Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

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So long as the https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole exists, piracy cannot be stopped. The ever-escalating arms race between content and consumers will go on, but there will be no victory, only collateral damage.

If you have content people value but they aren't willing to pay for it, find out why. Maybe it's because you're charging too much, running too many ads, making it hard to cancel, or they just don't actually value it all that much. In YouTube's case, I would say that for the vast majority of content and the vast majority of users on the site, the content is worth approximately $0.00 to them, and the content is not so crucial that a few unskippable ads in a row will have most users just saying "forget it" and finding something else to do.

Yes, pointing a camera at a monitor is more work and worse quality than getting the original video with best-quality-possible [compressed] audio, but no amount of laws can prevent people from doing that if they really value the content highly.

they can put fingerprints/watermarks into the analogue signal pretty easily if they're scared of that

plus the analogue hole is disappearing rapidly (including the 3.5mm jack)

> plus the analogue hole is disappearing rapidly

As long as you can aim a camera at a monitor or put a Bluetooth speaker next to a microphone the analogue loop hole will never disappear.

if that becomes the only avenue to rip a movie wide spread distribution of said movie with out permission will die

The idea that you would have lots of people getting up camera's and monitors to record a movie for distribution on the internet is laughable, and it would be a cam quality today so you would just end up with the early releases capture via someone setting in a theater which are generally poor quality

Poor quality but they still exist. If all digital versions were made unfeasible, you can bet good money that camripping would become more popular - and probably result in better-quality approaches at some point.

I think software can create a good version of a video taken from a middle-tier camera. My 8-year-old DSLR, Nikon D750, can take 4k video at 60fps. Its sensor has more dynamic range than even high-end screens can produce. When I take a picture of my TV I can see individual pixels. That camera can capture every bit of info my screen is putting out. I bet from a 4k/60fps video from my camera you can process it to produce something closer to a 1080p/30fps BlueRay rip.

This was not the case with handy-cam theater rips. Those things were at best 480p and could never capture the picture projected on a screen even in the best conditions.

Yeah, with a known resolution (1920x1080) and a stable camera it shouldn't be to hard to get a near-perfect rip.

Then people will make a complex device that hooks in where the LED/LCD grid does and converts the signals intended to drive the panel into a video feed for recording. And making a device that directly takes the output of a Bluetooth device's DAC (or even grabbing the digital output directly) should be even trivial.

Absolutely!

It wouldn't be easy, and would need some adjustments for colorspace etc but this is a method I have seen discussed online before.

The speaker part is much easier. At some point in almost all modern audio systems, there will be a PCM signal as part of the DAC step. Hook in here, pipe that signal to a computer's audio in / microphone port, and you've got a pretty clean audio stream.

fingerprinting can survive both of those

While someone is busy tracing that fingerprint, everyone has already copied and watched the video.

the fingerprint disables the camera (or puts it into some sort of crappy mode)

if you want a real world example of this in practice: search for the EURIon constellation

Use an old camera.

then when you try ingesting the footage into the machine/cpu/hard drive/router/cloud storage/...

it's not really something you can win as an individual on an infinite timescale

(unless you plan to keep your VHS around for the next few hundred years)

You gave me an idea if someone was to design a small display attached to a camera paired specifically to capture high quality video not just someone propping up a camera but where external light was blocked and the image size and camera are perfectly matched with an audio input as well they may have a market.

Why not skip the display completely and just go with a capture card? They are cheap and have none of the issues with lights and timings.

I was just thinking with vendors making hardware more hostile and if they made that not a possibility where an external camera defeats that. If a capture card works then that seems even easier and if youtubedl is under attack maybe that is how people will do it but one thing is for sure, people will do it.

In theory, HDCP is supposed to prevent such use, by cryptographically verifying that the video isn't going to a device able to copy the media. Keys can be revoked by, say inserting a disc with a new set of revocations on it (alongside the media).

If you want to play such media, you have to license keys from Intel and show that your design is hostile to copying.

In theory, yes.

You may be on something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope

So yeah, it's possibile to do it, but nowadays isn't done because there are more pratical ways to record video

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

This is similar to how they would broadcast film on television in the early days - using a Kinescope.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope

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