I think he's referring to HDCP, which is a standard meant to prevent tapping into a HD video output for the purposes of recording.
It's of pretty dubious effectiveness, and quite honestly has screwed me in the past more than a few times even when I was doing something 100% legitimate (like renting a movie on iTunes and trying to use my MacBook's HDMI out to the TV... and it refusing to play).
Not to mention there are many, many more ways to record HD content from a source than tapping the video output.
Well, it's certainly of no effectiveness whatsoever since the HDCP master key leaked and anyone can trivially decrypt a HDCP stream ever since. The NeTV (http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=NeTV_Main_Page) does this in realtime.
That doesn't mean they have stopped preventing people from watching their just bought content on a beamer or display without HDCP support. Oh no, that stuff continues right now.
In the history of DRM, this is probably one of the most bizarre failures. You can reasonably assume it never stopped anyone from making illegit copies (capturing very high bandwidth interfaces like HDMI is decidedly non-trivial and simply not worth the time investment if there are much easier sources), while denying people who just seconds ago shelled out cash for your product access for a reason they will not understand and will certainly not appreciate.
No, the NeTV does NOT do any kind of decryption. What it does do is encrypt its own image using the same key in parallel, so that it can overlay its own display on top of the incoming display stream.
It does include an implementatiom of HDCP that could be used for decryptioon if you work hard enough at it (and I would guess someone worked hard enough at it), but as it comes out of the box, NeTV cannot be used to strip off HDCP.
Is there anything that does decrypt HDCP in real time? Something where you plug an encrypted cable into one end and it outputs an unencrypted source on the other? One that maintains things like audio?
That's a fragile attack anyway, as I imagine the key they're using would be revoked. The only attack that works is one that uses the master key to generate keys that haven't been revoked, which I doubt their hardware does. (Illegal and all that. Just being an HDCP endpoint is easy; take the chips from your TV product and stick them in the splitter. "Oops, sorry." But then you get revoked.)
My complaint is that the standards committees are wasting their time on a replacement for HDCP: something nobody wants or needs. Meanwhile, where's my 120Hz 4k monitor.
It's of pretty dubious effectiveness, and quite honestly has screwed me in the past more than a few times even when I was doing something 100% legitimate (like renting a movie on iTunes and trying to use my MacBook's HDMI out to the TV... and it refusing to play).
Not to mention there are many, many more ways to record HD content from a source than tapping the video output.