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>The requirements for becoming part of HDCP cabal explicitly state that you must degrade the quality of non-HDCP streams[1]. Your source only seems to support

>The requirements for becoming part of HDCP cabal explicitly state that you must degrade the quality of non-HDCP streams[1]. Your source only seems to support that if you have a HDCP stream and a non-DHCP output you need to degrade the quality. Is there actually a requirement that if I try to view my 4K family video that I captured with my own camera on a non-HDCP 4K projector that the content needs to be degraded? That would be a whole other can of worms of anti-competition. Where not even the argument that you can vote with your wallet would work (flimsy as it originally is anyway).

cyphar 9y ago
Yeah, that was badly worded on my part. I meant that they have to degrade HDCP content if it's not being played through HDCP. Note that any combination of {graphics card,HDMI controller,OS,browser,monitor} may result in not being able to play HDCP content and thus your quality being degraded. The point stands that the reason for doing the degradation in that instance is because of DRM and not because of technical issues. I personally am not sure how I feel about artificially removing the ability to access high-quality streams based on the current machine I'm accessing a site over (which is what GP was talking about) -- it feels user-hostile because if I want to download the stream then I can't download it in any quality available. But it's not as bad as full-blown DRM. My mentioning of DRM was to point out that not all auto-degradation is benign.