Huge Flaw with Intel HD 4000 drivers

So I recently upgraded the HTPC to an i7 on a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H. For a while I was running with a $50 Celeron while waiting for the i7 3770T to become available to end consumers. I ended up with an 3770K figuring I can always underclock it if I so desired, but I have yet to research whether there’s any power-savings there (an interesting subject for another time…).

I was also excited to swap out my trusty GT 430 for the on-board graphics since less hardware in the box is a good thing. Unfortunately, I ran into show-stopper with the motherboard/HD 4000/driver combo that’s forcing me to put the GT 430 back in.

Now I’m aware of the well-known 0-255 vs 16-235 issue on the HD 3/4000 chips, but was willing to live with that until they fixed it.   The bigger problem is in their HDCP protection algorithm.

In my setup, I have a direct DVI (NOT DisplayPort) connection to my 141-FD as well as an HDMI connection to the SC-07.   I switch between them so I can pipe audio out the SPDIF port to multiple receivers throughout the house and most receivers won’t down-convert HDMI to SPDIF for various reasons, some legit.   So I watch most TV through the DVI, and only switch to the HDMI connection for watching BD content with True HD audio tracks.  I even added a Media Center shortcut to switch between the two.  All well and good.

Unfortunately, if you boot the machine with both the DVI and HDMI connections plugged in (doesn’t matter whether they are active or not) the video driver decides you are violating HDCP and you’ll be greated with the dreaded “Display Driver Error: The video playback device does not support playback of protected content.”

So I can imagine that they might want to prevent people from showing protected content on multiple screens (though the logic of that is obviously stupid) but in my case, not only is the second screen not mirrored, it’s not even configured!   What if you wanted to run your media center UI on the second screen, and see the video on the first?

So this is obviously broken, and I strongly suspect it’s the sort of thing that will never make the priority list to get fixed (heck the 0-255 bug isn’t getting any love either, and that one should be easy)   I did not have this problem with the GT-430.   Looks like I’ll be switching back.