Why ZiVA is the best solution for PCs (old)...................
This article is a reminder of one of the reasons ZiVA is such a good solution for PCs. The significance of CSS copy protection is that without it, you cannot connect your PC to a TV for viewing DVDs. Interesting, PC-DVD has advanced much more quickly than predicted by the article.
techweb.com
May 24, 1997, TechWire
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DVD Effort Still Stalled
By Junko Yoshida
MILPITAS, Calif. -- The seemingly endless stalemate over DVD copy-protection issues has pushed back plans by U.S. computer makers to launch DVD-enabled PCs by at least six more months--from June to Christmas, maybe longer. Discussions at the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG), composed of movie studios, computer and consumer-electronics manufacturers, have been deadlocked since early this year over how the Content Scrambling System (CSS) should be implemented.
The best hope for a break in the logjam may be a new draft, being drawn up by Matsushita, to support inclusion of watermarking technology in all new DVD systems by 1999. (Watermarking embeds imperceptible, unremovable information in multimedia data.) Executives of all three industries recently agreed to a watermark provision; in exchange, Hollywood studios will give in to the PC industry's implementation of CSS in software by using a CPU.
The draft was scheduled to be e-mailed last week to all parties involved in CPTWG activities. Barring any snags, it could be approved in a matter of weeks.
Though negotiations have heretofore progressed at glacial speed, several industry sources said last week they were fairly confident the latest breakthrough will get things moving. Others, however, remained skeptical.
"This was supposed to happen more than a few months ago," said George Haber, president and chief executive officer of CompCore Multimedia Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), now a part of Zoran Corp. "I will only believe it when I see it."
The introduction of CompCore's software-based CSS descrambling solution, designed for PC OEMs, has been shelved, due to its lack of a CSS license. To date, no companies in the PC industry--not even Microsoft or Intel--have been granted a license to implement CSS descrambling in software on a PC.
That leaves OEMs with only one choice: a hardware implementation. C-Cube Microsystems Inc. (Milpitas) will announce this week what it claims is the industry's first single-chip DVD decoder to incorporate the DVD Consortium's CSS copy-protection scheme. SGS-Thomson Microelectronics and other chip makers are preparing their own versions.
Pressure to support a watermarking technology for DVD has emerged as yet another monkey wrench in the copy-protection works. So far the industries have not agreed on which functions--recording, playback or transmission--the watermarking technology will control. Nor have they selected an appropriate watermarking technology or determined how it should be implemented.
"Any technology proposals are like peeling an onion. There is always another layer, and it often involves tears," said Michael Moradzadeh, program manager of the copy-protection task force at Intel Corp. (Santa Clara).
However, he said, Intel supports the concept of watermarking, which "looks doable," judging from some of the watermarking technologies demonstrated at the CPTWG meetings. "Obviously, it has to be a technology friendly to industries, and whose implementation does not require unreasonable barriers to consumers and content owners," Moradzadeh said. The function responsible for implementing a watermarking technology is supposed to reside in a DVD-ROM drive rather than on a PC motherboard.
A new draft of the DVD spec that includes in its language support for watermarking on DVD systems "is absolutely a critical piece of puzzle," Moradzadeh said. It's a necessary step if the PC industry is to implement a cost-effective DVD playback system by taking advantage of software-based CSS authentication and descrambling done by a CPU, he said.
Right now, no immediate solutions exist for PC OEMs who seek a software CSS license to implement CPU-based CSS authentication and descrambling. In fact, most U.S. PC vendors have already missed the promised June launch for DVD-enabled PCs, due to the stalled negotiations.
Assuming CPTWG members approve the Matsushita-drawn draft quickly, the last resort for OEMs serious about implementing DVDs in their systems in time for Christmas is a hardware solution.
The only way out today is to either buy a CSS descrambling chip from Japanese companies such as Matsushita or Toshiba and design it into a DVD subsystem on a PC, or to buy a whole DVD-ROM drive and DVD playback add-in-card kit from the Japanese. The latter is the route Creative Labs Inc. (Milpitas) has taken with its first DVD add-in cards.
The selection of CSS chips has been severely limited, however. As of last week, very few U.S. or European chip companies, except for those who originally developed the DVD standard, had a license to manufacture and sell CSS copy protection, or the master key to implement CSS as a whole DVD player.
That may be changing. At a time when a software-based CSS solution using a CPU is still not an option, C-Cube Microsystems hopes to take an early lead in the market. The company also believes it can compete against chip vendors that already have standalone CSS chips but have not integrated them with MPEG-2 decoding functions. |
