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Comment by daveoc64 | Hacker News Reader

The DRM clearly does work in preventing "casual piracy" - where average users do things like downloading a file and keeping it forever (even after cancelling a subscription) or copying the file to a friend.

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Video streaming hasn't been "a file" in a long time. HLS et al download little snippets at a time, adjusting to current bandwidth circumstances, typically with video and audio separate, etc. Even without DRM, the average user couldn't "download a file" from Netflix.

Depends on what tools you give the average user.

A simple GUI wrapper around something like yt-dlp or ffmpeg would suffice for downloading DRM-free HLS videos.

As a concrete example, try

  yt-dlp --format english_192-English+bestvideo https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2020/10655/3/45C0E27F-A3BA-416D-B037-9BEE7466C11F/master.m3u8

Note that --format is only required (to get the best available version) because yt-dlp appears to rely only on metadata present in the supplied .m3u8 file to determine which stream is "best", and no such metadata appears for the audio streams in this example.

For details on what yt-dlp knows about each candidate stream when attempting to choose the best, see

  yt-dlp --list-formats https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2020/10655/3/45C0E27F-A3BA-416D-B037-9BEE7466C11F/master.m3u8

This would presumably not be a problem for our hypothetical "Netflix DLP.app", which could rely on whatever convention Netflix uses to indicate stream quality to its own clients when choosing streams, rather than falling back to sensible defaults for arbitrary HLS input.

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