Re: HDMI, RBGHV and Resolution
There is a grave fear in the Content Producer's corporate minds that if there is an unencrypted, high quality analog signal, people will record it and pirate it.
This is, perhaps, true.
On the other hand, it's not that hard to break/bypass the HDCP content protection that travels over the DVI and HDMI connections and get the unencrypted, unprotected digital bit-stream, too. But at least that takes effort.
So, many manufacturers, under pressure from the Movie Industry, make players that limit themselves, artificially. Some limit BD playout to 1080i, instead of 1080p. Many upscaling player makers sort of use this as an excuse to not add another D/A stage, so that any upconvert beyond 480p is only via DVI/HDMI. This allows for less expensive D/A converters.
But in the grand scheme of things, if you can do a direct digital display path, from your disc, to the player, to the monitor, to the actual transistors that drive the individual pixels, then you can potentially get a much cleaner signal.
It's unfortunate, however, that they picked something as fragile as the current HDMI physical specification. Connectors can only be wired up by machine. There are about 30 wires in that little connector, and as a whole, the cable is pretty close to its specified bandwidth, so that if there's a flaw, too tight a radius, or your cat started chewing on it, then you're getting close to catastrophic payload failures -- generally represented by the screen going dark.
Leo
