HDCP compliant Monitor ... Bluray ... Video Card

[AVITRY]

Ya know, I love this tech stuff. I really do. It's interesting as a hobby and it can save some money when the time comes to upgrade your PC or components. I've recently put together a newer PC for my video editing in the interest of speeding things up and with the small hiccups along the way I learned a few things about the newer OS (64bit Win7) and newer software like APE 14 and 15 not supporting DV capture ... LOL.

Anyway, now that I have this newer computer up and running, I decided I'm going to do some upgrading to my prior video editing computer since I have some of the parts.

This system was a 32bit Windows XP machine with an Asus Z68 Pro Gen 3 MB, core i5 2500 and 4 gigs of memory. I couldn't take advantage of the motherboard with that 32 bit OS. I'm going to upgrade it to Win 7 Pro 64bit, 16 gigs of memory, and .... I thought .... a Bluray burner / player.

Low and behold, I come across something new again. HDCP compliant monitor, compliant Bluray burner / player, and even compliant video card!

Maybe I'm getting cross eyed and I'm not understanding what I'm reading, but it seems that unless all these components are HDCP compliant, a Bluray disc won't even play on my computer. If any one of these components don't meet this HDCP thing, the copyright protection prevents playback.

Whew .... and on and on .... I revert to my old favorite phase, "I'm learning more and more all the time. If I keep learning at this rate, soon I'll be too dumb to do anything!"

Off on another tangent? A new quest? I have to find out if my monitor and video card are HDCP compliant before I purchase a Bluray burner.

I'm better off not reading about this stuff and just buying the components and letting them run like probably a thousand other people have.

Anyway .... do you guys know about this HDCP thing?



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[Chuck Engels]

Hi Joe, I can tell you that I have older DVI monitors with an older LG Blu Ray player inside a almost brand new system with a very brand new video card, no problems at all. From what I have briefly read this seems to be more related to resolutions over 1080 and display of analog content. It also seems to have more to do with TVs than it does computers. For example, to stream Netflix the device must be HDCP compliant.

Don't know how much reading you have done but there are a couple of good articles that cover the basics.

https://www.lifewire.com/hdcp-explained-3276387

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-band ... Protection

https://www.digitalconnection.com/faq/hdtv_12.asp

My guess is that Bob knows all about this and will be able to help you much more than I can

[Chris B]

but it seems that unless all these components are HDCP compliant, a Bluray disc won't even play on my computer.

From my understanding that only applies to copy protected Bluray discs. Disks you have made yourself won't have the protection and will therefore play back without any issue.

Any device that has an HDMI port should be HDCP compliant - but may not be when not using that port (displayport connections should be - but DVI has several variants only some of which are). The issue I have had is with the software to play back a copy protected disk. You usually get this with a burner - but if you don't they can be quite expensive (around the £60 mark) - which I can buy a new physical player for... Any bundled software you do get is often old versions - which have a habit of becoming unsupported and won't work with newer components and/or movies (can you tell I been burned here ).

[AVITRY]

Thanks guys ... nothin's easy, is it.

I think I read enough to confuse the hell out of me. I put an SSD drive on my newer computer as the boot drive and a standard WD Blue as my secondary drive for data, video and such so I won't be writing to the SSD so much.

I read that failure of the SSD drives is sometimes a shorter span than conventional HDs, so I bought a second SSD and cloned the first one, just in case, and put it away in the event of the SSD failure.

Here's something of interest that ..... LOL, probably everyone knew but me ..

I decided that while upgrading this second computer, I might go with an SSD drive again as my boot drive. I checked prices, and they went up quite a bit. So, I started comparing on Newegg. Samsung vs Crucial. Samsung listed a 512mb cashe, but Crucial had a blank in that spot so I called them. They assured me that their drive also had the 512 cashe.

I told him I was thinking about getting two, one for boot drive and one to put away as a cloned backup. He said, you really should power up SSD drives at least once every 3 months or they could fail. Wow, didn't know that.

He said most of the failures they run into under warranty is because the drive sat on the shelf at places like Amazon, or Newegg for months before they were purchased, and then perhaps another month or so before they were used. This is the main cause of failure.

He said I needed to take the cloned backup out of storage once every 2 or 3 months and power it up. Wow ..

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

I think that your worry with the durability lifetime of SSDs might be misplaced. There are lots of articles like this:-

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2856052/ ... fears.html

[Chris B]

My 2 year old Samsung 850 Evo is being used as a boot/paging drive - including temporary files for BluRay burning and going through two windows 10 upgrades. It came with a 5 year/75TB written warranty. But so far I've only managed to write 17.7TB. At current rates I'll get to 75TB in 2023 - giving an 8+ year lifespan. Seems that the warranties are more generous than they sound.

[Bob]

We've got two unrelated topics going in this thread now -- HDCP and SSD. LOL

Re: HDCP, pretty much any monitor and video card made in the last 12 years or so is probably compliant. As long as your monitor is connected using a digital connection (dvi, hdmi, etc.) You should be good. You only need to worry about HDCP if you want to play a commercial blu-ray disc with copy protection. You won't be burning your own discs with HDCP.

SSDS do tend to lose data if left Unpowered for a long time. It's a natural consequence of how the technology works. But it's typically longer than that time frame. They degrade faster if stored at higher temperatures though. It's data loss rather than a bad ssd. This is a different phenomenon than the number of times that a cell can be written.

Hard drives are still a better bet for long term unpowered storage.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

[Peru]

SSDS do tend to lose data if left Unpowered for a long time. It's a natural consequence of how the technology works.

Is that true for memory cards like SD, MMC, etc. and also for flash drives?

[AVITRY]

Sorry about the multiple subjects. When I get leaning on the water cooler, I go off on tangents.

The guy from Crucial said yes about the sd cards, I also asked that question of him.

These ssd drives I have are both 275 gig drives. I'm going to put the cloned disk in my second computer, reformat it and use it as my boot drive.

Newegg has WD blue 320 gig drives selling for 22 dollars. I just bought 2 of them and I'll clone both PCs using them, and storing them.

Bob, what do you think my chances of success are if I just put the clone drive of my ASRock z68 extreme gen/3 computer into my second computer without reformatting? The second PC is an Asus P8z68-v pro gen/3 motherboard. The second PC is an i5 2500, and the ASRock is an i7 2600. I'm thinking those two boards are pretty much the same thing but from two different mfgs.

Being lazy I know, but it would save installing the os and all the software.

[Bob]

Is that true for memory cards like SD, MMC, etc. and also for flash drives?

Yes. Memory cards, USB flash drives, and solid-state drives typically use NAND type memory. Each memory cell is electrically isolated from external influences, but charge will leak continuously and randomly through other mechanisms: cosmic rays, ionizing radiation, thermal agitation, etc.. Memory cells will also leak more when they have had a lot of write cycles and are nearing the end of their useful life.

For a fresh device, i.e. one not anywhere near it's end of life, longevity is measured in years not months. I wouldn't worry excessively about it. But, remember, this isn't archival quality storage.

[Bob]

Bob, what do you think my chances of success are if I just put the clone drive of my ASRock z68 extreme gen/3 computer into my second computer without reformatting? The second PC is an Asus P8z68-v pro gen/3 motherboard. The second PC is an i5 2500, and the ASRock is an i7 2600. I'm thinking those two boards are pretty much the same thing but from two different mfgs.

It might work. Keep in mind that the hardware will not be 100% identical and the drivers supplied by the manufacturer will likely be different and may be modified specifically for that board. Windows will also configure itself during installation to conform to the hardware and will store hardware specific info in the registry. Windows will detect new hardware during boot up and might be able to reconfigure itself. However, the hardware signature of the new system will not match the other system you cloned from and you will probably need to reauthenticate. You will need a separate Windows License for each machine. Personally, I would do a clean install.