Hacker News Reader

Comment by _august | Hacker News Reader

Why is it possible to pirate 4k content from these sites but not simply view 4k officially on my mac? (disney+ in particular)

View on HN

In your case, the likely reason is because the DRM is done in software and not hardware, making it easier to crack, and Disney as a policy avoids their highest resolution content going through software decoding.

I get the technical reasoning, but as a policy it makes no sense because the pirates are getting 4K anyway, and a paying customer is getting a degraded experience.

The usual then. Pirates never have to deal with DRM and sometimes their games perform better — I recall a story about an anti-copy mechanism slowing the game down for people who purchased it. Good stuff.

I spend a lot of money in indie stuff- games, music, docus, books written by young academics, programmers, etc. And then I get the same content through other means. The experience is much, much better.

I ensure that the "small" people benefit from my consumption- the people who will actually benefit from my $10/$20/$50. But I also have to keep my comfort and ease in mind.

By that logic, no DRM makes sense at all, which is a take I understand but I think misses a lot of nuance.

So their anti piracy solution is to prevent people from accessing their content? Sounds toxic but okay.

It's not strictly anti-piracy, though the roots are in it. Consumers aren't the only source of requirements. It goes back to content protection deals Disney has cut for years and the reciprocity requirements.

Sounds like you really are not their target market. The primary money making target for Disney is people who watch it on their smart tv. Even if the average joe does decide to fire up their mac they won’t care if it’s not 4K.

Then why do they advertise 4K as an important feature?

Because if they didn't Average Bob would feel like they're missing out.

Some people don't care about 4K. Other people think they care about 4K but don't really know the difference.

"4K streaming" is such a joke

They compress and screw up the video quality so much that even calling it 1080p is a stretch in my opinion

Most people have houses/screens too small for 4K to be visible anyway, though, so I guess it's easy to get away with providing such a crappy service

I believe Safari on Mac and Edge on Windows support 4K. But yes, if you're using Chrome or Firefox, you're only getting 720p I believe.

It's stupid because the majority of people don't realize and may be paying for the more expensive 4K option even though they're never getting that...

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

It's not pirating... you have to have an account, I believe,

It's an unauthorized copy.

they can ban me, I guess ... if they don't want to receive payments.

Copyright applies to the entity doing the distribution. It could be violating of DMCA though I am not a lawyer and don’t fully understand the law.

It applies to all copies. Unless you have a blanket law like AHRA that absolves you or you're doing something covered by fair use, it's unauthorized. This has always been the case since before DMCA.

DMCA would be a violation, but more importantly, it could potentially be argued that you are copying it to your hard drive permanently when you wouldn't need to have an archival copy.

You can get 4k by playing content on your iOS device and then casting it to your Mac using AirPlay. Ridiculous that there's no other way.

Problem might be the network traffic. Maybe they could not afford the 4K streaming if there are so many people use it.

Presumably the piracy apps tell those sites you're using something like Windows XP and need a certain version of the file.

I think 4K is only available on smart TVs and game consoles. The piracy code probably tells the sites you're using one of them.

You don't have to presume anything. The source code is right there.

I don't think which user agent they fake is particularly interesting, the point is they fake it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com