a lot more.

The current approach we're working on is still secret, we don't want to share details before this has been evaluated by some lawyers. Nevertheless it would indeed provide a solution for the 6030 bug. We cannot really tell you an exact time how long it will take to evaluate our current solution, or if it turns out to be useful at all - but we also hope that we can fix this issue as soon as possible.

If you want to stay up-to-date I would suggest you to subscribe to the bug report above, which will be updated if we know more details.

Michael