SlySoft AnyDVD HD - Go HDCP Free!

Product: SlySoft AnyDVD HD
Provided By: SlySoft
Price: $79.00USD

Introduction:

Everyone is going "HD" crazy.  Movie Studios are jumping on the High Definition bandwagon and releasing Hi-Def trailers on the web, and choosing to support either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.  The benefit of these new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats are the enhanced copy protection we've come to know as HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection).  At first, this sounds like a great idea, as I have no problem with the publishers and producers protecting their work, but the problem lies in how HDCP content is delivered from the media source to your screen.

In order to play Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movies, you obviously need a optical drive of some sort.  If this is a set-top unit that plugs directly into your HDCP compliant display, you're off and running.  The issue is when legitimate users try and play HDCP-protected content on their computer.

In order to play such content, you'll need several things.  1) A Blu-Ray or HD-DVD Optical drive,  2) A graphics card that supports HDCP content,  3) A HDCP enabled software player such as PowerDVD 7.2 Ultra, or Intervideo WinDVD 8 Platinum,  4) A driver that is recognized as HDCP supported,  and 5) A display that is HDCP compliant.

For the PC user, this a pretty steep list of requirements - not only in price in some cases, but also in system configuration.  Many large LCD monitors sold in the past year are not HDCP compliant and will not allow playback of your favorite HD-DVD or Blu-Ray title.  Also graphics card and driver support can be sketchy.

Today we are taking a look at a product from SlySoft that aims to make the High-Definition bandwagon a little easier to ride.  We'll find out how well it works and explore some features of their new AnyDVD HD.

The Road to PC HD-DVD:

A little over a year ago, my wife bought me a Gateway FPD2185W 21" Widescreen LCD.  This display supported HDCP content and was my first item I acquired that actually supported High Definition.  The resolution is a now standard 1680x1050 and while it won't support native 1080p content, it will look pretty good regardless.

Next up I acquired an eVGA GeForce 7950GX2 graphics card that supported HDCP content as well.  Even with a graphics card and a display, I never really grasped the quality of HD content as, at this point, I hadn't been exposed to much HD content.  I live in a remote location and internet is delivered wirelessly with limited bandwidth and it didn't interest me to download a 200MB HD clip.  As time went by I grabbed a few smaller clips and was blown away with the quality of the video.

Regular DVD movies have a native resolution of 720x480 and when scaled on a display of 1680x1050 or larger, the video appears pixilated and blocky.  HD movies have a resolution of 1280x720 or 1920x1080 and don't have to scale as much or at all.  After watching some HD content on my display - I became unsatisfied with regular DVD content.

Several sites have reported success by plugging in an XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive and this interested me enough I was willing to drop $169CDN (On sale) on a HD-DVD drive.  It was also about this time that I picked up a new Samsung 305T 30" LCD that supports an amazing 2560x1600 resolution and I was super excited to give this a shot.  I plugged in the device, installed a driver to let Windows XP view the file system and I thought I was ready to go.

Unfortunately things were not as easy as I had hoped and after playing an HD-DVD title for about 1 second, I was met with this error:

Something obviously was not right, so we'll go over our test setup, run the BD/HD Advisor tool and try again.

HDAdvisor

HD-DVD Passes

Oh, yay.  It looks my system will play HDCP protected HD-DVD's just fine - except it doesn't.  That is just perfect.  Once again the legitimate consumer gets screwed by DRM.  Just to make things clear, below is a list of system specs that we have tried that are all unsuccessful with both PowerDVD and WinDVD HD Editions.

System Configuration #1:

• AMD Athlon X2 4200+
• 2GB Crucial PC2-5300 DDR2
• MSI K9N Platinum Motherboard
• Sapphire HD 2600 Pro 512MB (and/or)
• eVGA 7600GT 256MB
  
• Samsung 305T 30" LCD
• Gateway FPD2185W 21" LCD
  
• Windows XP Pro SP2

• Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600
  
• 2GB Patriot PC2-6400 DDR2
• MSI 975X Platinum V.2
  
• Sapphire HD 2600 Pro 512MB (and/or)
  
• eVGA 7950GX2 1GB
  
• Samsung 305T 30" LCD
• Gateway FPD2185W 21" LCD
  
• Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

System Configuration #3:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
  
• 4GB SuperTalent PC2-6400 DDR2
• eVGA 680i Motherboard
• Sapphire HD 2600 Pro 512MB (and/or)
  
• XFX 8800GTX 768MB
  
• Samsung 305T 30" LCD
• Gateway FPD2185W 21" LCD
  
• Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

Note:  On System #3, we were able to play HDCP protected content successfully, but on the other two HDCP "Compliant" systems, we were not.

It's this reason that we started exploring possible solutions that remove the AACS copy-protection and allow playback of HDCP protected content on systems that don't allow native playback of this content.  This is what lead us to SlySoft's AnyDVD HD.  On the next page we'll cover the alternatives and explore AnyDVD HD more.