Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content • Hacker News Board

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#241

Post by madeofpalk » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 2:19 AM UTC

eitland wrote: post #192

matheusmoreira wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy. It's impossible. Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible. They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Piracy offers us all the works of humanity, everything ever created. These copyright hold…

> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it: I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care . Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max…

What's this "scam" you keep mentioning?

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#242

Post by VRay » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

ralferoo wrote: post #213

VRay wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I grew up lower/lower-middle class, about 30-40% of the median family income, and we had the $80/month cable package plus went to Blockbuster for 5+ rentals per week I don't think that was unusual, either.

If you're watching 5+ rental films per week, when do you have the time to watch anything on the cable package? Sounds like a ridiculous waste of money to me, but then I'm firmly at the other end of the spectrum. I finally cancelled my £30 a month TV package, I've not rented a film for over 10 years, and would buy blu-rays or DVDs only for things I thought I'd watch more than once, or where buying them was cheaper tha…

Yeah, it probably wasn't the most efficient use of my family's limited budget, but that's how it goes

Nowadays I'm a big /r/financialindependence guy, and I was shocked recently to find out that a lot of my lower-middle class friends and family are constantly ordering food with those ripoff delivery apps. It's completely insane IMO to pay $50 for cold, soggy food that should have cost 25, but I guess people do it. They buy new top-end smartphones every year or two, lease cars, and do all sorts of other ridiculous money-wasting stuff.

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#243

Post by Underphil » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

princevegeta89 wrote: post #233

Underphil wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really bothers me is that if I watch a non-English film on Netflix or Amazon Prime, the subtitles are often garbage. Sometimes even English films have spelling mistakes and poor attempts to condense the dialogue. With piracy, I have a choice of multiple subtitle providers.

Hmmm, haven't run into situations with bad subtitles on foreign films, I watched a few and they were decent. I thought there was good quality control. But I definitely agree on the absence of multiple choices and options when it comes to dialogue and subtitles

Not that I've seen it, but I'm told the subtitles for Squid Game lost a lot of context in the translations.

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#244

Post by princevegeta89 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:32 AM UTC

Underphil wrote: post #243

princevegeta89 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, haven't run into situations with bad subtitles on foreign films, I watched a few and they were decent. I thought there was good quality control. But I definitely agree on the absence of multiple choices and options when it comes to dialogue and subtitles

Not that I've seen it, but I'm told the subtitles for Squid Game lost a lot of context in the translations.

Are you talking about the dubbing? Or just subs? Dubbing was ..pure nonsense. Subs, I could definitely tell they're off.

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#245

Post by freebuju » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 8:06 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #241

eitland wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it: I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care . Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max…

What's this "scam" you keep mentioning?

Not in OP's shoes but maybe they used to enjoy the convenience of being able to just watch Friends on Netflix. Or maybe they login to their Netflix on an "un-approved" device such as an Ubuntu PC and Netflix deems this bad so they get capped to 480p video streaming. Or just maybe, whatever price is deemed appropriate for a NF subscription is no match for the volumes of content available on the other side of the high seas for free.

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#246

Post by eitland » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 8:15 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #241

eitland wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it: I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care . Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max…

What's this "scam" you keep mentioning?

The scam is that it started out with Netflix being like Spotify, only even though I paid full price I couldn't see all content because I was in Norway.

Then more and more got pulled out and now if I want a full Spotify experience for video I need to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Warner, AppleTV and maybe a few more.

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#247

Post by bb88 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 8:35 AM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #175

bb88 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It had to do with screwing around with the vertical blanking interval. TV's had no issue with it, but VCR's would fail. Cable TV "scrambling" was similar back in the day as well. It wasn't so much that the signal was "encrypted" as it was "modified" in such a way it wouldn't play on a normal tv anymore. Over time they could modify the scrambling technique so that any box you did buy to descramble a signal would be wo…

In the early 80s where I lived, there was some kind of filler that, once removed, allowed you to watch HBO. It was housed in a green box exterior to each house, where the cable left the street and entered your house. I don’t know if it was a filter really. It was just an electronic component of some kind that screwed on/off. When you ordered HBO, someone visited your property to remove this thing.

Back when TV stations were broadcast on frequencies, it would be as simple as a notch filter to block out that particular frequency that HBO/Skinemax was on.

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#248

Post by nyuszika7h » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

marcan_42 wrote: post #14

nyuszika7h wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The L1 device key they posted was already revoked earlier today. The tools themselves might continue to work for a while longer with an appropriate non-revoked key depending on how much services want to change up their APIs.

Widevine is completely broken ever since Nvidia Tegra devices were irreparably compromised due to a boot ROM bug. You can just pull the L1 key from any one of them, and Google can't mass revoke the entire device class since it would screw over a ton of legitimate users. (I don't know the details of how to dump the keys, I just know it's possible by definition given the security loss on that platform, and I'm sure som…

Well, what they did to Nvidia Tegra devices is either downgrade them to L3, or revoke them and issue a new L1 key for them. OTA updates patched something, but a hardware flaw can't be patched fully with a software update.

However, most people nowadays are simply exploiting phones and tablets with old vulnerable MSM chips, there are a lot more of those to choose from. Usually what Google does now is when someone publicly leaks a compromised device key, they revoke the unique key of that specific device but not the whole model. However, sometimes streaming services (especially Amazon, Netflix and Disney+) may still choose to blacklist an entire vulnerable model and limit it to SD playback.

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#249

Post by nyuszika7h » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

scoopertrooper wrote: post #13

nyuszika7h wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The L1 device key they posted was already revoked earlier today. The tools themselves might continue to work for a while longer with an appropriate non-revoked key depending on how much services want to change up their APIs.

I can't see them changing up their APIs in any meaningful way. It'd seem kind of pointless to me. At the end of the day, if you're exposing something on the internet, then it won't take a huge amount of time for people to reverse engineer how web clients interact with the server. Main game should be rotating the L1 keys. I don't know about L2 keys, but rotating L3 keys seems like a lost cause to me, some dude made a…

You can't really "rotate" L1 keys without breaking HD playback on millions of old vulnerable devices and pissing off a ton of legitimate customers in the process. A hardware vulnerability can't be fixed with a software update. Instead, nowadays when a key is leaked usually Google just revokes the key of the unique device it was extracted from and not the entire model. But major streaming services often blacklist or limit playback quality on known compromised models.

As for L1 on desktop, Google did announce exactly that [1], but TPM would be likely too weak for that, so maybe something like Intel ME would be used. But so far there's no evidence of them actually rolling anything like that out. So for now if you want hardware DRM on desktop you have to use Edge or native Windows 10 apps with PlayReady DRM.

And about the APIs, streaming services do sometimes change up APIs, make old app versions stop working, etc., but often things work with no or minimal changes even years later. They do have to be careful not to break compatibility with all of their own apps across multiple platforms as well.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210819093936/https://widevine....

Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content

#250

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:44 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #241

eitland wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it: I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care . Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max…

What's this "scam" you keep mentioning?

You pay for netflix yet you can't watch stuff you want. You search for a film and it shows up on the search autocomplete and yet it's not there. Why? Copyright bullshit nobody cares about.

Films that used to be in your list mysteriously disappear. You swear it was there but it's not. It's like netflix is gaslighting you. Sometimes you try to watch something only to be greeted by an ominous "last day to watch on netflix" notice. You thought you were paying for a subscription but it was really a long term rental that you have no idea when it expires. They simply take stuff away. Whenever something new shows up instead of being excited you now wonder how long it will take for them to take it away too. Cowboy Bebop? I wonder how long that's gonna last.

Whatever scraps and leftovers you do get is ruined by quality issues: extremely compressed encodes, shitty video player software, cropping, changes, sometimes they can't even get the episodes in the correct order which means I'd be watching it backwards. You now wonder if what you're watching on netflix is the best version. You now wonder if the netflix version is censored or altered in any way. I find myself searching for reddit discussions on a series to see if netflix screwed it up.

You entertain the notion of paying for other services as well but you discover their apps are even shittier and they still don't have what you want to watch. You remember facts such as amazon's non-existent customer service and the industry's tendency to profile you based on what you watch. You realize that paying money to these people is a lot like being in an abusive relationship.