With my DVR+, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire Stick taking up all of my TV's HDMI ports, I thought I'd take off the increasingly annoying Monoprice 3 mini HDMI switch and put the PS3 into the component video in. Voila! No more jumping up to swap from Apple TV to PS3.

One problem: Blu-Rays are windowboxed. That is, there are black bars on every side of the picture, and the picture is squished so that everyone is tall and skinny. Major fail.

If we go back in our time machines about five years, we can find out why:

"The new CECH-3000 series PS3 requires HDMI only for BD movie output in HD, in compliance with AACS standards," Sony told Ars Technica. "PS3 continues to support component output for HD gaming and streaming content." The restriction is just on high-definition video from Blu-Ray discs.
...
The strange part, then, is that the PS3 ever supported HD Blu-ray playback through component. Digital Foundry speculates that the rule didn't kick in officially until the AACS Final Adopter Agreement in December 2010, and thus only affects PS3s produced after then. That would mean that Sony (and pretty much every other electronics company) skirted its own rule for as long as possible. [emph mine]

Nice. Thank heavens I can't record the Blu-Ray with... well, with what I don't know... in full HD glory. For that, I'd need the net and a fast connection. So difficult to find those two things.

I hate DRM. I mean, I get it. Protect what you've got, and put a lock on to keep the honest folk honest. But the implementation is so shoddy. I mean, even Sony doesn't want to mind their own content protection rules. I wouldn't've even minded too much if the BluRay output was downsampled when it came out over component if they could do it cleanly, without screwing up the dimensions of the output (it looks like it's shooting for qHD, but I'm not sure why my TV would windowbox it skewed). I just want the blamed thing to display properly on my television.

Also managed to corrupt the hard drive somehow while I was doing all this testing. It's been a great couple of days.

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