Re: Vista
 

Content are bytes. If you open your content with an application, it only reads bytes. Windows does nothing with those bytes, the application does. Therefore, it means that your content itself has certain protection features enabled, and the application which reads your content takes care of that. Use open and unprotected file formats, always works. Don't use encryption, you're only locking yourself out. Disable your firewall, if you're not running anything behind your ports, they can't be attacked anyway. Never any problems!
Windows can at most disable features of your hardware, if they are not designed according to the specifications.

Re: Vista
 

actually, the os does a LOT with the data. the media renderer is an integral part of windows, the codecs are essentially virtual hardware drivers and the rest of the software between the applications and the devices consists of os-controlled hardware drivers. in effect a video player is not much more than a fancy remote control for the operating system's media facilities...
and at last, this is not a hypothetical situation. the friend i spoke about is now experiencing vista refusing to let her access devices that worked perfectly fine under xp, because it doesn't like to run high-quality media data to non-compliant hardware. (and no, she is not using wma oO, we're talking basic PCM here.)

Re: Vista
 

just remember kids, DRM is for our protection (from ourselves presumably) o_o

xp actually has a similar ability to nerf content playback but it was never really used. seems bill caved in or encouraged enforcement in Vista though..

Re: Vista
 

Some media applications use the Windows Media subsystem. Others don't do. Try with VNC, it uses his own codes; so no problems there.

Only if you go through the Windows media subsytem can windows deny reproduction of some HQ formats. So, it's easy, use another thing. Anyway, the people who wants HQ content being reproduced don't use WM, but another different and more specific systems.

Re: Vista
 

Vista has better security features than XP, which makes it very suitable for the average user with little PC and online security knowledge. It does also have some genuinely nice features, the "glass"/3D UI being one of them.

However, it is a new OS. New Microsoft Operating Systems need a year to mature, in general - and a service pack. For example, driver support for many essential devices is still in beta or just not present, which means poor stability.

Also (and it's a great shame), Vista for some reason wastes a large proportion of system resources on some seriously complex DRM and the flashy new UI. To be fair, the DRM only kicks in when you're playing "premium content" - and that can be anything from a HD-DVD or Blu-ray movie, right down to a music track or youtube movie being streamed from a website.

To anyone underestimating the DRM capabilities of Vista, you are mistaken. Anything deemed to be "premium content" is protected by the OS, not an application or a particular hardware device. Someone mentioned it was just HDMI in an earlier post - HDMI is maybe 10% of the DRM on a Vista machine, if that - HDMI's pretty much just a way for a video processor to securely ask a display "are you a HDMI-compliant display?". In the case of a movie, it's even down to the level of encrypting data as it leaves the disc drive and decrypting it when it gets to the video processor. And after that, the video card must check that the display meets a particular DRM standard - if it doesn't, the picture is downsized and made fuzzy before being transmitted to the display. Illustrated here - sound is affected in a similar way.

At the time of writing, it is impossible to legally play any "premium content" at full quality on a Vista machine with commercially available hardware!


In my opinion if you got Vista with a new PC then great, use it. But unless you really really need a particular aspect of it, do not pay for an upgrade 'cos you're getting a fancy front end and a few security features which can be substituted with common sense and security knowledge. It has no real benefit to a knowledgeable PC user, and the license agreement is more restrictive than ever (pray that you never need to reformat or change a CPU/motherboard) - the majority of its features were designed to make it marketable to Joe Average walking into PC World and buying a brand-name computer. A clue for anyone wondering: the people who know about computers aren't buying Vista.

Anyone who wants to read more about what Microsoft didn't advertise in their huge "the wow" marketing campaign, I suggest you read this. It's a lengthy and rather technical read but it will truly show you that there is no way around the Vista DRM. The technology itself is actually an impressively secure system, but it really should have been left to a dedicated media playback device rather than a PC OS.


To answer the OP's question - it works, but probably slower and there's no guarantee that all your hardware will work reliably under Vista unless your PC was sold as a unit with Vista pre-installed. Worst case scenario, Vista can shut down your video or audio hardware even if you're not doing anything wrong.

One last thing for the people doubting the truth of all this - the (extremely knowledgeable and trustworthy) computer and security experts who have brought this to light did so by reading Microsoft's own documentation which is freely available on their website. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't there.

PS: Hi I'm Rigsta I just got the game, hope to see some of you in-game and have some fun ;)
(Edited for accuracy)

Re: Vista
 

Do you use Vista? I do, and I've seen nothing of that DRM stuff all you people talk about. At least not here. And it even runs faster than XP, just uses a bit more ram, but the RAM prices just went down in january, didn't they? You can buy it now then anyway, before they go up again in a few weeks.
Just so you know, I'm using a pc that's somewhere around 4 years old, with an almost 2 year old graphics card. My monitor (a simple 1280x1024 TFT) is connected with a good old VGA cable. I can watch any 'premium' content here that I want, without problems. Because it does not contain protection. The OS can not decide those things, unless you use protected formats. End of my story.

Read it yourself, that article is about HDMI/HDCP, not Vista. Just check how many times each word appears in the text.

Re: Vista
 

.. and you screwed if you just bough brand new HD ready _big_ LCD (non HDCP like most currently are) and you PC is running Vista ;-)

Re: Vista
 

How big should I need then for that?

Re: Vista
 

read the article.

Re: Vista
 

On the other hand just like with windows 2000 when windows XP became the main microsoft OS in use most of the nasty stuff will target the new OS and ignore the old.