Are the "first generation" Bluray and HD-DVD movies HDCP protected?

no, there's a behind-the-doors agreement so that movies won't be HDCP protected till 31 december 2010 at least. Keep in mind there's no HDCP on Xbox 360 with HD-DVD external drive, or on the $499 PS3.
 
Sure they are HDCP protected, absolutely.

But there is the aforementioned informal agreement.

This is not 'no protection' but merely to not use the flag that enables blacklisting/refusing to display on non HDCP compliant displays.
When used the flag means that most people won't be able to actually get the blighters to work/may result in millions of people who had previously functional hardware having to junk them because some hacker somewhere found a vulnerability in that model.
 
I think some people are still thinking about the whole "HDMI only" panic we went through a few months ago...

HDCP is on all the movies, of course, which means that only HDCP compliant TVs will be able to show the movies through HDMI.
But it also means that you can get a perfectly acceptable non-digital HD signal through component. This will be true for the next few years (if we trust the powers-that-be). Eventually we won't be able to see movies in high definition through analog connections such as component, only through HDMI or HDCP-enabled DVI. Again, this is true at the moment but i'm the first to admit that things could change between now and 2010... Look how many things changed, how many U-turns we saw happening in the last year or so...
 
Back
Top