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The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

da.vidbuchanan.co.uk

211–220 of 293 posts

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#211
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not. It’s enough to deter casual piracy. There is some value in that. Casual pirates wouldn't bother right-clicking in the first place unless it's to store a local copy that they won't even know how to share effectively (since they're casual). The only thing DRM achieves for netflix is deterring new customers and hurting existing ones.

Most pirates are not subscribed in the first place. They just download something someone else had removed DRM from, which also makes it a superior experience. It only takes one pirate with a decent computer to encode a good DRM-free copy for it to be shared via BitTorrent. It is pointless to deter casual piracy when one "professional" pirate is enough to free the content.

> It is pointless to deter casual piracy when one "professional" pirate is enough to free the content.

For the piracy scene, sure. It’s irrelevant.

But for normal people the difference is huge. They may not know how to pirate content, where to go to find it, or be willing risk downloading it and getting in trouble (scary FBI warnings and ISP letters).

But once it’s trivial due to the lack of protection it will be all over TikTok and FB and WAY more people will pirate. Those are the people DRM, even light DRM, stop.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#212
post #63

The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done. They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

> They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

The user experience worse for all of the Linux users who want to watch Netflix on a computer? What percentage of the market do you think that is?

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#213
post #133
post #63

The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done. They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

The point is to make the Netflix experience better for the average person than the experience of using a pirated source. And - IMHO - it works. I used to use Bittorrent quite a lot. There was a bunch of US shows I watched that were unavailable in Australia and so I had a pretty decent setup where things would automatically download when torrents were posted. Life happened, I stopped using it and haven't really tried…

So, it’s easier for me to go through the trouble of finding a good torrent with seeds that download fast than just paying for Netflix and automatically stream to my iPad while I’m at the airport?

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say “security through obscurity” there’s a certain understanding that we’re drawing a line between implementation secrecy (obscurity / obfuscation) and key secrecy. If we extend the word “obscurity” to include the notion of physical security, I think we’ve gone too far—even if physical security is just the physical security of a secret embedded in silicon that you have physical access to (because it is super…

With DRM the user who owns the machine is the "attacker". The keys have already been handed to the user, he only needs to get them out. This is like hiding an API key in a public website's javascript with rot13. Very much security by obscurity. Proper security means that the attacker should never be in possession of the key.

You’re saying that a hardware security module is like rot13?

When you say the attacker “only” needs to get them out, the “only” is doing a lot of work, there.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#215
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was treated like a criminal when legitimately buying media years ago. What happened?

> What happened? Isn't that obvious? Circumventing the copy protection of your own property is a crime.

Yeah but so is speeding on the freeway. People do that all day long and never gets ticket. Other times, people actually get arrested they were speeding so fast. So I ask again, did something actually happen? Did the FBI/whomever show up at your door and someone went to prison? Or is it just that format shifting got deemed illegal and now we're all running around scared?

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#216
post #177
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not. It’s enough to deter casual piracy. There is some value in that. If you could just right click and choose “download” for any Netflix original don’t you think that would be a problem for them?

> It’s not. It’s enough to deter casual piracy. There is some value in that. Casual pirates wouldn't bother right-clicking in the first place unless it's to store a local copy that they won't even know how to share effectively (since they're casual). The only thing DRM achieves for netflix is deterring new customers and hurting existing ones.

> The only thing DRM achieves for netflix is deterring new customers and hurting existing ones.

Out of their more than 231 million subscribing households around the world, I don't think more than 5,000 feel the way you think. Even if 55,000 felt that way it doesn't matter.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#217
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …would result in DRM being less popular because it caused too much friction for users. I agree. But that wouldn’t lead to more content freely available. It would lead to more content being locked in apps and unavailable in the browser. Do you think they would’ve made an app for Linux? I don’t. The dream that all content be available DRM free isn’t happening any time soon. Rights holders clearly don’t want it and I…

I don’t think Spotify web would have DRM if it required manually installing crap like silverlight. Music went drm free because it was inconvenient, and then when the drm was refined a bit, it’s all locked up so the web ui doesn’t work on Asahi.

This is completely false and easily refuted.

By the beginning of 2007, every music service that wasn’t iTunes had failed to gain traction. The record labels wanted Apple to license FairPlay. Apple refused and Steve Jobs posted “Thoughts on Music” to the front page of Apple.com where he gave the music labels an alternative - license their music to everyone DRM free.

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

> The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat

The record labels wanted Apple to give them a cut of each iPod sold, allow variable pricing and allow more music to be bundled instead of sold as singles. Apple refused. Some other places like Amazon and MS acquiesced.

Apple then released the iPhone. But didn’t have the rights to sell music over cellular. Both sides came back to the bargaining table and by 2009, iTunes music was DRM free.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#218
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …would result in DRM being less popular because it caused too much friction for users. I agree. But that wouldn’t lead to more content freely available. It would lead to more content being locked in apps and unavailable in the browser. Do you think they would’ve made an app for Linux? I don’t. The dream that all content be available DRM free isn’t happening any time soon. Rights holders clearly don’t want it and I…

It happened for music! I wonder why. But it makes music the one digital good I don't torrent on the reg cuz it's easier to just search it up on Amazon than on some torrent site. (The one weird exception is discographies, since they don't sell those for some reason. For them, archivists' torrents got you covered.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35090355

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#219
post #192
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost wrote "just wait for people to say 'no it's easy'" but I thought surely we are over that now. I want to watch The Climb 2023 S01E01. I Google "The Climb 2023 S01E01 torrent" First result is www.stagatv.com/series/the-climb-s01 (not linking because it is spam) Hmm nothing else useful on the first page except this: In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page.…

Things have changed a bit, but not much. First, Google heavily censors results nowadays. You will get much more results with say Yandex. Second, TPB is no longer the best public torrent host. For public sites rarbg and 1337x are better alternatives. Also, for anyone actually doing this kind of stuff regularly, the key is to enter the world of private sites. There is more than enough public discussion around them on s…

See this is actually the point: It might be easy but it's going to take time. Even more-so with all the people suggesting setting up a whole software stack.

Again, it's all easy enough, but..

It's not time I'm not prepared to invest anymore.

And to go back to the point: this inconvenience is why Netflix keeps DRM.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#220
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capture is not lossless. Think about a photocopy machine, every copy loses a small bit of information. Recapturing video output is a similar situation.

Why? Photocopy is obviously lossy since there is a very noisy digital-analog-digital conversion going on. But a capture card is capturing a digital signal. There should be no loss except for video decoding/encoding artifacts.

> except for video decoding/encoding artifacts

Which is... lossy

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