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…
Curious why VLC/screenshot doesn't work on Mac?
Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
71–80 of 159 posts
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
They already did that, twice.
The DRM on the PS3 lasted from 2006 until at least 2010 - and even today, as I understand it, online play is disabled if you refuse a patch that closes the jailbreak security bugs. Perhaps effective DRM is possible, it's just taking a lot of practice.What's more, in the past media distribution was on physical disks and players weren't on the internet, so software couldn't be upgraded. The future is obviously in downloads and streaming, which will enable a bunch of new things.
Key rotation will be much simpler as vendors can just issue a compulsory automatic upgrade. As a different download can be prepared for every customer, there's no need for keys to be shared by multiple customers. Every download can be watermarked so anything that does get out can be traced to a particular downloader.
So I don't think the failures of the past indicate it's impossible for DRM to ever work.
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#73Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Europe has strong consumer protection rights. The angle to take is that media is sold misleadingly. When I buy a DVD / Bluray I am paying for a physical disc and a licence to use the contents of the disc. That licence is restrictive and restricts my rights more than law. Thus, I am not allowed to extract a short extract to use in an educational setting (fair dealings; fair use). Packaging and marketing of DVD / Blura…
Exactly, this is the main problem I have with the people who claim in comment sections across the internet that since I'm only paying for a license to play the content, I can't complain about owning it. Nowhere on the iTunes store does it say, "Click here to purchase license to play video". Not on Amazon or Google Play either. This is just a case of false advertising by content producers and distributors. If they can…
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#75This 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…
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#76My 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 whole copyright gang from MPAA to OS vendors and chip makers are using DRM to expand the reach of copyright law. And you can't just say "well I'll just break the DRM, since it's legal for me to take the screenshot" either. Because breaking DRM is illegal...So in order to exercise one of your rights you have to break another law.
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#77This 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" DRM has very little to do with piracy. Hollywood know perfectly well that DRM will not stop a determined pirate and a movie only has to be ripped once to be pirated indefinitely. It's about control. It's about the studios always having a seat at the bargaining table when new products/devices are being floated. They fear becoming a commodity supplier.
You know, I'm really not convinced they do. Everything I see from these people leads me to think they literally think this stuff is magic, and they want the snake oil so badly they'll believe the people selling it over the people telling them the disappointing truth, every time.
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#78Offenders' influence would then decline and people will become smarter, everyone wins.
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
My source is that I work on coreboot, where we have to interact with that stuff all the time. It's actually somewhat hidden in our haswell driver because so much is now binary-only on Intel platforms. But look at http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=blob;f=sr... whose comments refer to both "ME" (the management engine) and "PAVP", which is the "Protected A/V Path" referred to in the article. One sure wa…
From that file: pci_or_config32(PCI_DEV_HSW, 0xb0, 1 What is "BDSM"? It almost seems like a strangely appropriate name for another DRM feature. It's actually somewhat hidden in our haswell driver because so much is now binary-only on Intel platforms. One thing that I've noticed browsing around Coreboot sources is that the source code is rather opaque - full of "magic constants" with little to no meaning. It may be "o…
The value is that the higher level structure is more easily visible when you know what is code and what is data (which is the main issue with disassembly), and the ability to quickly see that you haven't missed extra code that is executed in some sneaky place because everything in the output is accounted for somehow.
The options we have with coreboot are to have 8MB of unaccounted stuff, or 500KB of unaccounted stuff. The latter can be reverse engineered more easily, since the scope is known, and the complexity is a magnitude smaller (no code decompressing other code, jumping into it, ...). That was actually done for sandybridge. We even built tools to simplify reverse engineering (www.serialice.com)
As for the funnily named BDSM register: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/... calls it "Base Data of Stolen Memory". Essentially, both GPU and ME get assigned some system memory to work in, and that register contains the first address that isn't available to the CPU due to this arrangement.
That register itself is harmless. In older Intel chipsets, it was possible for the host CPU to get a peek into the ME's memory by messing with that register, which was used for some ME analysis in 2012 or 2013. Unfortunately they plugged that hole, and that register's role is more of the informative kind.
Re: Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
#80It even has an embedded Java runtime.