the content at all. The Protected Video Path will not be used for quite a while. There is said to be an agreement between Microsoft and Sony that Blu-ray discs will not mandate protection until at least 2010, possibly even 2012. Vista does not degrade or refuse to play any existing media, CDs or DVDs. The protected data paths are only activated if protected content requires it. Users of other operating systems such as Linux or Mac OS X will not have official access to this premium content. Microsoft also noted that content protection mechanisms have existed in Windows as far back as Windows ME. Since mainstream and extended support for Windows Vista ended on April 10, 2012, and April 11, 2017, respectively, plans to enable the Protected Video Path for Windows Vista is very unlikely. Hardware requirements and performance Around the time of its release, Microsoft stated, "nearly all PCs on the market today will run Windows Vista," and most PCs sold after 2005 are capable of running Vista. Some of the hardware that worked in Windows XP does not work, or works poorly in Vista, because no Vista-compatible drivers are available due to companies going out of business or their lack of interest in supporting old hardware. Speed Tom's Hardware published benchmarks in January 2007 that showed that Windows Vista executed typical applications more slowly than Windows XP with the same hardware configuration. A subset of the benchmarks used were provided by Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (or SPEC), who later stated that such "results should not be compared to those generated while running Windows XP, even if testing is done with the same hardware configuration." SPEC acknowledges that an apple-to-apples comparison cannot be made in cases such as the one done by Tom's Hardware, calling such studies "invalid comparisons." However, the Tom's Hardware report conceded that the SPECviewperf tests "suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista". For this reason the report recommended against replacing Windows XP with Vista until manufacturers made these drivers available. The report also concluded in tests involving real world applications Vista performed considerably slower, noting "We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios". Other commonly used applications, including Photoshop and WinRAR, also