Quoting myself - always a bad sign...
I should add that probably the big dog in the restriction of access to software solutions are the studios. They are still paranoid about unconstrained access to content to stop pirating. Hence HDCP. Any vendor of HT equipment must guarantee that the raw digital information is never allowed out into the wild. So a software based audio solution would somehow need to make it impossible to sniff the audio. Which is basically impossible. Same of course with the video signal. This is just plain silly, open up any AVR and there are I2S feeds going into the DACs. Any fool with a soldering iron could get the audio out of the box if they desired.
This is why you never see AV processors with digital outputs to allow the user to feed their own DACs. Something you might imagine the ultra high end enthusiasts might like. Of course the dirty secret is that it would not be at all difficult to construct an add in board that created either S/PDIF outputs, or just installed much higher quality DACs.
The attempts at controlling media with such a steel grip hurt marketplaces. When people rip their Blu-Rays into DRM-free h.264/h.265 (for streaming from their personal Plex servers in their home to their LAN and offsite on their mobile devices for instance), they only want to work off the original full bitrate data with all available streams from the discs at greater than realtime and do not want to work off of lower quality realtime capture of a limited subset of decompressed content streams (which is what HDCP protects). HDCP doesn't actually protect anything that any everyday person cares about in the real world, the Macrovision protection tax/racket was created back in the VHS days as a videotape copy protection scheme, was ported over to DVD players (as a bit of metadata that could be turned on in the mastering process if a studio/content producer paid a fee to Macrovision on a per-unit sale that then activated the same analog output signal compromises via a Macrovision chip included in every DVD player). This might have made some nominal impact on curbing casual piracy back in the '90s, but the continuation of this brain-dead philosophy of blocking realtime copying via the very cumbersome HDCP which adds egregious handshake overhead and complexity is just painful to see in the modern world. The only people it's really helping are the ones pocketing the licensing fees from this tech and the big companies/conglomerates/private equity firms that are able to use their deep pockets to pay the the DRM cartel their money and keep the little guys from competing against them.
The movie industry has a history of cartels, going all the way back to the turn of the century when Edison created the Motion Picture Patents Company (aka the Edison Trust), as the culmination of his years of litigation, having built a warchest of patents by suing competitors out of business and buying out their intellectual property when they folded. Working in conjunction with the National Board of Censorship, the MPPC cartel for a while created a single point of control for all of motion pictures in the USA, not just by blocking out competition from foreign films, and it seriously stunted the marketplace. The MPPC required all movie making equipment to be purchased from the trust, and every theater owner to pay a weekly licensing fee, capped films at 20 minutes, and banned film credits from naming stars so that they could discourage them from asking for more money by suppressing their celebrity and clout. While the cartel was eventually dissolved, it led to a number of developments that ended up changing the course of the motion picture industry. Hollywood was created in reaction to Edison's cartel (which was based in New Jersey), and besides having good year-round weather for making films, it was a way to legally get as far away from Edison as possible by being under the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The cartel's restrictions led Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant who started off putting all his money into running a nickelodeon, into creating Independent Motion Picture Company so he could supply his growing theater business with films that that marketplace couldn't, and managed to survive 289 infringement suits from the Edison Trust (as well as physical attacts to on-set and in-theater equipment by paid thugs). Lamelle eventually consolidated IMP with other independent studios to form the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, which became Universal Pictures. Hungarian immigrant Adolph Zukor defied the cartel and screened the first full-length drama in the United States (a four-reel silent film from France), which led him to create the Famous Players Film Company, which became Paramount Pictures. Hungarian born Vilmos Fuchs, aka William Fox, created the studio that became 20th Century Fox, and he and Lamelle were the ones who filed antitrust actions against the Edison Trust that led to it being ruled a monopoly and ultimately dissolved.
I wish more people would learn the lessons of history and not repeat the same mistakes.
