The great and mighty Fry’s held a sale the other day on upconverting DVD players. My monitor can handle HD signals and so I said to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be great to watch DVDs with your computer off on your beautiful widescreen monitor in upconverted 1080 glory?”
Of course! I went out and bought one, and brought it home, and duly hooked up the component output from the DVD player into my monitor, and set the DVD player to output to 1080i, and put in a disk, and pressed play, and awaited the glory.
Except, you see, the MPAA and the DMCA have decided that I cannot be trusted with a 1080i (or 720p, for that matter) signal through the component output.
Oh no, no way can I be trusted with it. I could, I suppose, do something naughty. Not sure exactly what, but I guess I would do something very bad. See, they have mandated that only through HDMI can you send the upconverted signal. You can’t even buy an HDMI to Component converter, those are illegal too. So you are stuck with your 480p signal. Note that this 480p signal is what would being upconverted by on-board electronics to a higher def signal (using code specifically designed for that). It isn’t high-def to begin with.
Thanks to the MPAA, I am not able or allowed to view my legit, store-bought disks in a manner that would suit them best. Instead I am forcibly truncated to the straight 480p signal.
The joke at the end of all this is that it is actually now advantageous for me to buy bootlegged disks, disks that have had the copy protection stripped; my player will happily upconvert those disks. I would even save a few bucks doing that, it’d be a great deal all around for me.
Good show, MPAA.