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.

Nice Firefox Add-On for Mobile Website Testing

I'm working on a website which will render differently depending on whether or not it's being accessed from an iPhone web broswer. I came across this Firefox Add-On which is perfect for some of my testing.

It's called User Agent Switcher and it's written by Chris Pederick.

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

This add-on allows you to change the User Agent field in your browser HTTP requests. In the case of the Firefox browser I'm currently using on my macbook, here is the User Agent field:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042315 Firefox/3.0.10 GTB5

For my testing, I want to change this field to what it would be if I was browsing from my iPhone. This is the User Agent field my iPhone is currently using:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/7A300g Safari/525.20

The User Agent Switcher allows you to create new User Agent profiles and adds a pull-down button on Firefox so you can easily switch back and forth between browser types.

Once you've added your profile and enabled it, an easy test is to simply go to google.com since it should render a simple page for mobile devices.