Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Has the DRM for Chrome been cracked yet? It seems that having the complete data flow from the server sent packets through to the displayed data would make it relatively easy to work back and crack it sufficiently to make saving drm-ed streams to a local compressed video format possible.

Obviously you could use a modified video driver or grab the data from the actual display - the problem with that would be speed and data size.

Presumably the data stream of the compressed video is in memory at some point in the process and could be sniffed?

IF it's been cracked doesn't it show the futility of applying DRM in the first place?

View on HN

Nobody cares about cracking Widevine to extract 4 Mbps Netflix streams when Blu-ray rips are already available on the Pirate Bay. But if someone does crack it, Google will release a Chrome "security update" that makes it just different enough to make the crack not work, they'll tell Hollywood everything is fine, and the process will repeat until one side gets bored (see iTunes).

I thought Netflix was creating content now that isn't available through other streams; perhaps I'm mistaken I don't use it.

they are creating it, and it's being shared on torrent sites. DRM is effectively useless.

Everyone already knows that DRM is futile. But if you don't have DRM, you won't get Hollywood onboard for digital distribution.

So, we just smile, and nod, and say, "My, that's quite a lovely DRM setup you have", and it doesn't stop anyone from getting anything for free that they want. We just don't acknowledge that too loudly in public.

Seems like an absurd waste of time for so many people to be involved in implementing this.

So it goes.

I've always assumed movies were watermarked, so we know who owned the copy that was cracked. It could be powerful: If a unique identifier is embedded in every copy, it could track the origin down to the theater room or down to the watcher.

https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-mpaa-knows-where-movies-are...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com