Obscurity

Saturday August 09, 2008

Enabling HDCP Compliance to existing devices

It seems, HDCP is the new gatekeeper stopping the display of HD content on non-HDCP compliant devices. So this means even though my fairly new monitor that has a DVI input and is capable of displaying at least 720 pixels height cannot display HDCP protected content. 

Enter the Silicon Image SiI 1169 chip. It is a DVI Receiver chip that has the HDCP key and decoding built into the chip. The brochure is available here: http://www.sci-worx.com/products/product.aspx?id=50

It would then mean that theoretically, one could build a circuit that incorporates this chip to allow HDCP protected content to be decoded by this circuit and passed to a non HDCP compliant device like a PC LCD monitor with VGA/DVI.

 One would also suspect that devices like HDFury utilise this method of HDCP "compliance" to avoid being accused of "stripping HDCP".