Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

wonderspark

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Feb 4, 2010
3,066
112
Oregon
I've read that a 30" ACD hooked to a Blu-ray player won't work. Anybody figured out a trick to make it work, maybe through the 5870 in my Mac Pro, or do I suck it up and buy a real TV?
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Your 5870 doesn't have any inputs.

Get an external or internal blu-ray drive for your machine.
 
Sorry to confuse. I have an internal BD burner, but I'm talking about hooking up a Sony normally-hooked-to-TV player being hooked to the monitor. Supposedly, some HTCP business won't allow the monitor to play a Blu-ray movie, even though you could connect an HDMI-to-DVI cable between them.
 
Sorry to confuse. I have an internal BD burner, but I'm talking about hooking up a Sony normally-hooked-to-TV player being hooked to the monitor. Supposedly, some HTCP business won't allow the monitor to play a Blu-ray movie, even though you could connect an HDMI-to-DVI cable between them.
If you're wondering if the 30" can display HDCP protected 1080p, it can't, as it's missing the HDCP chip needed to decode the signal that's sent from a copy protected source, such as a store bought BluRay movie (design is too old; the 24" ACD and newer do have the HDCP support needed to make it work). :(
 
Yeah, HDCP was what I meant. Bummer. I was hoping someone figured out a way to make it work. I don't really need the monitor any more. Maybe I'll sell it and get a new TV with it. Heh.
 
Yeah, HDCP was what I meant. Bummer. I was hoping someone figured out a way to make it work. I don't really need the monitor any more. Maybe I'll sell it and get a new TV with it. Heh.
HDCP only works over a digital signal, so using an analog signal (VGA) is a way to get around it generally speaking (depends on what the specific equipment supports).

Unfortunately, I went back and looked at the specifications, and the 30" ACD uses a dual link DVI-D input which won't work with VGA (-D = Digital only). Analog support in the DVI connection is necessary (DVI-A is analog only, or more commonly, DVI-I = both digital and analog on a single port) for it to work, which some other makes do.
 
HDCP only works over a digital signal, so using an analog signal (VGA) is a way to get around it generally speaking (depends on what the specific equipment supports).

The Bluray folks just killed analog output higher than SD. All new disks will only output SD over analog.
 
The Bluray folks just killed analog output higher than SD. All new disks will only output SD over analog.
Are you talking about the Image Constraint Token (which hasn't been activated yet AFAIK; not 'til 2012 last I recall) or something else (resolution does halve over VGA to 960x540, but it's still higher than SD)?
 
ICT to my knowledge, hasn't been enabled on any commercial Blu-ray discs, at least yet. I know several people that connect their set top Blu-ray players over component video (Y/Pb/Pr) because they own older HDTVs that lack digital video inputs (DVI/HDMI). Although under that connection method, output is limited to 1080i (versus 1080p).
 
Yeah, HDCP was what I meant. Bummer. I was hoping someone figured out a way to make it work. I don't really need the monitor any more. Maybe I'll sell it and get a new TV with it. Heh.

There's one more way to handle this and thats to rip the Blu Ray content to a non-copy protected file and play that. For example, you could use handbrake to transcode the bluray content to pretty much any hd format you like.

There's no legal issues to speak of if you own the blu ray in question. Now, downloading torrents of pre-ripped movies would certainly be illegal.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.