There is absolutely nothing unfair about the questioning JAP is receiving. If nothing else this is a truly open forum of CI industry peers to deeply review a product. While it may be cumbersome or tiresome for Ed it is also an opportunity to go into much deeper detail than can happen on a tradeshow floor. The technical concepts and legalities/illegalities of them are the issues that matter, not the personality or or delivery method of scrutiny.

This is an opportunity to win over a potential clients, not lose them.

I look forward to meeting Ed some day and have met Alan. In no way am I for one side or the other: as I'm sure I speak for all of us, we are all *very* interested in JAP products, however Alan's tenacious and specific questions are with merit and to be commended, even if the style perturbs. Ed has responded in kind on many fronts. I'm sure it is tiring for him and frustrating. However, it is merely a taste of what CI has to go through if a product that they specified has some kind of serious problem causing frustration with the client that only $ and more time will mend. As David succinctly put and is worth recalling, we've been burned before and are wondering if we got burned again (KScape).

This is an opportunity to make us all JAP evangelists. You just have to earn it.

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Agreed.  The longer this "fight" goes on, the more die-hard JAP dealers there are going to be.

Regardless of what side I'm on, because I can't decide, how many other manufacturers are willing to come to a public place and hold up a fight like this?

What's ironic is that you are engaging in the same tactics of distraction that permeate forums, although with a more polite and more professional demeanor. I absolutely disagree with your point: if all internet forums were run like this thread has the last few pages, then more manufacturers would engage in them. I would agree it's usually not worth the time, especially in the Exhuberant Monkey wasteland of Instant Experts and GroupThink that is AVS (and at times here on on RC). This thread is now being polluted with you debating Alan about Alan and his tactics and some mild apologetsia for JAP. While it is somewhat entertaining to see the two of you go at it (and think you guys would be even better in person), it's off topic.

JAP is doing well on it's own: dismissing Ed by telling him '... well, don't bother, you got products to sell' isn't' a justification for him to not respond. If he thinks this product is as great as it looks, that he spent years working on, he should be here discussing it with sustained vigor, when he can. This is no some idiot chat room where teenagers are 'debating' Microsoft vs Mac or C4 vs Crestron: this is real peer review.

The upside is huge.

This document fills in some key gaps in our conversation: [Link: digital-cp.com][110408][v02].pdf

"HDCP revision 2.0 specifications define a standard, interoperable method for supporting compatible protocols like TCP/IP and compatible wired or wireless interfaces including the ubiquitous Wi-Fi and USB standards as well as emerging wireless interfaces like WHDI currently shipping in many consumer devices.

Previously, the only way to protect wireless interfaces was through the HDCP Approved Retransmission Technology (ART) process, which allows transmission over approved proprietary content protection technologies applied to wireless interfaces using transmitter-receiver pairs. These pairs must be distributed as a single licensed product, eliminating any interoperability with other devices. DCP, LLC will no longer accept submissions for ART technologies as of December 31, 2008."

We know JAP product sends out packets that are compliant with TCP/IP and Ethernet protocols.  But maybe because they don't disclose the protocol therein, they do qualify under the above interop provision.  Question then becomes how JAP qualifies now to produce a product since we are past Dec 31, 2008.  Maybe by using a previously licensed solution they can continue to do so.

More goodies here:

"Authentication with Repeaters. [JAP product falls in this category in the context of the doc] If the receiving device is a repeater, there is an additional authentication stage. The repeater assembles a list of all downstream receiver IDs, as well as the number of levels and number of devices in the tree. This enables the transmitter to determine whether the maximum tree size has been exceeded and whether any downstream device in the tree has been revoked."

And then this further clarification:

"Revocation

1. I have ceased responding to Ed.
2. As everyone on this board and a substanial number of manufacters are
already aware my company is Audible Solutions. My alias is me.
I do not post under an alias. And unlike you I don't have a pile of microsoft
millions to fall back on when I grow tired of losing money.

I still speak the truth. As for debating styles, well, I'll leave that to others to decide.

There are many reasons manufacturers do not play on boards. A lot of them have to do with controlling the message. If I worked for someone else I'd also find myself muzzled. But I don't. Therefore I can.

Edit: I wish to add one more bit and I wil cease all participation. It is not impossible to debate strongly and yet retain respect for the other party. It may have become unusual in this particular enviorment and in this moment in time but it used to be quite common.

Know what smart compaies have learned, such as Zektor? Listening to CIs often results is better products and a dedicated group of buyers. For a small CI manufacturer this is important. For a huge CE giant it's irrelevant.

What this world needs is more participation from Wilson Audio explaining why Wilson Audio Tiny Tots make the best medium for HDMI distribution.

Alan

I can't believe you are leading the rebuttal of one or two members stop you from participating in the conversation.


While I find many of your posts to repeat themselves and can sometimes be drawn out, I tend to read nearly everyone and then go searching for the response. You know a lot more than I do, yet you are in the same position as me, so it works well for me (and I'm sure other CI's on here).

I will say that I don't think Ed ever said he was ignoring you, it read to me as if he was suggesting you could just ignore him (maybe he felt like you weren't listening to his responses or something, I don't know).

Ed was at the IP Part last year at Cedia and was great to talk to. While the JAP product won't solve all my problems, it is damn cool and would solve quite a few.

I think the point that Alan has made that the product is cool enough that we may even alter the designs of systems to accommodate these limitations, when the end result is a better more reliable system.

Amir, correct me if I am wrong but in your 18 months and 240 posts here you have only RECENTLY added the name of your CI company to your signature. In fact, I don't recall seeing it until today and I am frequently here.

Until reading your post and new signature today I have always assumed your only connection to the industry has been your writing job for WR magazine.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

I have the answers to all my questions above. I should have asked one more "is the product legal?". The manufacturer says YES. I guess we will find out. Now to figure out how to distribute the audio without creating a science experiment.

If that's the only key presented to the source, then only that first display would have the ability to unencrypt the stream sent by the source, right? Clearly, this is not the case. So, what am I missing?

I have been hard at work starting the new business for about a year now but it has only recently gotten off the ground. We are still finishing our showroom and hope to have our grand opening in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, our CI business has gotten off to a good start so I thought I should go ahead and acknowledge that.

BTW, Bruce Stanley is part of the team and spilled the beans when I first approached him last year :). There was also a discussion of our "soft opening" in the "What did you do today thread" a few weeks back when we had our Harman event. See the middle of this page: [Link: remotecentral.com]


Indeed, lest someone wish me to get hit by a truck in addition to going out of business :D.

Ed says they have a white paper on various ways to accomplish this and to just ask your disty and you'll have it.

First things first, I think everyone needs to deflate their heads and return to ground level. We've revealed a great deal of knowledge in this thread, and there is no point in turning it into a war of words. Let's keep moving forward here.

When I initially posed the question a few weeks back here and on IP, my one goal was to figure out how they could distribute content from a source with only one KSV to many displays. Two hundred was a number that was specified by Ed in the thread on this site. From Amir's post -

This enables the transmitter to determine whether the maximum tree size has been exceeded and whether any downstream device in the tree has been revoked."

The maximum tree size per the HDCP specification is 127 downstream devices up to seven layers of repeaters deep. Once that quantity has been exceeded the HDCP SOURCE must assert the MAX_DEVS_EXCEEDED bit and the video stream goes dark.

I have researched the situation extensively. My independent conclusion is that the JAP transmitter box operates as an HDCP SINK, authenticating the first connected downstream SINK KSV to the SOURCE (automagically), and then authenticating each downstream SINK to the JAP Transmitter via the receiver (also automagically). While it doesn't follow the same conventions that we are used to in switchers that electrically connect the DDC channel of the connectors together and let the sources and displays work out the details, I can envisage the encryption working in an approved manner. Like Ed keeps saying, they only need to 'effectively frustrate piracy'. Furthermore, I think that the JAP box to JAP box encryption is more frustrating than other solutions. That isn't the point.

The point is that we keep adding items to the 'suspicious gray area' list, and every single time we ask any of those questions we are pointed to "google ART" which to me is the same as saying "Well Mike, I dunno". Well, guess what, I have gooled ART, I've asked Engineers from several switching manufacturers, I've read the HDCP specification front to back, I've read technical manuals for HDMI chipsets, and it still doesn't answer my questions. More importantly, everything I have read or been told has pointed me further into the gray-area tunnel. Until my questions are answered, I'm not buying anything, and it really is as simple as that. When my questions are answered, and the answers are acceptable, there is a HUGE opportunity for this product in my particular neck of the woods.

JAP is not the only company working on obfuscating the HDCP key limitations. Infocomm is going to be exciting.

The JAP product is not Crestron DM. The JAP product is one step above a Gefen / Atlona (who has a gray-area HDMI > HD-SDI converter that is also "approved", explain THAT ONE) / Extron / Autopatch HDMI switcher.

Ignoring Ethernet datarate and switching fabric bandwidth limitations, you can most certainly get Internet and Video down the same wire, it's all Ethernet, just use an Ethernet switch at the display, and make sure both switches support 802.1q VLAN trunking. The Procurve J9079A comes to mind.

Hi Stamp, I'm glad your questions were answered. I'm now up to my eyeballs getting ready for InfoComm and CEDIA-UK, so I won't be able to be as active in here for a little while. My apologies in advance.

I'll be back... (funny picture of Arnold/Terminator not inserted intentionally)

FYI, I have email into my industry contacts who helped write these rules (how is that for vague name dropping :D). Unfortunately one is out for two months and the other, may ignore me now that I hang around with the losers here :D.

Seriously, if I hear something and I am allowed to post it, I will.

Well, what do you know... people still return my emails! :)

As I expected, they would not give an opinion on any specific product. Their generic description though more or less says what Ed has indicated in that as long as they are using an approved retransmission technology (ART) and are not doing anything to violate the C&R (Compliance and Robustness) rules, all is well and can ship the solution indefinitely.

If they violate C&R rules by say, putting the output from HDMI without HDCP protection (this is my example not theirs), then they could face consequences but this would be the case for anyone's product.

So while everyone has to decide for themselves the level of risk here, knowing what I know, I would not worry about carrying the product for my own business.

Ed, all that remains as far as I am concerned is support for multi-channel audio :). That and seeing the video quality at Infocomm....