The Glade 4.0

Sheesh… A cautionary tale for the techies. I have an older iMac at home, with a 320GB drive that had gotten just about full (okay really full, like 1.5GB free). On the other hand, I run a file server, too, and it has hundreds of gigs of space free (and mirrored RAID). I decided it'd be clever to just wipe out my iTunes library on any machine but the server, and then just do home sharing on my network and let anything in the house just play media off the server. Simple, right? Because Apple stuff just works…

No.

Turns out that iTunes on the server wouldn't allow me to download any of the HD movies I'd bought. I could play TV episodes in HD all day long, but any HD movies threw a "this cannot be played in HD on this computer" error. After rooting around some, I found that it really didn't have anything to do with physical capability. It's all about the HDCP that Apple uses for DRM. They use it on movies, but not TV shows apparently, because the one worked fine, but the other - uh uh.

Just to be sure, I looked at the display driver for the graphics adapter (an nVidia GeForce 9300). It's got a generic Microsoft driver, so I went and downloaded the newest driver from the nVidia site. The nVidia control panel tells me plainly that it's capable of HDCP. Just to be extra extra sure, I went and bought a new video card with eight times as much graphics RAM (a GeForce GT 610) than the onboard one in my server, because it was only $50 and if you can get a video card with 2 gigs of RAM for a song, then hey. It, too, said HDCP? No problem. But iTunes still said no. Not only did it say no, the attempt to download a movie I'd already paid for in HD brought up a dialog box asking if I wanted to go buy it in SD instead. Um, no?

Anyway, eventually it started becoming clear that the issue was that iTunes just didn't know how to verify that my computer was being nice and compliant with regards to HDCP, because I was running Server 2008, and the iTunes client didn't know how to deal with anything other than Windows 7. Their web site says "32 or 64-bit version of Windows 7; Windows XP and Vista do not support HDCP ". Nor, apparently, did my file server. Oh, that's right. Server 2008? NT 6.0 - just like Vista. Server 2008 R2? NT 6.1, like Win 7. Bleh, well fine.

So I nuked my old 32-bit install of Server 2008 (not even R2), and installed a fresh copy of Server 2012. That worked; now iTunes finally sees my computer as being worthy of HD movie content. I think in retrospect I'm bound to have built this old file server before downloading HD movies was even an option, and it just never came up until now.

DRM can bite me.

Yup, HDCP is kind of one of those technologies that forced people to buy a bunch of new crap they didn't need, so they could get HDCP support. I don't believe it affects "analog" signals like your standard VGA/DVI connector, but if you're using your vid card to display movie content over an HDMI connection, even your TV needs to be HDCP compliant and report to the computer as such, or it won't display. Fun, huh? And the best part is only we legitimate consumers have to deal with this B.S.

What have we learned?

Stop being a legitimate customer.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

exactly.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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