Peter Gutmann's at IT again...

"Vista is disadvantaging high-end audio and video systems by openly disabling devices."

"Vista covertly degrades playback quality."

"This overt and covert degrading of quality is dynamic, not consistent."

"Vista...requires that 'any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present."

"It is apparent that Vista is going to use very much more of a PC's resources than previous versions of Windows and degrade multi-media playback quality unless the user has purchased premium content from a Microsoft-approved resource."

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...75&pagtype=all

While that article is true its not all Microsoft. I remeber reading a while back about HDMI and new vidcards with HD support. If i remeber correctly intel is in on it. This is much greater then microsoft. They are just playing a large part of it.