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Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

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Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#31

Post by rasz_pl »

redstripe wrote: post #9
Pyxl101 wrote: post #4

Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS? If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I shoul…

I believe this is part of "vPro" in intel marketing speak. Yes, many consumer CPUs have it. Intel provides pretty good feature lists by CPU if you want to avoid it: e.g. http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&FamilyText=4th%20Ge...

Chipsets, not CPUs, but that is a moot distinction as Intel stopped licensing their ISA, so you have no choice but to use intel chipset with spyware buildin

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#32

Post by stingraycharles »

jrockway wrote: post #27

This is all ultimately pointless because it's not like the video decoder checks the integrity of its own code or the CPU running it or the compiler that compiled it or that the OS it was tested against is actually running. (Reflections on trusting trust.) Nothing actually cares about secure boot or end-to-end code validation; Apple doesn't even include equipment on their mainboards to do this anymore. Meanwhile, if y…

> Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad.

And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#33

Post by jsdir »

Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sources though. Could this have been caused by DRM?

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#34

Post by Audiophilip »

pgeorgi wrote: post #16
Pyxl101 wrote: post #4

Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS? If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I shoul…

All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60. Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article. AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, the…

@pgeorgi:

>All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine.

Do you have sources for this? I wanted to verify it, but after a few Google searches I could not find anything that states exactly that. I have a Haswell CPU, but I have no Management Engine settings in my BIOS.

How does the vPro feature correlate with the Management Engine? Because not all Intel CPU's come with vPro. Or is that only a firmware difference? Would be nice to see clearer in this issue, but most websites contain only marketing nonsense.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#35

Post by [deleted] »

jsdir wrote: post #33

Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sou…

[deleted]

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#36

Post by anon4 »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #21
thatone wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, why would software be required to engage in all activity by piping through such a hardware interface. I would expect that open source alternatives and virtualization could easily bypass its necessity. At first glance, dumping the contents of any source media, or capturing network streams properly, should readily provide the raw, unencrypted content data, which is then decoded by an application that…

> the contents of any source media...should readily provide the raw, unencrypted content data Once this crap becomes ubiquitous, why would companies ship unencrypted bits at all? They could send files encrypted with all the major OEM "protected content" keys. If you're running on non-supported hardware, well, sucks to be you, pirate. I imagine it's rather difficult to extract the private key from DRM hardware. In the…

They already did that, twice. First with DVD which used a weak scrambling scheme that was defeated, then with BluRay which used strong encryption, but people were able to extract the keys. The problem with that scheme is that once any one key leaks, you can't do anything about it, especially not if the key is burned in your CPU. You can't expect everyone to go buy a new Intel CPU each time someone manages to extract a private key.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#37

Post by buro9 »

My partner is an academic, a lecturer in film theory. She watches a lot of films, and needs to make a lot of short clips for her lectures, and to take a lot of screenshots for her papers.

This task is becoming increasingly difficult as time goes by. The most reliable method (for her skill level) is now to rip DVDs, removing various bits of protection, before playing the film using VLC on Windows and using VLC to take the screenshot. This is a pain, as she now uses a Mac primarily (as most academia seems to be doing so almost exclusively because it makes presentations easier - connecting to projectors turns out to be the killer feature).

For a lot of films though, she pauses a film and uses a camera directed at the TV. Or worse, she'll record the clip on a camera (using the camera's microphone).

Aside from things like Box of Broadcasts (which is for UK broadcast TV), there are few to no resources for academics to resort to for sources of film that will enable dissemination to students through materials and presentations. All clips are short (10-30s), papers feature only a few screenshots when published.

Regardless of the studio and technology company desire to lock things down and control distribution, there remains a very legal exception to their controls: education.

And of course, education has resorted to alternatives to these locks. There exists private torrent sites that are collections of obscure, international and predominantly non-Hollywood productions. Like torrent sites pre-Netflix, these are actually the most reliable sources of films that academics use for sources. Even when an academic owns a DVD (as nearly all do for future presentation and citation purposes), the torrents deliver files that the academic can use to create clips and screenshots.

As much as possible, I try and help my partner avoid such sites. They are good, but in the hard world of academia I'm not sure her career will survive trying to argue any form of legitimacy of downloading content for academic purposes for already owned DVDs.

There is a very real and present danger that copy protections will harm libraries and education. They already are.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#38

Post by jrockway »

stingraycharles wrote: post #32
jrockway wrote: post #27

This is all ultimately pointless because it's not like the video decoder checks the integrity of its own code or the CPU running it or the compiler that compiled it or that the OS it was tested against is actually running. (Reflections on trusting trust.) Nothing actually cares about secure boot or end-to-end code validation; Apple doesn't even include equipment on their mainboards to do this anymore. Meanwhile, if y…

> Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad. And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.

Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on.

The content industry wonders why they can't stop piracy. Maybe they could start by providing a product that's as good as what the pirates get.

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#39

Post by akx »

jsdir wrote: post #33

Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sou…

No -- that was using video overlays for hardware acceleration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay

Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot

#40

Post by geon »

jsdir wrote: post #33

Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sou…

It was because of how HW accelerated video decoding worked. You would specify the coordinates of a rectangle on the screen where to play the video. Then you'd display a rectangle of a certain color (#010000, I believe), to be used as a mask.

The window manager could show windows on top of the video, and the masking would work even though the video decoding HW knew nothing about window management and vice versa.

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