HDCP Cables

HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. HDCP is an important development in video today. Anyone shopping for an HDTV should demand an HDCP-compatible video connection.

It's no secret the entertainment industry has been suffering losses due to piracy. You can't even go see a movie today without some heartfelt plea from the industry's blue collar asking you not to pirate his hard work. The DVD medium has long made analogue-only video outputs on players. This has been fine with the entertainment industry because copies made from analogue video sources suffer some degradation.

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But the same degradation exists for the viewer of analogue video sources. Video from your DVD using component outputs is converted from digital (as it was stored on the DVD) to analogue by the player and sent to the TV. The TV in turn converts the analogue video back to digital. This is necessary for the TV to work with the video signal and put it through any necessary process. Then what you watch on the TV is of course converted back into analogue. This is a lot of steps and video quality suffers.

HDCP is a standard created by Intel to encrypt outbound video signals which can be decrypted by any HDCP compatible receiver. So, DVD players can now have a true digital video signal delivery system and not need to muddy the video quality by converting it to analogue just to send it to the TV. Using a digital video signal delivery method can improve clarity and resolution of your picture by as much as 15%.

Currently DVI is the most common HDCP-enabled video interface. On the horizon, DVI will be overcome by HDMI, which is an HDCP-enabled audio and video interface.