Microsoft clarifies HD DVD and Blu-ray playback in 32-bit Vista, blames someone else

It must have been a restless night for Microsoft's Steve Riley who mistakenly told a crowd in Australia yesterday that Windows Vista would not support commercial Blu-ray and HD DVD playback on machines sporting 32-bit processors -- the vast majority of PCs in homes today. Not true says a scrambling Microsoft, "playback is possible with Windows Vista in 32-bit" but support will be determined by independent software vendors like CyberLink and InterVideo, not Microsoft. This because Windows Media Player 11 won't be able to play commercial, high-def films when Vista ships. However, as Riley let slip said yesterday, "this is a decision that the media player folks made" (now read: the ISVs) since the studios don't want their high definition content to play in x32 due to the ability of unsigned code to compromise their content protection schemes. So while Microsoft has shifted the blame, the position of the studios certainly hasn't changed. Now who do you think is going to cave, the studios or the ISVs, once Vista is launched?

[Intrepid @ Aug 25th 2006 9:38AM]

I say "fair enough". Microsoft has to try and stay in the legal good books.

[elliott @ Aug 25th 2006 10:05AM]

No way are the studios going to cave. Playback will be impossible on x32 systems for about a week, and then some "hacker" will write a program to make it work. Everybody will download the program, the hacker will get busted, and the program will continue floating around the internet until all computers are 64 bit.

[Franssu @ Aug 25th 2006 10:34AM]

Well, if the big studios really don't want me to play their shiny blue-laser discs, guess what : I won't buy them either.

More seriously, with all the people who won't go Vista for a while, they will have to do something for XP (and in fact it seems already done, with those shiny blu-ray equipped vaios and the like). I don't see why these XP software would't run on Vista 32. Or if they don't that means a lot...

[EdZ @ Aug 25th 2006 11:24AM]

So Vista will not play Blu-ray/HD-DVD out of the box, but will if you use another program? Just like XP does? What's all the fuss about?

Nevermind that any copy restrictions will be hacked within weeks, making the whole issue moot.

[Evilsmevil @ Aug 25th 2006 11:33AM]

Now im sure someone will pick me up on this if im wrong but im pretty sure that Windows XP initialy had no support for DVD playback out of the box...

[tim @ Aug 25th 2006 3:40PM]

@evilsmevil -

i believe xp did (i remember it being so, even with rc2), but it was osx that did not have it initially, but that was fixed almost immediately.

[solomonrex @ Aug 25th 2006 8:31PM]

--== Last Gen For Movies ==--

I think this whole HD mess is worse than we thought.

Once you're able to pirate an HD movie, there will be factories in China spewing millions of titles at $10 each. That's GAME OVER for the studios, they'll never sell that movie again because no one is going above 1080p format on a 60 in. screen. This might be their last chance to sell their back catalog in a physical format. They have to get it right. There is no tomorrow. There is no BD+ with smell-o-vision.

So if HD-DVD or BD have even a whiff of getting cracked on a PC, that's it. I think the studios pull up their stakes in both formats and start over. Regardless of public pressure, their stockholders will choose survival over popularity.

[Peter Payne @ Aug 26th 2006 12:35AM]

This is similar to what NTT does in Japan, cleverly "requiring" that you sign up for an account with an unrelated third party ISP when you want to use their connection services. This, I presume, holds off calls of "monopoly" and helps avoid an AT&T style breakup of the behemouth (which actually broke itself into many smaller companies proactively partly for the same reason).