HDCP In Action

I’m a big fan of Breaking Bad and missed this week’s episode. I don’t have a DVR, but still have a working VCR and use it on occasion to record a must see show. Since Breaking Bad is on AMC, I assumed I could watch the missed episode on Hulu since Mad Men, another AMC show, was carried on Hulu. But to my surprise, they don’t have it.

So I had to turn to iTunes to get the missed episode. For $2.99 you can download an HD version of the show. A few hours later (after waiting for 1.5 GB to download) I was ready to watch the episode. I hit play and this is what I saw.

My Mac home setup is my MacBook attached to an external VGA monitor. This gives me a dual screen setup, with the VGA as the primary screen since it’s the largest. When I got this message the iTunes player was located on the VGA screen.

HDCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection) is basically a DRM for HD video. It only allows the video to be displayed on devices that support HDCP to prevent unauthorized copies. Interestingly enough, when I dragged the iTunes player back to the MacBook screen, it played the video OK.