251–260 of 286 posts
There are a heap of image based ways to encode data. Kerning on the credits, Position of titling. Minor brightness colour tweaks.
The thing that springs to mind the most. THERE'S A FULLSCREEN WHITE NOISE EFFECT AT THE START OF THE SHOW. You could stick whatever you want in there.
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While stego might be a route, blurring the watermark may not be enough to obscure the source. Given a known frame, they could blur the same portion of the same frame on all watermarked copies, and the one with a matching output is your culprit. Blurring loses information, but is more akin to a hash than a deletion, as it's a deterministic process. Edit: this sort of thing. http://dheera.net/projects/blur
It's a deterministic process, but it still has inputs. You'd have to know those inputs or test for every possible set of inputs to whatever blurring method was used.
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Do you not realize how complex the workflow pipelines are for a film or TV series of any kind? And how shows involving a lot of special effects like GoT are orders of magnitude more complex? For the publicity and marketing side of things we like to send actors out on talk shows to talk about character and costumes and drama and so on, and maybe show a few shots of a giant camera on a greenscreen stage to talk about h…
I am hooked on GoT, my response to HBO is thus: "Dear HBO, as a subscriber to HBO since 1983, I am saddened for this leak. As a huge fan of GoT, I am delighted, thank you, I will still watch all episodes in HD and DVR them every Sunday." --- HBO should allow for HBO GO users to see the whole season at a time - the same way netflix does. There is no reason to meter out the story. Netflix dumping a whole season on the…
In contrast, after House of Cards s3 was released and we watched a few episodes together, it became a free for all. Having a conversation about the show with anyone is practically impossible unless everyone has seen the entire show.
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I am hooked on GoT, my response to HBO is thus: "Dear HBO, as a subscriber to HBO since 1983, I am saddened for this leak. As a huge fan of GoT, I am delighted, thank you, I will still watch all episodes in HD and DVR them every Sunday." --- HBO should allow for HBO GO users to see the whole season at a time - the same way netflix does. There is no reason to meter out the story. Netflix dumping a whole season on the…
Sorry, but I couldn't disagree more. Ever since Game of Thrones started, I have gathered with various groups of friends nearly every Sunday to watch the episode as it airs. Watching Game of Thrones has become a social event primarily because the release structure forces everyone to always be at the same point (even if some have read the books). In contrast, after House of Cards s3 was released and we watched a few ep…
As a father of three small kids, I don't have the luxury of a weekly viewing parties. I find solace in the times when I have several hours to binge watch at my own pace.
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/r/GameOfThrones has 484k subscribers. /r/HouseOfCards has 50k subscribers. These are not "small communities" and there's no reason that there should be 9.5x more interest in GoT than HoC; they're both gritty political thrillers and HoC usually has more episodes per season than GoT. I posit that the GoT sub is much more active because the way that HBO releases content makes communal watching and discussion much easie…
I know Reddit and subreddits fairly well - most subscribers to a sub are silent and passive. 50k is a small community. Stacked against the whole of the viewerbase, 50k is even smaller a community. I posit that GoT is much more active because the show draws on a hugely engaging series of books that has been building a fanbase for a decade - an excellent reason for an 8x difference in size. Bluntly, you're not making a…
At the end of the day, television is just entertainment. And I get a lot more entertainment from being able to discuss drip-rate shows with friends.
Was talking to my partner about this and she had a pretty clever take: "Seems like a simple idea would simply be to change just the spelling of one seemingly insignificant name near the end of each version of the credits and then by actually watching the credits you'd know the leaker straight away." "Of course, you'd leave the watermark on there so the leaker doesn't know how you caught them and thinks that the water…
Or, just add an insignificant name (changing someone's name might run you afoul of contracts, even in a review copy).
But in this wide world there are fans who painstakingly go through the credit and put the text online. Sometimes even special thanks. So a fake name could be detected, and once the m.o. is detected, in this networked age, everyone would know it and people will start looking for it.
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Do you actually know that or are you speculating? I wouldn't be surprised if MP4 (or other video formats) provided a mechanism for tweaking the timing of a given frame. Of course, if you're using such a primitive watermark you might as well just add a note in the metadata...
Yes, I know that - I work in film and post-production for a living and I can explain the origin and workflow aspects of video frame rates to you in excruciating detail. You know how annoying it is when you watch a movie and there's some sort of 2-dimensional 'hacker' character and s/he just says some gobbledegook about 'hacking the password' or whatever, you see something a progress bar briefly on screen, and then th…
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Yes, I know that - I work in film and post-production for a living and I can explain the origin and workflow aspects of video frame rates to you in excruciating detail. You know how annoying it is when you watch a movie and there's some sort of 2-dimensional 'hacker' character and s/he just says some gobbledegook about 'hacking the password' or whatever, you see something a progress bar briefly on screen, and then th…
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Here's an example of a deliverables manual, from Netflix: http://newworlddistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/FullTec... You will get something similar from any broadcaster or video distributor. I'm not making careless extrapolations of my knowledge here, but telling you what the industry standards are. I have long involved email conversations about these things with distributors so that stuff I submit to them doesn't get sent back, triggering contractual penalty clauses for late/non-delivery that will make a producer cross with me.
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I am hooked on GoT, my response to HBO is thus: "Dear HBO, as a subscriber to HBO since 1983, I am saddened for this leak. As a huge fan of GoT, I am delighted, thank you, I will still watch all episodes in HD and DVR them every Sunday." --- HBO should allow for HBO GO users to see the whole season at a time - the same way netflix does. There is no reason to meter out the story. Netflix dumping a whole season on the…
Sorry, but I couldn't disagree more. Ever since Game of Thrones started, I have gathered with various groups of friends nearly every Sunday to watch the episode as it airs. Watching Game of Thrones has become a social event primarily because the release structure forces everyone to always be at the same point (even if some have read the books). In contrast, after House of Cards s3 was released and we watched a few ep…
Entertainment, in such a busy world, should be available at the leisure of the viewer, not some game rigged to keep interest over a time. Personally I'd rather watch the whole GoT season now to avoid seeing spoilers.
I think because of binging, better quality content is being created that is more complete and movie like. This content is meant to be consumed as a whole complete series and written as such, rather than hacked together a few weeks out and more plot holes or unnecessary episodes. Shows are so much better consumed in whole rather than across many many weeks, it leads to a stronger buy into the characters and the writing.
With binging, full availability, people can also easily catch up this way and watch older series more readily together. What we are moving to is a much better system than linear broadcast television which was only that way because there was limited network and resource availability, also it was all about the ads. I am sure there will be more watchers groups setup to binge together because so much more TV is available this way.
How can people so easily assume that the watermark was truly the only tracking present? HBO wouldn't immediately come out swinging even if they knew who or where the copy was leaked.
But it could be even easier. Why not put the watermark in a different location for every copy you distribute?