HDCP on USB Blu-Ray drives

[RevRhubar]

Hi, Can anyone confirm that external Blu-Ray drives that you plug in to a laptop using USB can play disks that have the HDCP activation bit set? It might seem like a daft question but there seems to be a lot of grief on various forums with folk reporting that things stop working and displaying error messages cos they're not HDCP compliant. The thing is, as far as I understand it, USB cant deal with HDCP, so I dont understand how a HDCP compliant Blu-ray player can allow the video/audio stream to be sent over USB? (You normally need an HDMI/DVI connection for HDCP). I dont want to buy a Blu-Ray player only to find in the future that more and more disks won't play due to studios activating HDCP on their disks.

[yoda313]

I want to say its a function of your computers graphics card not the disc drive itself. THough that may be oversimplifying things. The graphics card has to have the hdcp compliance in it. The bluray drive simply sends the data off the disc. Its the graphics driver and software player that incorporate the encryption sequence.

Again I may be oversimlpifying it. Also I have an internal sata bluray drive so I don't have any issues in that regard so I can't speak to usb bluray drives personally. I am offering my interpretation of how I see the encryption process works.

[RevRhubar]

Okay, so the Blu-ray drive sends the encrypted data over USB and the graphics card or something decrypts it and sends it on to the monitor. So assuming my laptop is HDCP compliant I should have no problem with external blu-ray drives.
Cheers, RR

[edDV]

Okay, so the Blu-ray drive sends the encrypted data over USB and the graphics card or something decrypts it and sends it on to the monitor. So assuming my laptop is HDCP compliant I should have no problem with external blu-ray drives.
Cheers, RR

Your software player needs to be HDCP compliant as well. Most Blu-Ray burners ship with a Cyberlink PowerDVD player.

... So assuming my laptop is HDCP compliant.

Big assumption.