| Will My PC Run Vista? |
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| Saturday, 25 February 2006 | |
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No matter how good your computer is now, it won't be able to run all the features of Vista, such as high resolution video. Read on to find out why. First a primer in DRM With Microsoft Vista comes a new era of "Digital Rights Management" or DRM. On the surface DRM is a way that the publishers of music or movies can control how you use the product you paid for on your own equipment. In reality, since DRM doesn't actually stop "pirates" at all, all it does is to greatly inconvenience the law abiding customer. So why do publishers bother? The technology companies behind the publishers use their DRM as a weapon against other competing technologies, using their long suffering customers as cannon fodder. For instance there is currently a battle going on between Apple and Sony for control over the online music industry. DRM from Apple controls where you can play the music you bought from iTunes; recent competing DRM from Sony was designed to attack Apple's DRM, often breaking customers' PCs in the process. In both cases all of the music "protected" by the DRM is available to "pirate" on any of the peer-to-peer networks. High Definition video New High Definition (HD) video is on the way - currently video resolution is poor - around 500x700 pixels, but most modern monitors are quadruple that. High definition video will have much higher resolutions, which will mean much clearer and detailed video. The problem is that this HD video comes with a DRM requirement that is hardware based - Hollywood wants to control the movie from your hard-drive through the video card and to your monitor. If your video card or monitor doesn't support this particular DRM then you can only watch the HD video at low resolutions. Currently you can buy monitors with this capability, but there are no video cards on the market that will support it. Many advertise themselves as "HD Ready" however this grossly misleading statement refers only to the GPU (the graphics chip), not to the card as a whole. Since the DRM is hardware based there is no possible way to upgrade your graphics card to support the HD DRM. Back to Vista High Definition video will be supported by Microsoft Vista, but of course you will only be able to get the benefit of it if you have the appropriate hardware which supports the necessary DRM. This hardware is not yet available, despite misleading statements to the contrary. |
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, 25 February 2006 ) |
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