RHTI 36: Adios Netflix Profiles, $50 Surround Sound, HDCP Broke My Movie, "Alpha Dog", Chris Smither

**eugovector** · **06-22-08, 08:25 PM**

Episode 036 (6/23/2008)
«» Netflix Kills Profiles on Sept 1
«» The Showcase: $50 Surround from JVC SXXSW6000
«» Troubleshooting answer: HDCP ate my movies.
«» Movie Review: Alpha Dog
«»Chris Smither: Leave the Light On

**thewire** · **07-01-08, 03:59 AM**

Some things I would try with the television might be to unplug - replug the set and player in several times. In order to get my HDCP enabled transcoder going, I have to unplug it for about 15 minutes, then restart the devices up to three times before they sync correctly. Before I would get nothing not even an image with wrong color signal.

After the sync is good, turning off the power to these devices completely (surge protectors off - no power) is alright and does not require a sync on next power up for some reason. This leads me to think that there is some kind of internal memory in a HDCP device that might be present to prevent tampering meaning perhaps the chip design holds some sort of digital stored info as opposed to all hardware. People would not be able to simply make a chip if they are unable to copy the internal language. This is just theory. Maybe the memory went corrupt and needs a reset of sorts kind of like emptying a cache. After all there is no mechanical on/off switch for HDCP so it has to store the on/off somewhere. There might be some kind of master reset on the television in some service menu normally not accessible. I don't see any actual support anywhere for the makers of HDCP chips on the web.

Edit: Not corrupt memory. They don't actually have a term for it unless you count "handshake issue" but it is actually a session of signals of both ends and one has "failed" to reset it seems.

Quote:

# MDS. The audiovisual data is encoded into three Transition Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) data channels. These channels and a TMDS clock are carried over four differential pairs from the source to the sink.

# DDC. The Digital Display Channel (DDC) is a communications interface similar to I2C. This interface provides two-way communication in a master-slave relationship. The upstream device is the DDC master and the downstream device is the DDC slave.

# Hot Plug Detect. The sink indicates its presence to the source with the Hot Plug Detect (HPD) signal. The sink can toggle the Hot Plug Detect signal to reset the HDMI connection (and thus, the HDCP session).

# RxSense. Though not specifically defined by HDMI, many devices support a feature known as RxSense. There is no RxSense wire, but rather, sources can detect that a sink has terminated the TMDS differential pairs. Similarly to HPD, this signal can be used to detect the presence of a sink.

source - http://www.videsignline.com/showArti...leId=206800378

**thewire** · **07-01-08, 11:47 PM**

Sorry it doesn't work. Thought another try might be worth it.

**eugovector** · **07-02-08, 08:05 AM**

I did try leaving it unplugged for a whole day, no luck. I'm wondering if there is some magic combination of key presses that will hard reset the thing..

I haven't been able to get on the phone with tech support during business hours (not that I'm hoping for a lot). I'll let you know the outcome when I do though.

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