Dealing With HDMI And Piracy

There are so many benefits to HDMI in your home theater. One of the features is that HDMI has the ability to protect your data from piracy. Using high bendwidth digital coy protection or HDCP to protect your system from pirates looking to steal your information or signal. HDCP is nothing more than an authentication protocol. What this means to the user who is not so technically savvy, each of your home theater devices has data to identify it as well as encryption data which is stored on the extended display identification data (or EDID) chip. Pirates pick up data easiest while it is traveling from one device to another. This is when it is most vulnerable.

The device that is the source of a piece of data before it moves, like your DVD or Blu-ray player will check the authentication key of the device recieving this data, like your high definition television. Assuming that both keys are correct, your Blu-ray player would move on to the next step in this process. It will generate a new key and send it to the high definition television, which is the recieving device. This means that a secret password is now shared between both devices. Anything that wants the signal, has to have the secret password. This process of secret keys is known as a handshake, and it happens almost in an instant. Because it happens so quickly, it is almost impossible for a pirate to catch this secret key.

The first device will encode all the information it wants to send using the secret key. The device recieving the signal (your high definition television) can decode it using the same information. Think of this process like the old decoder rings in cereal boxes. If a device that does not have the secret password tries to get the data, your source device will stop sending data for a moment. It makes sure the key has not changed for some reason, and it runs a check to ensure that your whole system is safe every few minutes. Any device compatible with HDMI is required to support HDCP, but there is a problem. The companies that make and sell high definition content are not required to enable that protection on the content. In the United States, at least, this technology that protects content is made required by our FCC or Federal Communications Commission. This department of the government has a measure of control in regards to broadcast content, data, and the protection of the same.