Originally posted by bridgman
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If there's nothing magic in that regard, then you guys technically have nothing to worry about as the capture hardware will simply fubar up on the signal just like any other standard recording device would. Now, the same can't be said about the video output hardware, but the reality is that all one has to do is put in a VGA to composite device in the mix to sidestep the restrictions there as you're not able to realistically expect someone to not hook a projection monitor or a scanline converter on the analog out port or the DVI port to get a raw feed (And this doesn't even begin to touch on what one can do if they've got a DV bridge on a 1394 bus leg...).
As it stands, we didn't seem to have any restrictions at Coollogic on using composite out from the Allwell (Tvia 2xxx and 5xxx VGA) or the ECS designed (Hardware never released, devices used either an SiS 300 variant GPU or a Savage4 variant GPU...) set-top boxes, nor were there any requirements for us to do so at that time- for us the composite/SVGA was hot and used instead of the VGA port the moment you hooked it up to a TV. It could be that it was because we were more operating in the internet appliance space and only peripherally providing things like video feeds from off the Internet via RealPlayer and Flash...
My understanding is that the restrictions come from the agreements which govern output protection. If we only made tuner cards and not graphics cards we wouldn't need to sign the same agreements... at least that's what I was told last time I looked into this.
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