Pirating the Oscars 2022: The Rise and Fall of the Screener over 20 Years | Hacker News Reader

Pirating the Oscars 2022: The Rise and Fall of the Screener over 20 Years

waxy.org

Last year, the Academy announced they were finally banning physical screeners. Voters would no longer receive DVDs or Blu-Rays by mail, with screeners exclusively available through Academy Screening Room, a free video streaming app for iOS, Apple TV, and Roku accessible only by Oscar voters.

Okay. So why is Apple still doing it?

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https://thenougatmachine.wordpress.com/2022/03/23/an-apple-o...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809226

Well, you can give each streamed copy an undetectable steganographic ID, then if and when it leaks you will know whose copy leaked. This is not like encryption of the stream - the stream is quite legible. Since a stream is a string of bits you can change one or more bits to create uniqueness. You know where the bits are = you can find them. It can be defeated by a quality downgrade by putting it though a tele-cine chain (show it on the wall, capture into a lesser resolution, format, PAL/SECAM/VIDEO. I am amazed at the fee gouge the oscarmongers extract.

Even 20 years ago, I turned my back on the whole Oscar spectacle. They and their critics are not me and have failed to pique my tastes in a positive way for those decades. I feel the Oscars are in a fade to black era.

Until someone gets a copy of two streams, diffs them and removes the “undetectable steganographic ID”.

Hard to do if editing of scene cuts are differentiated as well.

This is time consuming. You can pick one frame at a known time stamp and some way into the movie. You can also pick 10 frames that are stenoed and 300 that are spoof stenoed = hidden in the deep woods, not worth the time to fiddle unless some one is driven.

However if you get hold on a single copy, you're not willing to publish it, as it will point to you as the source of the leak. You also can't get access to another copy, because the person that got that, has the same consideration.

So you need someone who has an access to two copies, or is trusted, by at least two people with copies, to remove hidden data.

But how would this steganograohic ID fair throughout the multiple encoding/transcoding that happens during scene distribution?

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