I've always considered ATI's excuses for not providing access to certain parts of hardware to be bullshit.
In past, they tried to avoid publishing specs for TV-out, due to Macrovision (or so was the excuse). In the end, it was reverse engineered, later TV-out got obsolete and today, nobody cares. ATI however grew an user base that will not purchase ATI card again.
Today, they make life more difficult to those, who want to use UVD. UVD is quite simple functionality, basically you provide compressed buffer and the card decompresses it. You can put the result back to system ram, into texture, whereever, it has nothing common with the output (In theory, it may flag originally AACS-ed buffers and enforce secure video path for them, but in practice nobody cares, the pirates have better ways to capture content anyway). So they again are losing those who want to build video players for the living room due to the theoretical attack that nobody cares about. So they think Zacate will be more popular that Atom+Ion? I doubt it and quick look at xbmc forums confirms my opinion.
In past, they tried to avoid publishing specs for TV-out, due to Macrovision (or so was the excuse). In the end, it was reverse engineered, later TV-out got obsolete and today, nobody cares. ATI however grew an user base that will not purchase ATI card again.
Today, they make life more difficult to those, who want to use UVD. UVD is quite simple functionality, basically you provide compressed buffer and the card decompresses it. You can put the result back to system ram, into texture, whereever, it has nothing common with the output (In theory, it may flag originally AACS-ed buffers and enforce secure video path for them, but in practice nobody cares, the pirates have better ways to capture content anyway). So they again are losing those who want to build video players for the living room due to the theoretical attack that nobody cares about. So they think Zacate will be more popular that Atom+Ion? I doubt it and quick look at xbmc forums confirms my opinion.