101–110 of 175 posts
Is there any video DRM scheme which successfully protects video content appearing on the pirate bay within 24 hours? I really don't see why so many millions (billions?) of dollars have been spent on technologies which so far have never kept the bad guys out.
The platforms roll their eyes, but implement it anyway; cause it's a rounding error, and keeps publishers happy
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Are subtitle tracks also encrypted? I've always had the impression that only video itself is. edit: But the subtitle tracks are also available on software-only DRM levels that are easy to break.
Actually now I think of it that doesn't matter since you could just pull the subtitles from the weakly protected 720p version then apply them to the higher resolution versions. Ripping the 4K video through LVDS or HDMI capture would still be annoying though.
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The point of the DRM schemes is basically to keep video "hard enough to copy that normies don't do it". And not even "normies can't find it on the Pirate Bay" but "you can right click and download from Netflix." If they mostly succeed at that, they consider it good enough.
If that were true it would be possible to watch in 4k resolution on Netflix on Linux. But it's not.
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Actually now I think of it that doesn't matter since you could just pull the subtitles from the weakly protected 720p version then apply them to the higher resolution versions. Ripping the 4K video through LVDS or HDMI capture would still be annoying though.
Yep I realized that and edited my parent comment but you beat me to it.
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This assuredness that piracy will always win will be our demise.
The only way to reduce piracy is to make access easier and cheaper - something the music industry figured out. Sure music still gets pirated but its a lot less.
for the tv/movie industry, the best solution we have right now is basically streaming services like netflix. the issue is that its probably still not economically feasible for companies like netflix to pay for the streaming rights of new movies for their subscribers, especially those big budget movies. so for those, either you'd have to wait until the price is more palatable for netflix, or you'd have to just pirate it.
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If you take the capitalistic lust of the corporate executive to its logical extreme, given the massive costs of the DRM tech you'd think that at least one of them would realize that they could make more money if they didn't have to pay for something that doesn't work. The economics of distributing the copies are such that it doesn't actually matter if it's easy or hard for 1 or 100,000 people to break the protection.
I work for a large streaming service and a significant part of my work is content protection. Honestly, tech folks misunderstanding of DRM and content protection is significant. There's some assumption that people are inherently honest and that we're just money grabbing. In the years that I've been doing this I've seen a lot of things and nothing has convinced me that if we turned off DRM we'd: 1) save money 2) not h…
The "sustainability" of Disney's profits are not important. To suggest otherwise on a site literally named Hacker News is comical.
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There's three Winevine tiers, L1, L2 and L3, which generally correspond to 4K, 1080p and 720p respectively though it depends on the service. L3 is what you get on Linux. L2 is supposed to be more secure than L3 but AFAICT it makes little difference to piracy groups, L1 is the only actual roadblock for them.
Why are Linux users limited to L3?
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The only way to reduce piracy is to make access easier and cheaper - something the music industry figured out. Sure music still gets pirated but its a lot less.
Well, no, that isn't the only way to reduce piracy. Another way would be widespread collaboration between the largest tech corporations to lock down the pipeline from manufacturing to sale and onward If users continue to accept this path, which... they seem to, that is where we'll inevitably end up.
You fundamentally can't prevent someone copying your file. It isn't possible, full stop. You can only make it maximally inconvenient. You can't encrypt a user's eyeballs, so the media has to be transmitted in the clear at some level. Be it intercepting the LVDS signal to your TV panel or just pointing a camcorder at the screen.
The current tact is to just make it maximally inconvenient for anyone to access the file in any way. This does not consider the asymmetry in effort required. All legitimate users must deal with shitty DRM systems and broken apps, where it takes exactly one pirate to go through the effort of making a copy. Then everyone else who obtains a copy has to expend zero effort to consume the media.
Piracy is simply easier, which is why there's a resurgence now. The only sustainable option is to make legitimate consumption easier than piracy. For a lot of media, piracy is the only option to obtain a copy that will not vanish at some indeterminate point in the future. even if you paid for it.
Companies think that they can just make piracy harder, but that simply doesn't work. Once the first copy is made, the game is over. As established, there's simply no way to truly and permanently prevent a copy being created. That's simply the nature of digital media. At best, you can slow pirates down, you can never stop them. Piracy will never go away, and people need to accept that. People have been selling bootleg copies of goods since the dawn of time, there's no way to prevent it. There will always be someone nabbing copies of movies and sharing the files.
You can either waste everyone's time by trying to fight it, or you can realize that companies need to compete to survive, not just be large. If you compete with the pirates and produce a better product that people want more, well that's what capitalism is all about, isn't it?
At some point this silly game of cat-and-mouse is going to escalate, and streaming players won't work unless your entire computer is locked down and "verified" by Microsoft or Apple.