DVD - Dastardly, Vile, and Devious?

Perhaps -- if you realize that the makers of DVD players and HD televisions are willing to limit the kinds of physical connection that the player and television can make to each other in order to appease the video industry. Here's an interesting quote from an article in today's Washington Post about DVD players that can improve the image of older DVDs through a technique known as 'upconversion' --

To get the full effect of upconversion, you need an HDMI input port on your HDTV (or a DVI port, with the purchase of a special DVI-to-HDMI cable). Unfortunately, that leaves out the millions of viewers whose HDTVs only have component video inputs (the red, green and blue plugs).

This limitation is ironic, since component cables are perfectly capable of carrying an upconverted signal. However, the movie industry requires that manufacturers cripple their component video ports because they don't support new copy protection schemes.

Fortunately for consumers, sites like http://www.videohelp.com/ catalogue simple remote control code sequences that restore HD upconversion to many brands of DVD players that have component output. Many consumers already own upconversion-capable DVD players but don't even know it.

The players also could be a way to avoid fallout from a new high-definition copy protection scheme (Image Constraint Token) that has the potential to degrade the high-definition output of all but the latest-model HDTVs. At that point, today's DVD players that upconvert a standard DVD may actually deliver better picture quality than their high-definition counterparts.

Pity that such information is needed, isn't it?