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How encryption for Cinema Movies works

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Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#101

Post by sandworm101 »

codemiscreant wrote: post #24
john01dav wrote: post #3

Even with all of this onerous encryption and DRM, it's not hard to find pirated copies of movies. It makes me think that the sacrifice in ownership rights for the theaters over their equipment isn't worth it.

There is essentially zero piracy from these digital cinema releases. The pirate copies are generally from once it starts digitally streaming on one of the services including PPV, and when pirate copies exist earlier it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener. Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.

There is zero piracy from projectors because there are a multitude of easier places to rip from. But close those doors, limit to only theatrical releases, and we will again see content pulled from projectors and underpaid projectionists.

The only way to prevent piracy, to actually prevent copying, is to keep content in a dark vault well away from public view.

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#102

Post by TheDcoder »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #81

>Encrypted DCPs use Forensic Watermarks which contain the serial number of the projection system. So if a recorded copy of a movie appears online, the theatre will have to answer serious questions and may never get movies again. Is this not as simple as dumping the same movie from two different projectors, diffing the output, then obfuscating the watermark?

To do that you need to figure out what parts are noise (watermark), simply diffing them would just give you a different noise pattern which can still be analyzed depending on how the watermark is encoded.

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#103

Post by teeray »

codemiscreant wrote: post #24
john01dav wrote: post #3

Even with all of this onerous encryption and DRM, it's not hard to find pirated copies of movies. It makes me think that the sacrifice in ownership rights for the theaters over their equipment isn't worth it.

There is essentially zero piracy from these digital cinema releases. The pirate copies are generally from once it starts digitally streaming on one of the services including PPV, and when pirate copies exist earlier it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener. Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.

> it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener.

Could an insider do a more sophisticated telecine capture with more fidelity?

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#104

Post by loeg »

abujazar wrote: post #71
loeg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1080p/4k as encoded by the streaming sites / blu-ray is sufficiently high quality for virtually all of the viewing public. You're weird (no offense).

As someone who's been working with cinema and video mastering, it sounds like you haven't seen the difference between professional formats like DCP and consumer formats viewed on a proper screen or projector. There's a reason we still have cinemas after all. Even consumer equipment benefits greatly from visually lossless encoded media.

Most people are watching at home, on smaller screens, and simply do not care about pixel perfection in every frame.

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#105

Post by crazygringo »

dsr_ wrote: post #98
crazygringo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no point to decoding in parallel if you're watching in sequence.

If your hardware can only manage 4 frames per second but you need 48, then decoding with 12 sets of hardware in parallel achieves your goal.

Derp, quite right. Never mind, thanks!

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#106

Post by dist-epoch »

Bedon292 wrote: post #86
dist-epoch wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hollywood is stupid and eroded its own economic advantage by putting everything on streaming You are making a big assumption that they had a choice, that if a movie was not put on streaming, the consumer would go to the cinema to watch it. But many consumers don't, if the movie is not streaming, they just don't watch it at all.

But how much of that is because they know it will come to streaming soon for free? I feel like the 'if the movie is not streaming, they just don't watch it' mentality was driven by everything being put on streaming. I am not the average consumer, so I could definitely be off base, but I feel like people were more willing to go to see a movie in theaters when they knew it would be months before they would be able to s…

> but I feel like people were more willing to go to see a movie in theaters

There was no Internet, no TikTok, shitty games, not much to compete with movies then.

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#107

Post by ale42 »

wmf wrote: post #99
jasode wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying. Kaleidescape movie players[1][2] are an example of an "adversarial" environment in customers' homes but so far, their DRM is still unbroken by pirates. (10+ years of Strato players deployed out in the wild but still not defeated yet.) The 4k 100+ GB…

If HDCP strippers work they should also work on Kaleidescape. I wonder if they use watermarking so they can "burn" the player after a single rip.

They most certainly do. A quick online search returns "NexGuard" as the used watermarking technology, at least in 2018.

Edit: it's actually mentioned in a comment not far from here (https://www.kaleidescape.com/news/kaleidescape-taps-nexguard...)

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#108

Post by Animats »

dsr_ wrote: post #98
crazygringo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no point to decoding in parallel if you're watching in sequence.

If your hardware can only manage 4 frames per second but you need 48, then decoding with 12 sets of hardware in parallel achieves your goal.

Although you still have four frames of latency if you do it that way. All the audio has to be delayed to match. Parallelized decode of JPEG 2000 frames is quite possible, though.

The choice of JPEG 2000 is unexpected. Most of the neat features of JPEG 2000 are useless for cinema. Being able to construct a low-rez version from a truncated file isn't useful. Nor is the ability to divide the image into tiles and decompress different tiles at different resolution. (That's used in JPEG 2000 medical and military imagery, where you want to zoom in on the interesting part and see it in lossless mode.) You can have more than RGB or RGBA layers, which the multispectral imagery and prepress people like. Maybe the advantage is that you can have more than 8 bits of color depth.

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#109

Post by loeg »

adrian_b wrote: post #54
loeg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1080p/4k as encoded by the streaming sites / blu-ray is sufficiently high quality for virtually all of the viewing public. You're weird (no offense).

I do not think that's weird. A 4k movie, even from a Blu-Ray, may look very nice when watched at a normal speed, but if you look at the individual frames in order to distinguish some details during a sequence with fast movements, the quality is very bad and it may be impossible to see the details that you want to see. At the levels of compression that are typical for movies distributed by encoding with H.264, H.265 a…

Most people just watch at normal speed. Single-steppers (myself among them) are, objectively, weird.

> I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.

Then don't do this? No one does this. Theaters certainly don't offer this experience.

Re: How encryption for Cinema Movies works

#110

Post by tverbeure »

jeffbee wrote: post #48
tverbeure wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that context matter? It's not as if the use of DRM for movie theater distribution influences whether or not somebody goes to see a movie.

No, the other direction. Clearly the problem is that nobody wants their product, not that everyone wants to steal it.

Without DRM, even less people would visit a movie theater.
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