Serial digital interface

[BBQ]

Serial digital interface (SDI) is a family of digital video interfaces standardized by SMPTE (The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers). For example, ITU-R BT.656 and SMPTE 259M define digital video interfaces used for broadcast-grade video. A related standard, known as high-definition serial digital interface (HD-SDI), is standardized in SMPTE 292M; this provides a nominal data rate of 1.485 Gbit/s.

This would be so much more practical to have on consumer products, as it uses BNC connectors and cables. The reason it is not used is because it is unencrypted, very sad...
So what do you think about that, to get some discussion going.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface

[Tinkerer]

I find the un-encrypted part to be a bit odd though. Its simply transmitting data, and the wire/connector shouldnt care about the data being encrypted or not. It would seem like the only thing to do would be to have a step for encryption before transmission takes place.
Anyway, I have had plenty of experience at home with the old antennas and such using BNC connectors. Not that particular style, but the idea is still the same as is stated.

[ConKbot]

I find the un-encrypted part to be a bit odd though. Its simply transmitting data, and the wire/connector shouldnt care about the data being encrypted or not. It would seem like the only thing to do would be to have a step for encryption before transmission takes place.
Anyway, I have had plenty of experience at home with the old antennas and such using BNC connectors. Not that particular style, but the idea is still the same as is stated.

The wire doesnt care, MPAA/whatever studios care. They have to have their thumb on the consumers, demanding that the link between the source and the display is encrypted.  Want to hook up your blu-ray player up to an old LCD with a DVI input that you have for your workshop via an HDMI-DVI adapter?   Too bad, if its not HDCP encryption enabled youre out of luck, go buy another monitor. Youre not to be trusted, and have to play by their rules to watch their precious movie. 

Nevermind the fact that pretty much every encryption scheme that is devised to protect tv/movies/etc can  get cracked usually within weeks, definitely within a year of its release  So its not going to hinder piracy at all, just consumer fair use.

[rexxar]

I find the un-encrypted part to be a bit odd though. Its simply transmitting data, and the wire/connector shouldnt care about the data being encrypted or not. It would seem like the only thing to do would be to have a step for encryption before transmission takes place.
Anyway, I have had plenty of experience at home with the old antennas and such using BNC connectors. Not that particular style, but the idea is still the same as is stated.

The wire doesnt care, MPAA/whatever studios care. They have to have their thumb on the consumers, demanding that the link between the source and the display is encrypted.  Want to hook up your blu-ray player up to an old LCD with a DVI input that you have for your workshop via an HDMI-DVI adapter?   Too bad, if its not HDCP encryption enabled youre out of luck, go buy another monitor. Youre not to be trusted, and have to play by their rules to watch their precious movie. 

Nevermind the fact that pretty much every encryption scheme that is devised to protect tv/movies/etc can  get cracked usually within weeks, definitely within a year of its release  So its not going to hinder piracy at all, just consumer fair use.

But ZOMG teh pirates are gonna stole all our movies!!!!!1! Movie producers will to starve to death because lost sales! All the copies will get stoled!!!

The MPAA is the biggest crock of shit I've ever seen. The RIAA is no better. In fact they're worse, suing dead people thousands of dollars for downloading single MP3s, and grannies because someone used their WiFi signal.

Who the hell is gonna bother recording something over HDMI when all disc copy protection schemes are already broken? Everyone just rips the movie from disc; uploading to TPB optional. There's even fair use cases for this; AFAIK it's perfectly legal to keep backup copies of your own movies, so long as you don't share them.

[rkupka]

This would be so much more practical to have on consumer products, as it uses BNC connectors and cables. The reason it is not used is because it is unencrypted, very sad...

yes, that is true for consumers products. In professional/broadcaster world, SDI and HD-SDI is defacto standard. And they also have to cope with HDMI/HD-SDI conversion, if they want to use FullHD 3rd party content in their pruduction.  All professional HDMI/HD-SDI signal converters have to be HDCP compliant, i.e. if content provider decides to apply HDCP, the conversion will not be possible......  and that is perfectly ok.

[NiHaoMike]

Is there any reason they couldn't just amend the spec to support encryption?

[rkupka]

Is there any reason they couldn't just amend the spec to support encryption?

why would they want it there ? SDI and HD-SDI was never meant for consumer market. SDI standard is for broadcasters toolchain (i.e. content creators), where any encryption would be pointless.
HDCP encryption serves completely different purpose.

[Marco]

When it's bandwidth was still sufficient as a single link the high speed serial meant it was more expensive than TDMS ... now it's single link bandwidth is not sufficient a lot of the time and multilink SDI certainly is not very practical.

It has never been very practical.