Hacker News Reader

Comment by hapticmonkey | Hacker News Reader

The irony here is that despite all these DRM efforts, piracy groups upload 4K HDR (or Dolby Vision) atmos mkv files within hours anyway.

Meanwhile watching these shows the legal way on unsupported DRM chain gives you 720p SDR with worse audio.

View on HN

This irony already existed in the good old DVD age. If you bought one legally you had to sit through several unskippable videos, usually also one about piracy, before the movie starts. If you had pirated that same movie would play immediately, so the user experience was better.

Back in the day you could use AnyDVD to skip all the pre-movie cruft.

assuming you were playing on a computer.

Also, most DVD players allowed you to hit stop-stop-play to skip directly to the movie.

They don't even need to deal with screen recording which this DRM is trying to protect against either. Just find a device that supports the highest playback resolution and steal the data right off the bus.

They thought of that. HDCP is supposed to prevent this by encrypting the video signal all the way to the playback device.

Yeah, but the HDCP keys were cracked over 10 years ago, and there are plenty of Chinese-made devices that defeat it.

They were cracked several times, but HDCP has a revocation/rotation mechanism so it doesn't really change anything.

In 2010, an HDCP master key was leaked, allowing anyone to generate an infinite number of valid new HDCP devices. This has made HDCP useless for stopping piracy for the past 15 years. All it's done since then is add another point of failure between people's electronics and their displays.

According to wikipedia, they released a non-backwards compatible update in 2013, which presumably fixes this.

Wonder how many people lost the ability to play ~~their content~~ the content they were licensing when they released that update, and had to buy new hardware because it was no longer supported.

I believe these piracy groups arent hijacking the HDMI signal. They're cracking the Widevine DRM chain to grab the audio and video data from the stream and repackage it into an mkv file.

The way the groups typically achieve rips from streaming services is by using compromised Widevine L1 capable devices, and straight up extracting out the keys. This ends up in a dance of getting new devices when they eventually get blacklisted.

not even hours later in most cases. these anti-theft measures will block the random individual who wants to make a clip out of a movie but won't stop anyone actively pirating.

It's wild to me that these guys still try this hard with DRM given that obvious reality. Like, I get that streaming services aren't just shipping an MP4 file that you can right-click and hit Save As. But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?

>But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?

Even if making 3M screenshots to extract the video isn't a viable ripping strategy, it's still less work to block all capture APIs than it is to figure out which methods you want to block, and make sure that implementation is airtight.

That's why I pirate everything. Originally I tried purchasing music files (iTunes) with the hope of it supporting musicians I liked. When it was a lesser, hindered experience, I switched back to pirating everything, still do, and always will.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com