Posted by Tom Horsley on 07/02/06 19:05

I've got a Samsung DVD-HD860 I picked up on sale as an experiment
to try with my Westinghouse LVM-42w2 LCD monitor (to see if a
1080i upconversion of a DVD would look really spectacular
or not - the answer is "a little better maybe, but spectacular,
no" :-).

In the course of fooling around with this, I discovered
a side effect of the HDMI interface between the DVD player
and the monitor:

Apparently, if I switch the monitor to a different input
while playing a DVD, the content protection junk gets
all hot and bothered and decides it is no longer talking to
a HDCP compliant HDMI interface, so it shuts off the video
from the DVD player.

Switching back doesn't help - have to power toggle everything
to get the DVD video back on HDMI again.

Is the HDCP spec fundamentally flawed?

Is the Samsung DVD player poorly engineered?

Or is it the monitor that should be keeping the HDMI
interface happy even while I've switched away for a bit?

(In a no doubt related effect, I've noticed I damn well
better have the monitor set to the HDMI input before I
power on the DVD player, or I once again get no video).

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