Sky have gone and /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/swear.gif on everyones parade with the format they have chosen for Hi-Def.
Since the end of the eighties, start of the nineties there were HD standards laid out, the main one being 1080i/60, this format gives an image that is 1920x1080 interlaced (shows 1920x540 even lines and then 1920x540 odd lines on the next frame, it repeats this 30 times which is where we get the 60 from).
The next big HD standard was 720p/60 which is 1280x720 but progressive, in other words it shows all 720 lines in one go and again shows it 60 times a second. Although it is slightly less resolution than 1080i it has the advantage of being smoother for stuff like sports, and if you feed a digital display a progressive image it doesn't have to deinterlace it itself, which is usually a good thing as the cheap deinterlacers in tv don't noramlly do too good a job.
So everyone was expecting Sky to adopt these two formats, and at last we had a chance of a clean break to get away from living in a Pal world, when all the TV maufacturers live in an NTSC world this is a very good thing. However, Sky went and choose to keep everything at 50Hz, and to keep in with the film studios they also decided that their set top boxes would only output over HDMI, hdmi is dvi but with embedded audio and more importantly HDCP, High Definition Copy Protection. Now if they had kept with 60Hz this would not be a problem as just about all digital displays can accept 480p, 576p, 720p 1080i @ 60Hz, but only the Pioneer TV range can at 50Hz over HDMI.
This meant that all their target audience that were likely to adopt Sky HD in the early days would not actually be able to view it on the TV they had bought ready for it, and even the Plasma Sky had been selling people on the back of their monthly TV Guide would also need to be replaced.
Now, just about every digital display can accept these formats over component video, so Sky have now announced that the first HD boxes (made by Thompson) will have Component outs on them, however they can not guaruntee that at somepoint you may need to upgrade to a set that can handle the formats over HDMI (or DVI with HDCP).
I would have thought that just about everything other than Pay-Per-View events will be OK, even the boxes with HDMI will still output over the component, all that happens is that the analogue outputs automatically turn off when the HDCP is in the signal.
There are already boxes out there to strip HDCP and boxes that convert HDMI (with HDCP in it) to VGA or Component, and by the time this stuff really matters they will be even more of them about. the movies studios want to protect their rights, they are so scared of the average Joe ripping HD movies and sharing them across the net, but it is already being done, just look at the Gladiator 1080i downlioad, everyone is sharing it and it is 24gig, as speeds increase there will be more piracy, which is a shame, they only way forward is to drop the prices to a level that means you wouldn't even consider having a copy.
