Peter Gutmann at the University of Auckland has turned out another excellent article, this time discussing the technical costs of the Content Protection systems in Vista.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
This tells you how Vista will switch off nearly all the media hardware you have in your PC when playing “protected content” to prevent you from duplicating it in another format … and that it turns out you can't even buy hardware that will work, because no-one produces it yet.
To whet your appetite :-
Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.
Happy new year!