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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

DMCA take down and what not in 3... 2... 1...

Edit: wait, 2019? What gives? How is this not taken down?

You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show, thanks to DRM; but you can download Spotify tracks?

Spotify contains watermarks, the DRM is known to be simple and got circumvented many years ago already when Spotify was relatively new. A dev even responded: 'we know, please don't abuse.' Watermark is why the sound is worse than a direct rip in OGG Vorbis of the same quality.

With regards to Netflix I run Windows under Proxmox with a Netflix PWA, and I surely can make a screenshot of my NoVNC connection. Though I am pretty sure Netflix isn't 4k / Widevine L1.

I thought the watermarks were UMG, and on all streaming services, not just Spotify?

EDIT: Apparently fixed for most tracks: https://www.mattmontag.com/music/an-update-on-umg-watermarks

You can take screenshot of Netflix if you are using the software renderer.

It's based on librespot[1] which has been there for a while. Spotify used to official support "libspotify" to download .ogg files, but that was very early stuff that got deprecated in favor of platform specific APIs.

[1] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

> You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show, thanks to DRM; but you can download Spotify tracks?

There's also a lot of tools to rip movies from Amazon Prime or YouTube to MP3 sites. It will never be possible to take down all of them, especially if they are not located in the US.

If done cleverly, it will be indistinguishable from normal use, so it is technologically infeasible as well, to try and prevent it entirely.

I would have thought it's easy to distinguish when you download a 250MB video in 10 seconds without opening the YouTube client, so I'm always surprised those clients work.

Heh, that's not what I would call "clever" though ; ) You can add delays artificially, you can add random, but seemingly human pauses (people sometimes pause playback) etc. I am surprised as well though, that tools still work without having to go to these lengths. perhaps because devs on the other side of the thing know, that they would only trigger a more sophisticated tool to be created.

Some use headless Chromium/Chrome like Puppeteer or other to mimic usage directly. At that point only pattern detection would work i.e. downloading too many files one person could consume or other fingerprinting.

> You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show, thanks to DRM;

The windows snipping tool (which got renamed to "Snip & Sketch" at some point) takes screenshots just fine even when Netflix is running in full-screen mode.

off-topic: Under Windows 11 MS renamed "Snip & Sketch" to "Snipping Tool" and replaced to original snipping tool with it.

Feels like the gave up to overcome muscle memory. At least i continued using the og snipping tool under windows 10 because in german the new tool was named "Ausschneiden und Skizzieren" and that didn't map to me searching for "sni" and pressing enter.

Try Win+Shift+S for instant click/drag screenshot to clipboard. I haven't opened the snip tool GUI since I found out. It also has GUI buttons for window/freeform/fullscreen if you ever need that.

In Windows 11 there's also a setting to make the "Print Screen"-key work in the same way as Win + Shift + S. The setting is called "Use the Print screen button to open screen snipping".

How did I not know about Windows+Shift+S until just now?

That's probably because you are running Netflix in Google Chrom. The streams are 720P (1280x720) and hava a lower level of DRM.

Only Microsoft Edge and natives apps are providing the highest definition available. You can see the stats by pressing CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-D while Netflix is active.

>You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show

Works fine on linux even in 1080p.

Netflix doesn't supply Linux with 1080p streams, for exactly this reason. Any platform that doesn't encrypt the video path so screen recording isn't possible is limited to 720p.

No Firefox user can view anything but 720p from Netflix by default, but this extension enables 1080p video in firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-1080p...

Incorrect https://de.catbox.moe/uxy8eb.png

That makes me wonder: do the wires that feed modern LCD screens contain encrypted pixel information nowadays?

How close to the liquid crystal cell do we have to be to get unencrypted pixel data?

All you need is an hdmi capture card on a chromecast.

Yes there is encryption (HDCP), but it was broken almost immediately. Many choices to buy a cheap decrypter on Ali Baba…

> That makes me wonder: do the wires that feed modern LCD screens contain encrypted pixel information nowadays?

Yes. If your device and cables don't support HDCP [0] you won't be able to play netflix, prime, hulu, etc on it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

There is always the analogue hole. Music piracy is a battle that has long been lost.

I wouldn't say it was lost because of streaming. People don't pirate music like they used to because there is a convenient alternative. I still pirate because I like to have an actual library that doesn't change when licenses do, my I have nobody in my circles who still does the same.

Also because the discovery and social features are an actual value add for most users. Spotify wrapped may have done as much for its popularity as the music itself.

I've already experienced my songs becoming "unavailable" or replaced with imposters multiple times on spotify, it's really only good for discovery.

As for where to actually rip from, I've never actually had to backup a song that only existed on spotify.

Really? Never used Netflix but I am curious how can it stop me from doing screenshot when drm is run in browser?

aaaaaaand it's gone

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