Phil Rhodes
Well-known member
Mutter, grumble.
If they wanted to do that, the most obvious way would be to set the copy inhibit flags. There is, of course, intermittent availability of shady grey-market devices designed to subvert this, and it can be detected easily enough by plugging it into a Blackmagic Intensity, which will complain vociferously in those circumstances.
They might, for political reasons, not wish to go the most obvious route, and at this point we end up in tinfoil hat territory because I consider it enormously unlikely that they would have anywhere near enough reason to do any of these things.
You could deliberately use an obscure EDID, but in my experience that's just as likely to make a monitor unhappy as a recording device.
You could deliberately wind low frame rate material up in a pseudorandom frame or field repetition sequence on the 60i output in order to make it difficult to extract, but then if it's uncompressed, it's still going to be reasonably straightforward to undo it with a smart decimator that examined frame content. In my view, if they're putting all frame rates out at 60i then they're already discouraging people from recording it as you'll end up with more than twice the amount of data you really needed. It is theoretically possible to filter that on capture, and I may have a look at doing so if I can get a GH2 and an Intensity in the same room for a week (and if I can simultaneously repress my memories of directshow programming).
Another approach would be to mess up the picture data before sending it out. After all, you can record the HDMI output of a 7D, but even if it didn't have graphics all over it, you wouldn't necessarily want to. Doing overall transforms on HD video is quite expensive in terms of silicon and power, so if you were designing such a thing you might consider decompressing the codec output and putting that onto the HDMI. It would still have a power cost, and it would require an h.264 codec IC capable of full duplex operation which is an expense I can't see them going to.
This is all speculation, of course, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone else round here. As I say I consider it entirely unlikely that anyone at Panasonic is thinking along these lines. They make this sort of development work look easy; it's worth remembering that it isn't, and I'm sure they've had more than enough fun getting the GH2 out the door on time with its baseline feature set, let alone trying to creatively break it into the bargain. This was the plaintive cry of the graphics board manufacturers when they were told about the degree of obfuscation and deliberate embuggerance that would be required to satisfy the HDCP people, such that their boards could be used to replay blu-ray movies. It's hard enough to get this stuff to work, let alone to make it specifically not work in an interesting way.
