The surprising disclosure was made by Senior Program Manager Steve Riley during a presentation on Windows Vista security at Tech.Ed 2006 Sydney today.If you'd like to read more, the entire article can be found here. As usual, feel free to leave your comments in our forum.
"Any next-generation high definition content will not play in x32 at all," said Riley.
"This is a decision that the Media Player folks made because there are just too many ways right now for unsigned kernel mode code [to compromise content protection]. The media companies asked us to do this and said they don't want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection, so we had to do this," he said.
Update: APC has followed up with another article claiming that the statement made by Riley was only partially correct. According to a recent blog post, it is up to the software vendor as to whether or not you'll need a 64-bit CPU to play High Definition content.
