To take advantage of blu-rays you should get a digital HDTV connected with HDMI. Otherwise they’d look a lot blurrier than they actually are.
Or they won’t look like anything at all…since, as said, BluRays will only output via a format that can do HDCP, i.e. HDMI.
Yes, they could use a DVI connection that uses HDCP, but why? The cables typically cost more, don’t carry audio, and lots of newer TVs don’t have that as an input…and ones that do might not even be HDCP compliant through the DVI input.
This includes gaming consoles. I checked, and neither the PS4 nor the Xbox1 have analog audio out.
DVI is like HDMI without the sound channels nor the anti-piracy built in.
Devices that put out HDMI will typically also put out the Digital Coax/optical sound at the same time. Not all receivers or TVs are capable of HDMI-pass through needed to take advantage of the sound channels embedded in the HDMI cable. My Samsung 50" plasma is one of those that doesn’t work. So I run HDMI to my A/V receiver for video and co-ax and optical for my sound depending on the device.
The only downside I could potentially see is that there won’t be any converters from HDMI to DVI because it bypasses the anti-piracy systems. I am guessing this because my A/V receiver will not take my XBox’s component video and pass it via the HDMI cable to my TV because of the anti-piracy licensing built into the HDMI specification.
Technically, it should work, but the suits who wrote up the HDMI spec have imposed limitations that may prevent success.
I have never seen an AV box that will place anything into an HDMI stream. It isn’t so much that there is copy protection happening here, but to take analog component video and to encode it into a digital HDMI format is simply something that most AV boxes don’t have the hardware to to. You can however buy perfectly legal devices that will do it.
Certainly there are no direct HDMI to DVI converters, and indeed the only thing that such a converter does is strip the copy protection, and such a device is the essence of illegal here.
The trick with HDCP is that the two ends of the chain have to negotiate. So your TV and the player talk - even if there is an AV box, or other gear, in the middle. Once the TV has provided the player with the needed tokens and convinced it that it possesses the needed license, the player will deliver the content. What is more complex is that information about the license tokens is also on the BluRay disks, and, in principle, if a licensee violates their licence - for instance by manufacturing a HDCP stripper, new BluRay disks will contain a black list containing their license key, and players will refuse to play content from those disks to devices with that key. Old disks still play, but any new content won’t. I have not heard of this ever happening, but the capability is there.
There is lots of other stuff in the content protection system. Automatic downsampling of content is another, so that disks can flag that unless there is a perfect end to end HDCP chain the content should only play at SD (ie normal TV) resolution. If a players has component or other analog outputs it is supposed to do this. As of this year however even those outputs are gone.
In all it is a complex minefield of restrictions that seems more designed to force customers to junk their old TVs and systems and buy all new gear, rather than prevent pirating - as pirating of content happens anyway due to flaws in the protection system.