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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

They probably aren't storing the videos as you are traditionally thinking about them - you don't get to download a video file which you can play anywhere.

Most likely what they've done is stored the video chunks locally and then the Netflix app is "streaming" these chunks from the local storage rather than the netflix servers. If you looked through the folder that holds these chunks, you'd probably just see a bunch of randomly named 100mb files. That's all the DRM they need, you have no ability to consume these files without the Netflix app.

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That is not "all the DRM they need". Files split up into "randomly named 100mb chunks" does not make them safe from would-be pirates with a penchant for reverse engineering.

I mean, there's probably more to it than "randomly named 100mb chunks", but for the sake of brevity, that's how I described it.

The chunks themselves would have the same DRM applied as when you'd stream from their servers. In the latter case you can also just sniff the traffic, but that's not enough to be able to decrypt the video.

DRM never did stop "would-be pirates with penchant for reverse engineering". Ever.

Plus, the owner of the Android/iOS device is paying for that content anyway, why would it be in any way a problem if he can open that downloaded file in another software?!?!

Technically paying for a license to play said content in the Netflix app.

I agree that DRM is a waste of time and the pirates are going to get the content whatever happens, but a $10/m streaming service is only licensing you to watch video in a few specific scenarios. If you had spent $3 an episode (or whatever it is on iTunes/Google Play these days) to own it, then I'd expect a DRM free file to be available (Though I doubt you actually get one in reality).

For anyone who missed it, it seems like you can only download and view offline copies of videos in the Netflix app for Android and iOS¹. (Whatever the form of the DRM is that they’re using, it’s a definite that the Netflix app decodes it when you do playback).

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¹ — https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54816

>That's all the DRM they need, you have no ability to consume these files without the Netflix app.

This is like saying that .doc files are as good as DRM'd, since who's going to open one in anything but Word?

I get what you're saying but it's a security through obscurity argument - if this takes off, of course someone can figure out the encoding and transcode straight from those files.

It's just the same security they use for streaming. If you can decode the chunks, you can also capture the streamed data and decode it.

I would imagine downloads can be faster than 1x realtime, no? Having to stream things is a serious limit on ripping (transcoding) speed.

Whut?

You can write a stream to file with maybe 2 commands, and try to decode it later.

If the DRM on the stream is broken, you can save the stream to file and decode it later. If the DRM on the stream is safe, then it should be equally safe between the stream and saving the file to disk.

I fail to see how letting you save encrypted stuff to local disc has anything to do with breaking the DRM.

Also, the first thought people have when given a new service for free is "how can I use this to pirate movies". This is why we can't have nice stuff.....

My comment has nothing to do with DRM. I'm saying, "if there is no DRM" (or it is broken or can be broken), then the difference between downloading and streaming might be the difference between taking 2.2 days to "stream to disk" Game of Thrones (60 episodes @ 55 minutes) -- or, say, downloading it in 4 hours. (If downloads are allowed to be faster than realtime, which would only make sense.) GoT is obviously a hypothetical example.

If you don't think that makes quite a real difference in enabling or incentivizing actual piracy then I think I'll just disagree - that rate limit is a huge difference in my book and makes it far more likely for someone to take the trouble to rip and transcode.

You imply that there's speed throttling when streaming. There's not and it makes no difference if you're connecting to a streaming endpoint or just getting a downloaded file.

(Which you can confirm by fast availability of streamed content on torrent sites or if you actually test the streams.)

Thanks. Are you saying you could "stream" a 50 minute episode in 3 minutes even before this announcement?

Your second statement (about torrent sites) implies that everyone was already "downloading" content and NetFlix's servers were happy to serve the streams as a single very fast download without regard to how long it should takes clients to consume that (i.e. no throttling) - is this correct?

Yeah, at the end of the day, the player is also downloading and caching chunks. Usually faster than playback as well - precaching ahead so line fluctuations don't make your video stutter.

I know that's what some music streaming services used to do.

But I still see some risk for Netflix there... Split files are made to be whole again.

If you had only one movie stored locally, you would very quickly be able to solve the puzzle.

A file on a disk is still just a stream of video. Even if they use a proprietary container format, without DRM it's still very possible to reassemble the file into a more common container.

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