I'm constantly suprised when YT deploys another half measure against downloaders when GOOG also owns widevine. I wonder what is their reasons for not using it.
Using the hardware based version could cause a lot of problems with unsupported devices.
(My use case is not so much in downloading a video, I just want to be able to my Amazon Prime videos on my Linux computer at a better resolution than 720p.)
I used results from this Github search page (especially pywidevine) a while back to make a Hulu downloader in Go which I eventually had to remove: https://github.com/chris124567/hulu
I wasn't really a part of this scene but there appears to be some sort of weird competition among people involved in writing this kind of software so occasionally device keys would leak when they tried to get at each other which was great for me because it meant I didn't have to extract keys from a phone or NVIDIA shield or anything annoying like that.
There are relatively easy ways to download L3 content, but they are not as common because higher resolutions are available on illegal streaming sites and torrents. These sites break hardware Widevine or use other attacks to get the material.
For professional content, there is simply not much demand to develop a user-friendly way to break L3 widevine, as the market is already served by reasonably convenient illegal streaming sites and torrents that allow for higher quality video.
What they care about is you wasting their bandwidth. For an ad-supported video streaming site, bandwidth is normally more expensive than revenue - Google only manages to make it just about work because they have probably the worlds cheapest bandwidth due to being able to bully ISP's into peering with them for free. (they don't let you peer with Google for just Google Search but not youtube).
All these throttling measures are simply trying to reserve most of the bandwidth for real users, not people scraping all the content.
They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later.
Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.
Anyway, when they start delivering ads in-band, the next step for blockers is to identify that first keyframe in the player by using a pool of shared signatures, right? So then player clients will need adblock plugins which will have a sizeable signature distribution infra and grief for clients.
Then the anti-blocker might begin adding, per-play instead of per-video, a pixel or something to throw off the signatures, massively increasing THEIR video distribution infra. Ad infinitum?
AI controlled adblocker is the end game!
ah yes, AAI (Artificial-AI) AKA I (Intelligence), or "Crowdsourcing" if you're looking to use an older buzzword. I do think there's a few models trained on sponsorblock already, but they're not great.
I think Twitch users tend to watch on their computer mostly? And I think Twitch viewers are more techy so they would be more likely to have ad blockers.
I have no data on any of this. I'm just throwing shit at the wall.
Edit: Or make them unskippable?
Many VCRs could do that, and stop/start recording to skip ads, as that was the only way to do it.
I suspect that google doesn't actually lose too many to blockers, as mobile accounts for a large fraction of youtube's traffic (and so far, not that many people actually use a hacked youtube client to view videos).
It's probably cheaper and faster to have a pre-encoded video, cached at the edge.
- Introduces a decryption step, which is slow
- Forces software video decoding, which is slow
- Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective
It would effectively push a significant portion of their user base off the platform while not being very effective in its goals.
It's not slow, after you decrypt the AES key, then you are using hardware AES instruction set supported by most CPUs currently.
So like 99.99% of use cases?
> but I promise you that you're not going to have a good time if you try to play back multiple high bitrate videos on slightly older hardware (think HTPC).
That could be the case, not disagreeing here, if you use old hardware, have multiple high bitrate videos and multiple streams at once but this is specialized niche example.
No it doesn't. Heck, forcing software decoding is actually one of the ways to force Widevine down to lower protection levels on general purpose hardware.
> - Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective
It's not fullproof but it would certainly make tools to bypass it clearly illegal in most of the world.
There are efficacy reasons for not doing it on a backend level, but Google has required anything that wants YouTube to support Widevine for a very, very long time now.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...
If you're using a PC with a Nvidia GPU, run `nvidia-smi dmon -s u` and start playing a random Youtube video in Chrome. You'll notice how dec% moves from 0% to at least 2%. Pause, and start playing Widevine protected video and notice how dec% stays at 0% because decoding is happening on the CPU.
> It's not fullproof but it would certainly make tools to bypass it clearly illegal in most of the world.
Good luck, copyright infringement is already illegal and yet that hasn't stopped it from being widespread. Tools and techniques to bypass Widevine L3* are widely known and available (yes, even on GitHub).
I was being generous in my previous comment. In reality, deployment of Widevine L3* should be shunned at least as much as Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. It's completely ineffective in protecting content, it burns unnecessary CPU cycles multiplied by (potentially) billions of users, and significantly degrades user experience.
Even Widevine L1* is ineffective in practice. Techniques to bypass it aren't available to the average Joe, but of course there are groups that will download, decrypt, and re-upload the newest 4K streaming releases to torrent trackers within an hour of them appearing on streaming services.
*edit: Mixed up L3 and L1
It's because Widevine have embedded decoder into its lib and its using CPU instructions but from user perspective it's not a huge change on modern CPUs as most have specialized instructions to handle decoding of H264 etc.
> Widevine L1* is ineffective in practice. Techniques to bypass it aren't available to the average Joe, but of course there are groups that will download, decrypt, and re-upload the newest 4K streaming releases to torrent trackers within an hour of them appearing on streaming services.
There are no "Techniques to bypass it", the only way currently to get L1 streams is to use legit hardware keys from some devices, on which you can exploit secure enclave/extract HW keys.
There are no "instructions to decode H264", there is dedicated hardware acceleration like Intel QSV and AMD VCN, but these gets bypassed just like Nvidia's decoding acceleration from my previous example. All of this is trivially observable, playing back DRM-protected video wastes an obscene amount of resources, relatively speaking.
From user perspective you'll notice stuttering, unusually high CPU usage, dropped frames and more, especially once you try to play multiple videos at once.
> There are no "Techniques to bypass it", the only way currently to get L1 streams is to use legit hardware keys from some devices
That's exactly what I meant. Being pedantic over my choice of words isn't very productive.
For L3 you are just using SIMD/vector instructions compiled for specific platform, so they are specialized CPU instructions (not general use) that help with decoding. And L3 is mostly now 720p and 1080p low bitrate on majority of streaming services that people use, you would need to have VERY old hardware to not be able to use it. I've been watching 720p/1080p h264 videos 15 years ago with only CPU decoding without ANY issues, most of the world did. So that's just not an issue. If we are talking about L1 then you have hardware acceleration so your point is invalid in that case.
> From user perspective you'll notice stuttering, unusually high CPU usage, dropped frames and more, especially once you try to play multiple videos at once.
Yeah because 99% of people are playing multiple widevine videos at once on their 20 years old hardware... come on.
> That's exactly what I meant. Being pedantic over my choice of words isn't very productive.
Im not being pedantic, you are not bypassing a lock in a door with a key, don't you? "Hey honey lets bypass our neighbour door lock using his key so we can enter his house" No one says things like that. If you meant what I meant then you just used wrong words to describe that. Your choice of words have different meaning which isn't very productive.
It also paints a very big target on Widevine Level 3's back.
But ultimately it's just a financial equation. What Google are losing from ad blocking isn't quite worth pulling the WV lever yet, but given it has clearly become enough to take softer measures and the pressure they are likely under from music labels I expect a wider rollout will happen in the next few years.
If I were to predict it will probably initially be "any video containing label music or studio clips picked up by content ID", and maybe an opt in tag for other creators at first. They're the ones that are much more useful for monetisation anyway, and you don't lose all your CDN benefits at once.