The L1 device key they posted was already revoked earlier today. The tools themselves might continue to work for a while longer with an appropriate non-revoked key depending on how much services want to change up their APIs.
I can't see them changing up their APIs in any meaningful way. It'd seem kind of pointless to me. At the end of the day, if you're exposing something on the internet, then it won't take a huge amount of time for people to reverse engineer how web clients interact with the server.
Main game should be rotating the L1 keys. I don't know about L2 keys, but rotating L3 keys seems like a lost cause to me, some dude made a Chrome extension that can extract them.
Some theorise that Microsoft's Pluton/TPM antics with Windows 11 are a ploy to bring L1-style keys to the desktop.
You can't really "rotate" L1 keys without breaking HD playback on millions of old vulnerable devices and pissing off a ton of legitimate customers in the process. A hardware vulnerability can't be fixed with a software update. Instead, nowadays when a key is leaked usually Google just revokes the key of the unique device it was extracted from and not the entire model. But major streaming services often blacklist or limit playback quality on known compromised models.
As for L1 on desktop, Google did announce exactly that [1], but TPM would be likely too weak for that, so maybe something like Intel ME would be used. But so far there's no evidence of them actually rolling anything like that out. So for now if you want hardware DRM on desktop you have to use Edge or native Windows 10 apps with PlayReady DRM.
And about the APIs, streaming services do sometimes change up APIs, make old app versions stop working, etc., but often things work with no or minimal changes even years later. They do have to be careful not to break compatibility with all of their own apps across multiple platforms as well.
Widevine is completely broken ever since Nvidia Tegra devices were irreparably compromised due to a boot ROM bug. You can just pull the L1 key from any one of them, and Google can't mass revoke the entire device class since it would screw over a ton of legitimate users.
(I don't know the details of how to dump the keys, I just know it's possible by definition given the security loss on that platform, and I'm sure some people have tooling for this somewhere)
Well, what they did to Nvidia Tegra devices is either downgrade them to L3, or revoke them and issue a new L1 key for them. OTA updates patched something, but a hardware flaw can't be patched fully with a software update.
However, most people nowadays are simply exploiting phones and tablets with old vulnerable MSM chips, there are a lot more of those to choose from. Usually what Google does now is when someone publicly leaks a compromised device key, they revoke the unique key of that specific device but not the whole model. However, sometimes streaming services (especially Amazon, Netflix and Disney+) may still choose to blacklist an entire vulnerable model and limit it to SD playback.
IIRC Kanopy just uses L3, for which there was an existing Chrome extension based leak. The key is necessarily in main memory for L3, it’s just a matter of finding it.
ish. The link to Github prods Microsoft to either take it down, or leave it up, and we'll have to see what they do. Content producers aren't going to be happy about this and are going to put pressure on Microsoft to do something about it, same as with youtube-dl.
Yesterday's article links to this github page too and includes a screen shot of the related repos (possibly because they don't expect them to survive). Plus it's linked several times in the HN discussion.
If you try and screenshot or use something like OBS on Windows you just get a black box on top of the media content. Is that not the case using that solution?
the reason why linux users get lower bitrate versions of media is that companies with a bit too much power decided to try to abuse the entirety of the PC world in order to slow the efforts of a very few pirates.
it's a stupid untenable unwinnable arms-race that only results in poorer user experience and less and less user-liberty and choice across the board in order to slightly inconvenience a few bad actors, not stop them.
Meanwhile a 10 dollar video dongle setup and a pirated Windows copy will easily meet most DRM requirements and still allow for easy piracy.
These efforts (DRM schemes) are useless and anti-human, and most research from the 90s until now indicates that DRM enforcement does little for profit except for those that sell DRM solutions -- and that piracy increases social effect of released media; generally aiding sales and profitability.
It’s actually to control the manufacturers of legitimate hardware and software involved in playing back media. They know that anyone who wants to can pirate their stuff, and they’re not going to go after them. But legit companies can’t just sell HDMI splitters, capture cards, etc. that strip DRM.
DRM is to control, that's about it. Whether it's ownership or whatever is already irrelevant. For example DRM can be used to control the market (as an anti-competitive measure).
I'm not the happiest of dudes, that's for context, but I have this feeling that people are hiding something.. binging tv shows all the time, new video games all the time, waiting for the new console. It seems like a neverending chase of new shallow fun they don't even really like. Maybe simpler but deeper moments would improve things.
When they can't communicate with the "secured execution environment" they fall back to the lower quality stream. It requires some stuff on the OS level to make it work which Linux doesn't have (or at least, Linux browsers don't support properly outside of Chrome OS).
For Sky (satellite tv) in the UK you have an online version. As soon as you even open the screenshot app it closes the stream. If you try and airplay to your tv from laptop, it overlays a big grey box. It’s anti consumer at this point. Anyone who wants to capture and redistribute is ultimately going to find a way.
> Is it still "piracy" if you pay for the service, but torrent the video in question in higher quality?
Of course it is. Whenever you have these question, just ask what you think a mustache twirling characture of a villain would do and you will have your answer.
could you perhaps give a short guide on how this is done? i have plenty of programming experience but simply have never tried my hand at this. a linux solution would be nice
The UI is also terrible. I always end up on the marketing page for a show and have to figure out how to be redirected to the page that actually lets me stream.
I for one thank our piracy overlords who endlessly work to make every form of content (optionally) freely available in high quality.
I pay for plenty of subscription services that finally figured out how to make content as easy and accessible as piracy but there will forever exist legitimate gaps where “just pay for it” is simply insufficient (geo being #1, silly copyright owners #2, etc etc).
The other article mentions this dump is a result of a Discord dispute and we randos seem to be the winners. And who knows it might inspire others to get into the scene.
Amazon and Apple lure you in but many shows it seems need to be rented or bought. How much disposable income do these companies think the average Joe has to spend? the answer seems to be $10 to $20 to rent or "buy" movies. Which you never own a physical copy of. They seem to be out of touch with reality.
I stupidly “rented” a copy of Apollo 13 for $3.99 and being a long movie fell asleep halfway through. I came back to watch it a few days later and found the rental had “expired” in 2-3
days and was required to pay again to continue watching.
Sometimes I think these people
live in an alternate universe. last time I did that.
I'm guessing it was something like a jumper over an AGC (auto gain control) circuit VCRs use to avoid saturating the tape, since the MacroVision mechanism was basically to intermittently blast out-of-frame lines with too-intense brightness, which has no effect on a typical TV, but does make the AGC clamp down so the whole frame is intermittently too dark.
It had to do with screwing around with the vertical blanking interval. TV's had no issue with it, but VCR's would fail.
Cable TV "scrambling" was similar back in the day as well. It wasn't so much that the signal was "encrypted" as it was "modified" in such a way it wouldn't play on a normal tv anymore. Over time they could modify the scrambling technique so that any box you did buy to descramble a signal would be worthless in a few months when they changed the method.
The only way to really descramble Pay TV was to be an electronics guy who could reconstruct the video signal. Usually you needed the minimum of an oscilloscope to analyze the timing signals, and then the ability to create a circuit to fix it -- it wasn't exactly easy.
In the early 80s where I lived, there was some kind of filler that, once removed, allowed you to watch HBO. It was housed in a green box exterior to each house, where the cable left the street and entered your house.
I don’t know if it was a filter really. It was just an electronic component of some kind that screwed on/off.
When you ordered HBO, someone visited your property to remove this thing.
Back when TV stations were broadcast on frequencies, it would be as simple as a notch filter to block out that particular frequency that HBO/Skinemax was on.
Ah yes, crude indeed. We used to cut a small piece of payer, around an inch. Then fold it into a little square and place it inside that little empty square space on the front of the cassette tape. That's all it took to subvert it.
By the way this worked just as well for audio cassettes tape.
As sidpatil says, that's a write-protect tab. If you bought blank VHS tapes and recorded something you could rip the tab off to stop you or someone else accidentally overwriting, say, your wedding video. Of course, all retail tapes were tab free.
And you could simply use masking tape to bypass it, because it was only designed to stop unintentional overwriting, not intentional overwriting.
I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.
>I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.
Now that I think about it, I've never gotten a Blockbuster/Hollywood Video rental that was damaged in this manner. This method of property destruction never even crossed my mind. It seems so obvious given how easy it is to disable write protection. Was I just lucky or were people more considerate back then?
Just to clarify, I meant retail tapes I (read: my parents) owned. I never overwrote rented tapes.
I recall rental shops would have rewind machines, but I don't remember them ever checking the content of the tape.
Maybe people were just considerate. Maybe the threat of having a whopping fine when the the next unhappy renter returned and complained about the tape, causing the shop to check the rental history, dissuaded such behaviour.
Or, maybe people respected the institution. I used to really like video stores as they offered affordable access to entertainment and were just nice places to visit.
Yes this used to be a fun hobby. All my favorite films were TV runs and i'd have to time the stop button so I minimized any commercials ending up on the recording. Same goes for recording audio on the Radio onto tapes. It was a simpler time back then.
Pirate if you want (and can) but let’s not keep persisting the myth that these companies are being unreasonable. The average family paid 100 for cable and on top kept buying dvds for 10-20 a pop. These streamers are just trying to replicate that level of spending (and for the most part, failing).
probably it was the average family but not the median family, which of course means that the high end dream consumer family was paying much more than that.
Man, I grew up lower/lower-middle class, about 30-40% of the median family income, and we had the $80/month cable package plus went to Blockbuster for 5+ rentals per week
If you're watching 5+ rental films per week, when do you have the time to watch anything on the cable package?
Sounds like a ridiculous waste of money to me, but then I'm firmly at the other end of the spectrum. I finally cancelled my £30 a month TV package, I've not rented a film for over 10 years, and would buy blu-rays or DVDs only for things I thought I'd watch more than once, or where buying them was cheaper than renting (common in the case of box sets).
It's not particularly difficult to imagine a family situation where that would happen - although perhaps not nowadays when there is a much broader entertainment landscape:
1. traditional patriarchal setup, male parent works, mother at home, watches some cable during the day.
2. Kids come home from school / kindergarten at 4, watch some cable.
3. Eat dinner at 7, watch movie.
4. kids go to bed at 9, folks watch cable for couple hours.
5. Kids at age where they have their own tastes, 3 kids, buy 2 movies for adults 3 movies for kids or variations thereof.
I mean obviously the time to do this stuff is a waste of time, but often families waste the time because parents are burned out from various things and the easiest way to get through the time is to give everyone media to consume and forget about them.
Yeah, it probably wasn't the most efficient use of my family's limited budget, but that's how it goes
Nowadays I'm a big /r/financialindependence guy, and I was shocked recently to find out that a lot of my lower-middle class friends and family are constantly ordering food with those ripoff delivery apps. It's completely insane IMO to pay $50 for cold, soggy food that should have cost 25, but I guess people do it. They buy new top-end smartphones every year or two, lease cars, and do all sorts of other ridiculous money-wasting stuff.
No, it wasn’t the median either. That would be the high end of a cable subscriber setup in the 90s and 00s. About the only way to go above it is constant on demand rentals and PPV fights.
They had a moat that let them gouge consumers for years, but the moat dried up and now they're throwing a tantrum because they can't continue their outdated and overpriced business model.
TL;DR: They are being for the most part perfectly reasonable, and the rest of this comment suggests why that is.
Yes, and average cost and risk exposure that family sees is higher now, wages down or flat.
First order realization:
I've long maintained most families have a fixed entertainment budget. They have their monthly nut to crack, and entertainment falls into that somewhere, with a little flexibility here and there.
Say that's a few hundred dollars. Might be $200 or less, depending.
The various entertainment forms compete for those dollars, and sometimes compete to stretch the amount a little too. Something really special might displace some other spend, or warrant a draw from savings, use of credit, whatever.
This was my experience bringing up a family through the 90's and 00's. I had a few hundred bucks for entertainment, special spends, and that was basically it, unless there were very compelling reasons, say getting a new game console, or special event that warranted some other adjustment to allow for greater entertainment spending.
There is a near infinite demand for entertainment! Maybe not infinite, but it's a lot higher than the budgets would fund at the generally accepted market prices. This demand is both material, in that real, liquid dollars are there to satisfy the demand, as well as demand not backed by liquid dollars. (the latter being an opportunity to build relevance and sell through later, whether that is recognized as marketing efforts tend to be is another discussion)
Second order realizations:
The entertainment spend is made each month and every month overall, and that's true whether there is massive piracy, or not.
Additionally, content that is pirated hard also earns well. Content that is lightly pirated also tends to not do well.
Entertainment forms compete. Video game vs movie vs whatever. There is a little flexibility, but overall the dollars go where the value perception is highest. Basically max entertainment per dollar. How people see this is all over the map too.
Pricing up can be the right move, as can pricing down. Depends on value perception, relevance, and how that stacks up to the entertainment budgets out there and the different forms.
Third order:
Piracy =/= a loss.
Infringment is weird. It's not theft in that no one is denied property or rights. It's all about people doing or experiencing something they were not supposed to.
There is value created via infringement too. A lot of the sales opportunity boils down to personal relevance. When a content creator is irrelevant, they must somehow reach potential consumers, who then become opportunities for income.
Infringement builds relevance the same as licensed users do, and it all works the same, personal recommendations, sharing, all that stuff people do in order to trade on and participate in culture and relevance applies when people use the content whether it's infringing use or not.
All this suggests a strategy allowing infringement as investment in relevance which will deliver returns in the form of high value license rental or longer term media entitlement purchases later. Higher quality, greater availbility, as in "I'll buy this and share it with the others on my subscription.
Many people subscribe and share with parents, friends, family making good use of both the profile capability and device allowances. This is "infringement" in a similar sense to piracy, but different in that it's not a high priority for enforcement.
Finally, pricing / piracy / competition with other media forms tend to make pricing self-correct and settle in to maxima. There is a right price to capture more value with material demand backed by dollars. Too high, and other forms will garner more of the entertainment dollars, or other works in the same form may do that too. Too low, and value perception may be impacted as well as leaving money on the table.
People used to buy DVDs or blu-rays for $10-20. But of all the ones I have, there's probably only a handful that have been watched more than once.
That's what the renting system is built off. The fact that most people only watch a film once.
I couldn't care less about whether I own a copy of a movie. All I care is that I can watch it when I want to watch it. That's a different issue though, not one of disposable income, but of licensing and content availability.
I don't understand why the major streaming services don't have the good Christmas movies. They all have these new "made for TV" quality awful movies they push really hard.
It's A Wonderful Life
A Christmas Carol
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer (old animated version)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (old animated version)
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Home Alone
Miracle On 34th Street
Elf
White Christmas
There's tons of GREAT Christmas movies. On any given Christmas season Netflix might have 1-2 of the greats. Same for Amazon Prime.
I'm confused because it seems like an easy win for these streaming services. Is licensing them really so expensive?
Imagine you re a tv station with a license. I think you re ready to MURDER to keep some of these exclusive, must be their last easy butter these days.
Last time I watched tv I did the whole vpn + american tv package thing and I just was appalled at the sheer amount of unwatchable content (ads)... I pity these things, how did it even work in the first place?
There has never been a better time to be a consumer of home media than today. I wouldn't trade the (legal) access I have to essentially any film or TV show I can imagine wanting to watch for any conceivable bookshelf full of DVDs. The Blockbuster Video and Comcast Premium Channel Package era was no more cost effective, and things just get worse as you go further back in time.
I used to live next to a DVD rental place that was 1€ per day. Often I would return the movie the same night. I used to watch 1-2 movies per month. Nowadays I have Netflix for what, 12€ a month? I still watch maybe one movie a month. So I guess I pay ~10x for not having to step outside?
The fact that you only want to watch 1 movie out of their catalog is irrelevant. I do not find their content worth it, so I do not pay Netflix.
I find it better to just rent a movie from an online provider if/when I want to watch one, since I rarely watch. If I want to watch it over and over, I buy it (kids’ movies).
I sure did watch a lot more stuff when I lived a block away from Scarecrow Video, one of the last great video rental stores. With shelves full of stuff that had been curated, with staff notes here and there calling out the occasional film.
Theoretically the streaming services are more convenient, they're all lurking right there on my PS4, but... I never really touch the things.
> the (legal) access I have to essentially any film or TV show I can imagine
My imagination runs amok..
There is a Disney+ but https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Dog_Lost is not on it. Nor is any other Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color or whatever name the anthology ran on television since 1954 but to me this is the only one that matters, what can I do, I love corgis :)
The Mists Of Avalon mini series from 2001 is nowhere to be found.
Many, many movies have been made out of the novel The Count of Monte Cristo but what many consider the closest to the book, Robert Vernay's version from 1954 with no less than Jean Marais in the lead is impossible to find these days. This was Vernay's second Cristo movie, the vision he always wanted to make but couldn't in 1943 when he made the first. But no one knows of it because streaming, DVD, whatever you want just doesn't exist. Rare Films And More sourced a high quality 16mm print (it's in German) and digitized it and wrote English subtitles for it -- but it's a pirated copy, I don't think it entered the public domain yet.
About your Disney+ example, I do wonder why it seems that a lot of content like that isn't available on the platform.
Are there streaming rights issues? Are they holding back content to drip feed content drops for as long as they can? Did they determine that some content isn't worth digging up the tapes and preparing for streaming?
Many cartoon shorts from the 30s and 40s with blackface and other offensive material has been edited. I can’t find references right now, but have noticed this personally.
That’s certainly seems to be true for Kundun (1997).
The Chinese Communist Party wasn’t happy the film was made in the first place and would probably ban Disney from their market if it was available for streaming in the USA.
It’s quiet, limited sale on DVD is still tolerated.
Disney has always made a big deal out of the "Disney Vault"—back in the VHS days, they tried to replicate the scarcity of waiting until a movie was showing in a local theater by arbitrarily refusing to sell copies of some of their movies for years at a time. I believe they continued this practice with DVDs and Blu-Rays, though not nearly as widely.
This seems likely to be part of the same philosophy.
Amazon should offer an NFT of a physical copy for each streamed movie you buy. Then they could also sell that physical copy to another consumer. It’s a win-win!
If they’re out of touch with reality, there will be a price adjustment or they’ll fail. Something tells me they’ve done the research to determine what the average person will pay.
Looking at some newer films rentals are $4-$6 and “buying” $8-$15. Probably more for really new releases.
$4 for a rental isn’t bad compared to renting a VHS or DVD at Blockbuster a few years ago.
Compared to taking a few adults and kids to a movie theater, it’s a steal.
Its a few days because you can rent digitally just before you buy it. Back in the Hollywood Video days, you also had to make a special trip to the video store. Often this was done days in advance.
they count on you to price it against going to the movies and a lot of people (particularly families) choose to stay home and spend 1/5 to 1/10 what they would have spend going to the theater
I’ll admit I don’t understand how people can ethically pirate content. I dislike a lot of business models but I just don’t feel right calling them “silly” and looking for ways to take things I know I don’t have the right to take.
This is admittedly a small percentage corner case but there are people who are legitimately unable to access the content even if they want to and are willing/prepared to pay depending on their geographic location.
I pay for Prime and Netflix but I still often torrent shows from those services because of the stupid widevine drm level restrictions on quality/resolution. I guess you could say that’s not piracy then but I’m sure I’ve got things downloaded that are no longer on their catalogues so it’s hard to know.
When Netflix had 70% of the media content you’d want I was very happy to be a paying customer but now I’m mostly a begrudgingly paying customer as the cost goes up the the library shrinks. Everyone wants their piece of the pie right now and I don’t doubt they’re going to consolidate to some extent after the winners and losers are decided but it sucks ass that the ecosystem has become so fragmented.
Also having the raw files makes it easier for me to sync up watching with my fiancé who is currently abroad. She pays for Netflix in the UK but even when both libraries have the same content the UK version often has different intro credits which makes syncing difficult.
I guess the overall crux of my issue with the business model is that I can pay $15 a month to access X service and get hundreds/thousands of movies and shows or Something like $20 a season for a show which could end up being hundreds of dollars for just one show. The economics really just break down for me since they price owning a digital copy against physical. Ironically physical copies will end up getting discounted at retail because things have to move but the digital copies won’t. Also in many cases even owning a copy digitally doesn’t give you the ability to dictate where you use it/give you a raw file.
I just want things to work the way I need them to, however that manifests and the only way to do that is with the video files themselves and any barrier or artifice between them is a problem.
As an example, I recently wanted to watch The West Wing. I pay for Netflix and Hulu already, but the show is only on HBO Max. OK, fine, I guess I'll pay for a month of HBO like I've done before to watch Game of Thrones.
Ok, uh, what's it called now? HBO Go? HBO Now? Oh, HBO Max, ok. I live in Japan now, so I'm region-blocked, great. Time to open the VPN. HBO already seems to know that server #1243 is a VPN, but server #849 works OK for now.
Ok, time to create an account. "Account with that email already exists"? Ok, so let's log in using my old HBO Go credentials. Looks like there's some kind of account migration problem and the account is stuck in the "account verification" phase but I can't get it to send me a new verification email. There's a little pop-up chat window for the support team, let's try it. Three separate support agents and thirty minutes later, I have a working verification email. But my payment information is out of date. OK, let's update it. HTTP 505 error. Wonderful.
Ok, that's enough: Type "West Wing season 1 episode 1" into Google. Thirty seconds later I'm watching in full HD and there's popcorn in the microwave.
You are absolutely right it's the least draining part of the streaming experience. First you have to look if it's on a streaming service or where you can buy it in the quality you look for, is it like many sport events even available in my country, does the device or browser use the right drm or do I just get the 720p version, is it just the dub and not OV. Why are there no forced subtitles? What my Mac and Windows PCs can't play Blurays? What no Dolby passthrough? Your comment is just ignorant to the problem itself.
Your use of the word "take" is probably related to the disconnect. In copyright violations, the crime is copying. Usually "taking" has a different connotation than copying. (I'd be mad if you took my bike, but if you copied it then I'd just be happy for you.)
Some people have a looser coupling between legality and morality than others, often because they disapprove of some laws (like the crime of sleeping under a bridge, or repairing your own tractor…)
I subscribe to some streaming services and that's all I use, but consider this: copyright grants ownership over a fraction of your mind without your consent. Once you've seen a show or heard a song, whether you chose to or not, those neurons are permanently allocated to that show or song. How is that ethical?
Moreover, the current state of copyright gives a few large corporations enormous power to shape our culture. The stories of our time should belong to us well before we're dead, but copyright lasts well past one human lifetime.
And as others have mentioned, sometimes there is no price you can pay to legally watch something, for reasons that are truly "silly" to anyone who isn't profiting from the international balkanization of distributors. Like the Great British Baking Show on Netflix: it's actually Great British Bake Off, and you can't watch the original in the US. Good luck finding anywhere to watch Grand Designs (from any locale) in the US without ads, no matter how much you'd be willing to pay. There are many examples of shows from UK, Australia, and New Zealand that aren't available in the US at all, and probably vice versa, let alone the rest of the world.
> I dislike a lot of business models but I just don’t feel right calling them “silly” and looking for ways to take things I know I don’t have the right to take.
How do you know if you have a right to take them?
If it's according to the law, then your ethical stance changes with the wind. E.g., you would believe you have a right to derive new music by taking a chord progression from your favorite song, but not by taking the melody. Worse, the rich history in the U.S. of building new songs out of old chord progressions was preferred to taking melodies chiefly because it was illegal to take copyrighted melodies and put new chord changes to them. So your ethical stance would change depending on whether you happen to be reading the notes that are stacked vertically on the page (i.e., a chord), or horizontally across it (a melody). That's ethically incoherent.
If it's according to your own ethical stance, you have to explain what that stance is. E.g., are you ethically opposed to circumventing a company's API to download content in a way they didn't intend? Are you opposed to someone accepting a flash drive from a friend that has their friend's favorite music on it? Someone pasting their big fat head on indy content and reposting as a "reaction video" to steal views? I happen to think these aren't all covered by the same ethical rule, but maybe they are.
> How do you know if you have a right to take them?
If someone says “This is $5.” And if I don’t pay them $5, then I feel like I don’t have a right to it. If it takes paragraphs of text to explain why despite not paying them $5 I have a right to take it, then I feel like I don’t have a right to take it.
For me its quite simple. Just the other day I really wanted to watch Anthony Bourdains No Reservations. Where I am right now I can't do:
1. Stream
2. Purchase
3. Rent
4. Catch on tv
5. Subscribe to an american streaming service using a vpn (requires an american credit card, and while there are services that allow to get a pseudo prepaid card the costs of it all are huge)
Not just "silly", many are genuinely user-hostile. I have legitimate copies of games that I'd rather not touch as against pirated copies of the same games (mostly from Rockstar and Ubisoft) that provide an objectively superior, garbage-free experience.
Same goes with Movies and shows. I have Netflix and PrimeVideo subscriptions but the overall quality they provide is trash as against 4K ripped HEVC releases with 10bit audio and better subtitles which you can watch in whatever player you want.
Remember when the Covenant Kodi plugin was thriving and the media companies hadn't waged legal-nuclear war against that sort of thing yet? It finally felt like the future: I could watch anything, in any language it was available in, right now, in my chosen quality, with automatic subtitle downloads if you want that sort of thing.
I would pay good money for a service that could do that legitimately, but no, we can't have that.
Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy. It's impossible. Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible. They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.
Piracy offers us all the works of humanity, everything ever created. These copyright holders can barely manage to display episodes in the correct order in their little streaming service user interfaces.
> in the correct order in their little streaming service user interfaces.
And in the correct format [1]. Made me just want to pirate Seinfeld so that I could watch it under the proper conditions, but I'm too lazy for that as Netflix is just a few clicks away.
I would love to see compulsory licensing schemes for audio and video streaming like they have for radio broadcasts. Maybe allow 1 or 2 years of exclusivity, but anything else is fair game to stream by anyone as long as they pay the license fee.
Some people would love to compensate the original creator. And some people would be willing to pay to be able to easily consume content legally.
The problem is that the current state of affairs is fragmented and not set up in a way that ensures that I as a consumer can be sure that I can consume said content again tomorrow.
I pay for access but am not ensured that the content I like is going to be available.
I start to listen an album via Spotify. I buy it via iTunes if I continue to listen it. If I really like that album that much, I find a lossless copy.
If I can buy a lossless copy from the original artist, I go that route first. RadioHead's leading the pack on that. I have a 24bit wav album from them.
> Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy.
Music has proven that idea wrong. I'm part of a few private music trackers that came after oink and what.cd. They're much smaller today than they used to. Legal music streaming has made them all but obsolete for everyone but enthusiasts. They're maybe serving 200k people worldwide, if you include the language-specific ones from China, Korea etc.
Spotify alone has 172 million premium subscribers.
It's mostly three things according to my friends who use streaming services:
1) discovery: Spotify is great at giving you more of what you like, without you needing to manage your library
2) ease of access: No need to carry around a hard drive to have everything available
3) giant catalogue: to buy MP3s at that price and have a similar breadth and depth as Spotify (or rather: what you'd use of Spotify), you'd pay a lot more.
If you just want some tunes and are happy with what's very popular, you could also stream for free from Youtube.
Yeah, if you like popular music which is what the average person consumes. If I look up some less popular artist or even a soundtrack on spotify chances are it won't be there. About a year ago I tried it, found exactly one of the about 30 works I searched for. All the stuff that gets played on the radio is there, of course. It was an immensely disappointing experience. Why pay for this crap since I'll still have to resort to youtube or something to get what I want?
What I meant by competition is they won't be able to offer higher quality and availability. They will never achieve the ideal I proposed: everything humanity has ever created at the highest possible quality. They are of course masters at being just good enough for the average consumer. Honestly that bar is pretty low.
I will never forgive them for shutting what.cd down. I consider that a crime against humanity itself that vastly outweighs whatever little profits they thought they were losing.
Games and music seem to have managed to defeat piracy. And when it was just Netflix before the fragmentation and greed of the movie/tv content holders no one I knew downloaded.
They have, then came Epic Games store and we're back to exclusives.
If you want a really good example of where video games got it wrong in recent years: Metro Exodus was sold as a "pre-purchase" on Steam before it released for some time (at least a few months, could be a year). A few days before release it went exclusive on Epic Game store IIRC and you couldn't buy _or download_ it on steam anymore. After some well deserved outrage, people who pre-purchased on steam could play on steam, but you couldn't purchase it for about another year.
Metro: Exodus was the only title I pirated in the last 10 years because they took away the ability to purchase it (and I like the series and have the first two titles on steam, and I bought and read the books because of the first game).
> They have, then came Epic Games store and we're back to exclusives.
And that's why I'll never buy anything from them even if it's nice. I feel morally compelled to do my tiny part to let them (and every other steam competitor) go bust, to stave off exactly the fragmentation we see in the video streaming market.
Of course, there's always the possibility of Steam becoming evil and making all of us regret propping them up, but you know what? I'll have to live with it.
> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.
Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it:
I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care.
Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max even at their low offer of around $5/month for life, and it annoys me that I have two video streaming sites already.
I think it is because both Spotify and Apple Music are OK: they contain almost everything I want from commercial music, while the video streaming sites feels like an elaborate scam: pay just as much as I pay for Spotify to an increasing number of services where none of them are good.
I want creators to get paid, but I don't want to support scams, so being somewhat principled I only watch whatever I have on DVD + what is available on the services I subscribe to (and I'm planning to get rid of one) and the few that I bought from Apple.
I can clearly see why people pirate though and if I worked in law enforcement I'd probably do my best to work with something important and useful, not to support large scale scams.
Not in OP's shoes but maybe they used to enjoy the convenience of being able to just watch Friends on Netflix. Or maybe they login to their Netflix on an "un-approved" device such as an Ubuntu PC and Netflix deems this bad so they get capped to 480p video streaming. Or just maybe, whatever price is deemed appropriate for a NF subscription is no match for the volumes of content available on the other side of the high seas for free.
The scam is that it started out with Netflix being like Spotify, only even though I paid full price I couldn't see all content because I was in Norway.
Then more and more got pulled out and now if I want a full Spotify experience for video I need to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Warner, AppleTV and maybe a few more.
You pay for netflix yet you can't watch stuff you want. You search for a film and it shows up on the search autocomplete and yet it's not there. Why? Copyright bullshit nobody cares about.
Films that used to be in your list mysteriously disappear. You swear it was there but it's not. It's like netflix is gaslighting you. Sometimes you try to watch something only to be greeted by an ominous "last day to watch on netflix" notice. You thought you were paying for a subscription but it was really a long term rental that you have no idea when it expires. They simply take stuff away. Whenever something new shows up instead of being excited you now wonder how long it will take for them to take it away too. Cowboy Bebop? I wonder how long that's gonna last.
Whatever scraps and leftovers you do get is ruined by quality issues: extremely compressed encodes, shitty video player software, cropping, changes, sometimes they can't even get the episodes in the correct order which means I'd be watching it backwards. You now wonder if what you're watching on netflix is the best version. You now wonder if the netflix version is censored or altered in any way. I find myself searching for reddit discussions on a series to see if netflix screwed it up.
You entertain the notion of paying for other services as well but you discover their apps are even shittier and they still don't have what you want to watch. You remember facts such as amazon's non-existent customer service and the industry's tendency to profile you based on what you watch. You realize that paying money to these people is a lot like being in an abusive relationship.
I co-founded a company in 2006 which intended to do something very similar to this. We ran out of money when the economy collapsed in 2008. I’m still passionate about the idea, but it’s high-risk for a private corporation in the US to pull off.
> Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible
Netflix was kinda of that for a few years (2012-2015) before the rise of streaming services. Piracy was way down (P2P not indicative of the whole picture, but good enough), during that period. Then everyone decided to make their own platforms and started taking pieces of the pie from Netflix and here we are today, where you need at least 4-5 services to get access to half a dozen show you want to watch per year, as well as requiring a VPN service if you don't want to have less than 20% of the US library in a lot of countries.
Even before these tools doesn't really seem to affect the pirates. The rips on pirate sites (not that I've watched them!) are pretty flawless and they're out very quickly after the initial release to the streaming site.
The content companies can look for differences in how the tools work compared to how a legitimate client works, and block any requests for content that are formatted the way the tools do it.
Can you try ripping a Joe Rogan episode with your setup? His podcast introduces ads even if you pay and while yt-dlp worked for a while now they are encrypting with Widevine (for supposedly his podcast only).
To date I have not found a way to rip this other than recording the episode on Desktop. The main use case for me is that when I am driving, I hate when it randomly stops the podcast to talk about some underwear brand and it is hard to skip and not cause an accident. :)
Does this work for podcasts? Would you be able to try ripping a Joe Rogan episode with this app to test? They use widewine and so it breaks yt-dlp. They play ads even if you pay for a subscription.
Here is an example link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0DsunsN5MGI0CWwvuaxZdt
Does this work for podcasts? Would you be able to try ripping a Joe Rogan episode with this app to test? They use widewine and so it breaks yt-dlp. They play ads even if you pay for a subscription.
It’s about getting the best quality copy. You also don’t have to wait hours for it to capture, which is important in the pirate scene (being the first to upload).
> Does this allow you to download the videos without an account?
I’m sure some tools work but the in-built one in macOS (QuickTime) doesn’t. I was trying to capture a couple of seconds of video but all I got was a black screen.
I understand wanting to disable video capture but I’ve also noticed image capture being prevented in some cases.
DMCA would be a violation, but more importantly, it could potentially be argued that you are copying it to your hard drive permanently when you wouldn't need to have an archival copy.
It applies to all copies. Unless you have a blanket law like AHRA that absolves you or you're doing something covered by fair use, it's unauthorized. This has always been the case since before DMCA.
In your case, the likely reason is because the DRM is done in software and not hardware, making it easier to crack, and Disney as a policy avoids their highest resolution content going through software decoding.
Sounds like you really are not their target market. The primary money making target for Disney is people who watch it on their smart tv. Even if the average joe does decide to fire up their mac they won’t care if it’s not 4K.
It's not strictly anti-piracy, though the roots are in it. Consumers aren't the only source of requirements. It goes back to content protection deals Disney has cut for years and the reciprocity requirements.
I get the technical reasoning, but as a policy it makes no sense because the pirates are getting 4K anyway, and a paying customer is getting a degraded experience.
The usual then. Pirates never have to deal with DRM and sometimes their games perform better — I recall a story about an anti-copy mechanism slowing the game down for people who purchased it. Good stuff.
I spend a lot of money in indie stuff- games, music, docus, books written by young academics, programmers, etc. And then I get the same content through other means. The experience is much, much better.
I ensure that the "small" people benefit from my consumption- the people who will actually benefit from my $10/$20/$50. But I also have to keep my comfort and ease in mind.
The amazon app for Samsung TV's does not tell you if you already rented a movie or not, it just displays the price. Will someone here get this fixed? Its not worth even explaining why this is horrible.
Edit: If it was included with Prime and not for rent it would display "resume" or "play from beginning".
I never understand what pushes people to download Netflix/Disney media and share it on torrent sites.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad they do. But, what is the positive for them?
The negatives (angry copyright lawyers from one of the richest corporations) outweighs the positives (some clout on 1337x or Usenet or wherever these guys dump it)
> The challenge, kindness, compassion and the joy of sharing all come to mind.
I have been in some scene group chats and I can tell you that many "important" people there don't give a damn about the "spirit of sharing" and just do it for the fun of beating a challenge. They see the sharing of these tools/decryption keys as "throwing food scrapps to homeless people". Lots of ego-driven "I don't give a fuck about anyone" attitude in some groups.
(At least) two reasons. First, once you already made your own personal copy, and you already have your torrenting strategy in place, adding another torrent is basically as easy as just dropping it into a folder. Second, exchanging content. You upload shows X, Y and Z since you have them and hopefully you can get access to A, B, and C from someone else who happens to have them. Though, this is more prominent in private trackers and risker in public ones.
Probably the same reason people provide open source code for free at no monetary benefit to themselves (even when they probably should be charging money).
In these groups it's probably mostly driven by desire for internet fame/prestige, a sense of belonging, and competition with other pirate groups. But a lot of piracy I think comes from the spirit of sharing. No one paid all those people who uploaded their obscure Hawaiian music on what.cd and they probably didn't boost their ratio that much from them either. But they did it anyways, presumably out of a sense of community/giving back. (And yes I'm aware of the power law nature of uploads on private trackers but there are still plenty of people with a handful of uploads who can get a good enough ratio from just downloading and seeding but still upload occasionally anyways).
People do it for the lulz, money and some fartetched believes. The online groups are often tight knit communities of people with impresive skills who one-up each other on every chance they get. Most of them believe that they are absolutely private and operate in absolute anonymity, so there really is no risk or any negatives involved. So any positives (intl. news talking about you, hearing colleagues chat about your "work" at the office ... etc), far outweight that nothing (supposedly) could happen to you. Until of course the feds kick in your door and reveal some new tracking method you didn't even consider.
Not all content is available in all countries at all times.
I currently have this problem with Spotify + South Africa, where a bunch of music on my playlist is no longer available.. I do not care about their reasons. Pondering not renewing next year.
Who has time to program something like this? To be this good at making software but not employed making it? Or is this teams working in their spare time?
The saturation in digital/streaming video is simply out of control now.
I'm gonna buy Netflix, Amazon prime since it's free with prime anyway, and maybe just another one like Hulu on a subscription basis.
But no, I'm not gonna throw my dollars on every little platform out there like Disney+, HBO, Vudu, Fandango, and other crappy services from other companies just because some content I needed exists only there. Guys, if we look closely this is basically all back to TV Channels all over again.
So, no thank you. I'll keep pirating my content with a VPN.
What really bothers me is that if I watch a non-English film on Netflix or Amazon Prime, the subtitles are often garbage. Sometimes even English films have spelling mistakes and poor attempts to condense the dialogue.
With piracy, I have a choice of multiple subtitle providers.
Hmmm, haven't run into situations with bad subtitles on foreign films, I watched a few and they were decent. I thought there was good quality control. But I definitely agree on the absence of multiple choices and options when it comes to dialogue and subtitles
I’d be happy to pay for content if there was a cohesive interface to actually consume it. Alas, at the moment that interface is Plex and the various ‘*arr’s.
What surprised me is how quickly it felt like the consensus went from "DRM is evil" to "Neat, Netflix!". Same thing with privacy and anonymity online.
I have to imagine it's because the internet quickly filled with people not primed to be interested in those concerns and so they became popular in spite of the previous concerns.
Less like the boiling of the frog metaphor and more like they started boiling a mouse and then threw a million frogs in, so the mouse didn't matter anymore.
> I have to imagine it's because the internet quickly filled with people not primed to be interested in those concerns and so they became popular in spite of the previous concerns.
261 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadHow long will this last now that it has been posted to HN?
Main game should be rotating the L1 keys. I don't know about L2 keys, but rotating L3 keys seems like a lost cause to me, some dude made a Chrome extension that can extract them.
Some theorise that Microsoft's Pluton/TPM antics with Windows 11 are a ploy to bring L1-style keys to the desktop.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/317512-microsoft-pluto...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16269/microsoft-pluton-hardwa...
As for L1 on desktop, Google did announce exactly that [1], but TPM would be likely too weak for that, so maybe something like Intel ME would be used. But so far there's no evidence of them actually rolling anything like that out. So for now if you want hardware DRM on desktop you have to use Edge or native Windows 10 apps with PlayReady DRM.
And about the APIs, streaming services do sometimes change up APIs, make old app versions stop working, etc., but often things work with no or minimal changes even years later. They do have to be careful not to break compatibility with all of their own apps across multiple platforms as well.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210819093936/https://widevine....
(I don't know the details of how to dump the keys, I just know it's possible by definition given the security loss on that platform, and I'm sure some people have tooling for this somewhere)
However, most people nowadays are simply exploiting phones and tablets with old vulnerable MSM chips, there are a lot more of those to choose from. Usually what Google does now is when someone publicly leaks a compromised device key, they revoke the unique key of that specific device but not the whole model. However, sometimes streaming services (especially Amazon, Netflix and Disney+) may still choose to blacklist an entire vulnerable model and limit it to SD playback.
They can DRM and engineer all they want but nobody can stop me from recording what's playing on my screen :D
the reason why linux users get lower bitrate versions of media is that companies with a bit too much power decided to try to abuse the entirety of the PC world in order to slow the efforts of a very few pirates.
it's a stupid untenable unwinnable arms-race that only results in poorer user experience and less and less user-liberty and choice across the board in order to slightly inconvenience a few bad actors, not stop them.
Meanwhile a 10 dollar video dongle setup and a pirated Windows copy will easily meet most DRM requirements and still allow for easy piracy.
These efforts (DRM schemes) are useless and anti-human, and most research from the 90s until now indicates that DRM enforcement does little for profit except for those that sell DRM solutions -- and that piracy increases social effect of released media; generally aiding sales and profitability.
In practice, DRM never has a good reason.
The quality was locked to an eye watering...360P! On Windows 10 with a modern HDCP compliant display and GPU no less!
Is it still "piracy" if you pay for the service, but torrent the video in question in higher quality?
Of course it is. Whenever you have these question, just ask what you think a mustache twirling characture of a villain would do and you will have your answer.
I pay for plenty of subscription services that finally figured out how to make content as easy and accessible as piracy but there will forever exist legitimate gaps where “just pay for it” is simply insufficient (geo being #1, silly copyright owners #2, etc etc).
The other article mentions this dump is a result of a Discord dispute and we randos seem to be the winners. And who knows it might inspire others to get into the scene.
Sometimes I think these people live in an alternate universe. last time I did that.
as a child I knew a guy that knew how to make the recording VCR record those properly, though I don't know how it was done.
Cable TV "scrambling" was similar back in the day as well. It wasn't so much that the signal was "encrypted" as it was "modified" in such a way it wouldn't play on a normal tv anymore. Over time they could modify the scrambling technique so that any box you did buy to descramble a signal would be worthless in a few months when they changed the method.
The only way to really descramble Pay TV was to be an electronics guy who could reconstruct the video signal. Usually you needed the minimum of an oscilloscope to analyze the timing signals, and then the ability to create a circuit to fix it -- it wasn't exactly easy.
I don’t know if it was a filter really. It was just an electronic component of some kind that screwed on/off.
When you ordered HBO, someone visited your property to remove this thing.
By the way this worked just as well for audio cassettes tape.
And you could simply use masking tape to bypass it, because it was only designed to stop unintentional overwriting, not intentional overwriting.
I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.
Now that I think about it, I've never gotten a Blockbuster/Hollywood Video rental that was damaged in this manner. This method of property destruction never even crossed my mind. It seems so obvious given how easy it is to disable write protection. Was I just lucky or were people more considerate back then?
I recall rental shops would have rewind machines, but I don't remember them ever checking the content of the tape.
Maybe people were just considerate. Maybe the threat of having a whopping fine when the the next unhappy renter returned and complained about the tape, causing the shop to check the rental history, dissuaded such behaviour.
Or, maybe people respected the institution. I used to really like video stores as they offered affordable access to entertainment and were just nice places to visit.
Lol, no way in hell that was the average. That was the high end dream consumer that very few of the people I knew matched even back in cable’s heyday.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/680645/number-of-cable-s...
In my family we would rent lots of movies each week with an 2-3 times a week ritual trip to the video rental store to pick something out for $2 or so.
Movies we liked were bought when they went on sale at the cheap DVD trough at Walmart for $5.
I don't think that was unusual, either.
Sounds like a ridiculous waste of money to me, but then I'm firmly at the other end of the spectrum. I finally cancelled my £30 a month TV package, I've not rented a film for over 10 years, and would buy blu-rays or DVDs only for things I thought I'd watch more than once, or where buying them was cheaper than renting (common in the case of box sets).
1. traditional patriarchal setup, male parent works, mother at home, watches some cable during the day.
2. Kids come home from school / kindergarten at 4, watch some cable.
3. Eat dinner at 7, watch movie.
4. kids go to bed at 9, folks watch cable for couple hours.
5. Kids at age where they have their own tastes, 3 kids, buy 2 movies for adults 3 movies for kids or variations thereof.
I mean obviously the time to do this stuff is a waste of time, but often families waste the time because parents are burned out from various things and the easiest way to get through the time is to give everyone media to consume and forget about them.
Nowadays I'm a big /r/financialindependence guy, and I was shocked recently to find out that a lot of my lower-middle class friends and family are constantly ordering food with those ripoff delivery apps. It's completely insane IMO to pay $50 for cold, soggy food that should have cost 25, but I guess people do it. They buy new top-end smartphones every year or two, lease cars, and do all sorts of other ridiculous money-wasting stuff.
They had a moat that let them gouge consumers for years, but the moat dried up and now they're throwing a tantrum because they can't continue their outdated and overpriced business model.
Yes, and average cost and risk exposure that family sees is higher now, wages down or flat.
First order realization:
I've long maintained most families have a fixed entertainment budget. They have their monthly nut to crack, and entertainment falls into that somewhere, with a little flexibility here and there.
Say that's a few hundred dollars. Might be $200 or less, depending.
The various entertainment forms compete for those dollars, and sometimes compete to stretch the amount a little too. Something really special might displace some other spend, or warrant a draw from savings, use of credit, whatever.
This was my experience bringing up a family through the 90's and 00's. I had a few hundred bucks for entertainment, special spends, and that was basically it, unless there were very compelling reasons, say getting a new game console, or special event that warranted some other adjustment to allow for greater entertainment spending.
There is a near infinite demand for entertainment! Maybe not infinite, but it's a lot higher than the budgets would fund at the generally accepted market prices. This demand is both material, in that real, liquid dollars are there to satisfy the demand, as well as demand not backed by liquid dollars. (the latter being an opportunity to build relevance and sell through later, whether that is recognized as marketing efforts tend to be is another discussion)
Second order realizations:
The entertainment spend is made each month and every month overall, and that's true whether there is massive piracy, or not.
Additionally, content that is pirated hard also earns well. Content that is lightly pirated also tends to not do well.
Entertainment forms compete. Video game vs movie vs whatever. There is a little flexibility, but overall the dollars go where the value perception is highest. Basically max entertainment per dollar. How people see this is all over the map too.
Pricing up can be the right move, as can pricing down. Depends on value perception, relevance, and how that stacks up to the entertainment budgets out there and the different forms.
Third order:
Piracy =/= a loss.
Infringment is weird. It's not theft in that no one is denied property or rights. It's all about people doing or experiencing something they were not supposed to.
There is value created via infringement too. A lot of the sales opportunity boils down to personal relevance. When a content creator is irrelevant, they must somehow reach potential consumers, who then become opportunities for income.
Infringement builds relevance the same as licensed users do, and it all works the same, personal recommendations, sharing, all that stuff people do in order to trade on and participate in culture and relevance applies when people use the content whether it's infringing use or not.
All this suggests a strategy allowing infringement as investment in relevance which will deliver returns in the form of high value license rental or longer term media entitlement purchases later. Higher quality, greater availbility, as in "I'll buy this and share it with the others on my subscription.
Many people subscribe and share with parents, friends, family making good use of both the profile capability and device allowances. This is "infringement" in a similar sense to piracy, but different in that it's not a high priority for enforcement.
Finally, pricing / piracy / competition with other media forms tend to make pricing self-correct and settle in to maxima. There is a right price to capture more value with material demand backed by dollars. Too high, and other forms will garner more of the entertainment dollars, or other works in the same form may do that too. Too low, and value perception may be impacted as well as leaving money on the table.
Subscriptions / content distribution agreeme...
That's what the renting system is built off. The fact that most people only watch a film once.
I couldn't care less about whether I own a copy of a movie. All I care is that I can watch it when I want to watch it. That's a different issue though, not one of disposable income, but of licensing and content availability.
We watch the same ten or so movies every holiday season. Now we scramble to find them on streaming services and pay $3-5 each to watch.
At one point I had them all downloaded on a portable HD (along with others) but it failed, and why back up what you can just re-download?
It's A Wonderful Life
A Christmas Carol
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer (old animated version)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (old animated version)
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Home Alone
Miracle On 34th Street
Elf
White Christmas
There's tons of GREAT Christmas movies. On any given Christmas season Netflix might have 1-2 of the greats. Same for Amazon Prime.
I'm confused because it seems like an easy win for these streaming services. Is licensing them really so expensive?
Last time I watched tv I did the whole vpn + american tv package thing and I just was appalled at the sheer amount of unwatchable content (ads)... I pity these things, how did it even work in the first place?
The fact that you only want to watch 1 movie out of their catalog is irrelevant. I do not find their content worth it, so I do not pay Netflix.
I find it better to just rent a movie from an online provider if/when I want to watch one, since I rarely watch. If I want to watch it over and over, I buy it (kids’ movies).
If you want to compare DVD rental to renting a movie on Apple/Google Play/Amazon, that would make more sense.
Theoretically the streaming services are more convenient, they're all lurking right there on my PS4, but... I never really touch the things.
My imagination runs amok..
There is a Disney+ but https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Dog_Lost is not on it. Nor is any other Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color or whatever name the anthology ran on television since 1954 but to me this is the only one that matters, what can I do, I love corgis :)
The Mists Of Avalon mini series from 2001 is nowhere to be found.
Many, many movies have been made out of the novel The Count of Monte Cristo but what many consider the closest to the book, Robert Vernay's version from 1954 with no less than Jean Marais in the lead is impossible to find these days. This was Vernay's second Cristo movie, the vision he always wanted to make but couldn't in 1943 when he made the first. But no one knows of it because streaming, DVD, whatever you want just doesn't exist. Rare Films And More sourced a high quality 16mm print (it's in German) and digitized it and wrote English subtitles for it -- but it's a pirated copy, I don't think it entered the public domain yet.
Are there streaming rights issues? Are they holding back content to drip feed content drops for as long as they can? Did they determine that some content isn't worth digging up the tapes and preparing for streaming?
Cartoons have also been censored:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven
https://deadline.com/2021/03/pepe-le-pew-space-jam-2-new-yor...
Many cartoon shorts from the 30s and 40s with blackface and other offensive material has been edited. I can’t find references right now, but have noticed this personally.
The Chinese Communist Party wasn’t happy the film was made in the first place and would probably ban Disney from their market if it was available for streaming in the USA.
It’s quiet, limited sale on DVD is still tolerated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundun
This seems likely to be part of the same philosophy.
Looking at some newer films rentals are $4-$6 and “buying” $8-$15. Probably more for really new releases.
$4 for a rental isn’t bad compared to renting a VHS or DVD at Blockbuster a few years ago.
Compared to taking a few adults and kids to a movie theater, it’s a steal.
Its a few days because you can rent digitally just before you buy it. Back in the Hollywood Video days, you also had to make a special trip to the video store. Often this was done days in advance.
I like it.
Content is mostly ephemeral for me. I don't want to manage a ton of files or physical media.
I pay for Prime and Netflix but I still often torrent shows from those services because of the stupid widevine drm level restrictions on quality/resolution. I guess you could say that’s not piracy then but I’m sure I’ve got things downloaded that are no longer on their catalogues so it’s hard to know.
When Netflix had 70% of the media content you’d want I was very happy to be a paying customer but now I’m mostly a begrudgingly paying customer as the cost goes up the the library shrinks. Everyone wants their piece of the pie right now and I don’t doubt they’re going to consolidate to some extent after the winners and losers are decided but it sucks ass that the ecosystem has become so fragmented.
Also having the raw files makes it easier for me to sync up watching with my fiancé who is currently abroad. She pays for Netflix in the UK but even when both libraries have the same content the UK version often has different intro credits which makes syncing difficult.
I guess the overall crux of my issue with the business model is that I can pay $15 a month to access X service and get hundreds/thousands of movies and shows or Something like $20 a season for a show which could end up being hundreds of dollars for just one show. The economics really just break down for me since they price owning a digital copy against physical. Ironically physical copies will end up getting discounted at retail because things have to move but the digital copies won’t. Also in many cases even owning a copy digitally doesn’t give you the ability to dictate where you use it/give you a raw file.
I just want things to work the way I need them to, however that manifests and the only way to do that is with the video files themselves and any barrier or artifice between them is a problem.
If you don't want someone to copy your data without charge then find a better business model.
Ok, uh, what's it called now? HBO Go? HBO Now? Oh, HBO Max, ok. I live in Japan now, so I'm region-blocked, great. Time to open the VPN. HBO already seems to know that server #1243 is a VPN, but server #849 works OK for now.
Ok, time to create an account. "Account with that email already exists"? Ok, so let's log in using my old HBO Go credentials. Looks like there's some kind of account migration problem and the account is stuck in the "account verification" phase but I can't get it to send me a new verification email. There's a little pop-up chat window for the support team, let's try it. Three separate support agents and thirty minutes later, I have a working verification email. But my payment information is out of date. OK, let's update it. HTTP 505 error. Wonderful.
Ok, that's enough: Type "West Wing season 1 episode 1" into Google. Thirty seconds later I'm watching in full HD and there's popcorn in the microwave.
People have no problem to pay, but driving into the city to buy a cd then convert it so you can listen to it on your ipod......or eMule?
I love it that they are resistant to learn anything from the past.
Moreover, the current state of copyright gives a few large corporations enormous power to shape our culture. The stories of our time should belong to us well before we're dead, but copyright lasts well past one human lifetime.
And as others have mentioned, sometimes there is no price you can pay to legally watch something, for reasons that are truly "silly" to anyone who isn't profiting from the international balkanization of distributors. Like the Great British Baking Show on Netflix: it's actually Great British Bake Off, and you can't watch the original in the US. Good luck finding anywhere to watch Grand Designs (from any locale) in the US without ads, no matter how much you'd be willing to pay. There are many examples of shows from UK, Australia, and New Zealand that aren't available in the US at all, and probably vice versa, let alone the rest of the world.
How do you know if you have a right to take them?
If it's according to the law, then your ethical stance changes with the wind. E.g., you would believe you have a right to derive new music by taking a chord progression from your favorite song, but not by taking the melody. Worse, the rich history in the U.S. of building new songs out of old chord progressions was preferred to taking melodies chiefly because it was illegal to take copyrighted melodies and put new chord changes to them. So your ethical stance would change depending on whether you happen to be reading the notes that are stacked vertically on the page (i.e., a chord), or horizontally across it (a melody). That's ethically incoherent.
If it's according to your own ethical stance, you have to explain what that stance is. E.g., are you ethically opposed to circumventing a company's API to download content in a way they didn't intend? Are you opposed to someone accepting a flash drive from a friend that has their friend's favorite music on it? Someone pasting their big fat head on indy content and reposting as a "reaction video" to steal views? I happen to think these aren't all covered by the same ethical rule, but maybe they are.
If someone says “This is $5.” And if I don’t pay them $5, then I feel like I don’t have a right to it. If it takes paragraphs of text to explain why despite not paying them $5 I have a right to take it, then I feel like I don’t have a right to take it.
1. Stream 2. Purchase 3. Rent 4. Catch on tv 5. Subscribe to an american streaming service using a vpn (requires an american credit card, and while there are services that allow to get a pseudo prepaid card the costs of it all are huge)
I can however pirate it.
Same goes with Movies and shows. I have Netflix and PrimeVideo subscriptions but the overall quality they provide is trash as against 4K ripped HEVC releases with 10bit audio and better subtitles which you can watch in whatever player you want.
I would pay good money for a service that could do that legitimately, but no, we can't have that.
Piracy offers us all the works of humanity, everything ever created. These copyright holders can barely manage to display episodes in the correct order in their little streaming service user interfaces.
And in the correct format [1]. Made me just want to pirate Seinfeld so that I could watch it under the proper conditions, but I'm too lazy for that as Netflix is just a few clicks away.
[1] https://twitter.com/Thatoneguy64/status/1443961536079450117?
Legal music streaming is good enough for me. Seems a much more convenient and less fragmented ecosystem; I wish movie streaming was like that.
My absolute favorite song suffered from this. One morning I opened Spotify, and all the songs in that album was greyed out.
It returned a couple of months later, but it's an enough of a warning.
The problem is that the current state of affairs is fragmented and not set up in a way that ensures that I as a consumer can be sure that I can consume said content again tomorrow.
I pay for access but am not ensured that the content I like is going to be available.
That makes piracy an option for some.
I start to listen an album via Spotify. I buy it via iTunes if I continue to listen it. If I really like that album that much, I find a lossless copy.
If I can buy a lossless copy from the original artist, I go that route first. RadioHead's leading the pack on that. I have a 24bit wav album from them.
Music has proven that idea wrong. I'm part of a few private music trackers that came after oink and what.cd. They're much smaller today than they used to. Legal music streaming has made them all but obsolete for everyone but enthusiasts. They're maybe serving 200k people worldwide, if you include the language-specific ones from China, Korea etc.
Spotify alone has 172 million premium subscribers.
Movies are similar.
Sitting in a cafe Abu Dhabi now, a shop on the opposite side of the street has "$10 for 1000 MP3 Hitz"
I don't know who streams, when you can just download MP3s.
Of course, I'm a bit concerned with the tracks "unavailable in my region" or "no longer available at all", but convenience trumps it.
As others have said, when I really like an album or something, I'll usually buy it, ideally lossless download, but a CD will do in a pinch.
1) discovery: Spotify is great at giving you more of what you like, without you needing to manage your library
2) ease of access: No need to carry around a hard drive to have everything available
3) giant catalogue: to buy MP3s at that price and have a similar breadth and depth as Spotify (or rather: what you'd use of Spotify), you'd pay a lot more.
If you just want some tunes and are happy with what's very popular, you could also stream for free from Youtube.
What I meant by competition is they won't be able to offer higher quality and availability. They will never achieve the ideal I proposed: everything humanity has ever created at the highest possible quality. They are of course masters at being just good enough for the average consumer. Honestly that bar is pretty low.
I will never forgive them for shutting what.cd down. I consider that a crime against humanity itself that vastly outweighs whatever little profits they thought they were losing.
If you want a really good example of where video games got it wrong in recent years: Metro Exodus was sold as a "pre-purchase" on Steam before it released for some time (at least a few months, could be a year). A few days before release it went exclusive on Epic Game store IIRC and you couldn't buy _or download_ it on steam anymore. After some well deserved outrage, people who pre-purchased on steam could play on steam, but you couldn't purchase it for about another year.
Metro: Exodus was the only title I pirated in the last 10 years because they took away the ability to purchase it (and I like the series and have the first two titles on steam, and I bought and read the books because of the first game).
And that's why I'll never buy anything from them even if it's nice. I feel morally compelled to do my tiny part to let them (and every other steam competitor) go bust, to stave off exactly the fragmentation we see in the video streaming market.
Of course, there's always the possibility of Steam becoming evil and making all of us regret propping them up, but you know what? I'll have to live with it.
> Games
Hmm.
Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it:
I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care.
Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max even at their low offer of around $5/month for life, and it annoys me that I have two video streaming sites already.
I think it is because both Spotify and Apple Music are OK: they contain almost everything I want from commercial music, while the video streaming sites feels like an elaborate scam: pay just as much as I pay for Spotify to an increasing number of services where none of them are good.
I want creators to get paid, but I don't want to support scams, so being somewhat principled I only watch whatever I have on DVD + what is available on the services I subscribe to (and I'm planning to get rid of one) and the few that I bought from Apple.
I can clearly see why people pirate though and if I worked in law enforcement I'd probably do my best to work with something important and useful, not to support large scale scams.
Then more and more got pulled out and now if I want a full Spotify experience for video I need to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Warner, AppleTV and maybe a few more.
Films that used to be in your list mysteriously disappear. You swear it was there but it's not. It's like netflix is gaslighting you. Sometimes you try to watch something only to be greeted by an ominous "last day to watch on netflix" notice. You thought you were paying for a subscription but it was really a long term rental that you have no idea when it expires. They simply take stuff away. Whenever something new shows up instead of being excited you now wonder how long it will take for them to take it away too. Cowboy Bebop? I wonder how long that's gonna last.
Whatever scraps and leftovers you do get is ruined by quality issues: extremely compressed encodes, shitty video player software, cropping, changes, sometimes they can't even get the episodes in the correct order which means I'd be watching it backwards. You now wonder if what you're watching on netflix is the best version. You now wonder if the netflix version is censored or altered in any way. I find myself searching for reddit discussions on a series to see if netflix screwed it up.
You entertain the notion of paying for other services as well but you discover their apps are even shittier and they still don't have what you want to watch. You remember facts such as amazon's non-existent customer service and the industry's tendency to profile you based on what you watch. You realize that paying money to these people is a lot like being in an abusive relationship.
They could federate and rely on open protocols, but that might be less profitable.
The concept is to allow the exchange of copyrighted cultural goods and collect a fee at the ISP level to finance those back.
Netflix was kinda of that for a few years (2012-2015) before the rise of streaming services. Piracy was way down (P2P not indicative of the whole picture, but good enough), during that period. Then everyone decided to make their own platforms and started taking pieces of the pie from Netflix and here we are today, where you need at least 4-5 services to get access to half a dozen show you want to watch per year, as well as requiring a VPN service if you don't want to have less than 20% of the US library in a lot of countries.
I pirate significantly less content than before because its just easier to watch on Netflix or buy the season from iTunes or whatever.
https://github.com/eviabs/downtify-premium
Here is a link to an episode to test: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0DsunsN5MGI0CWwvuaxZdt
To date I have not found a way to rip this other than recording the episode on Desktop. The main use case for me is that when I am driving, I hate when it randomly stops the podcast to talk about some underwear brand and it is hard to skip and not cause an accident. :)
Here is an example link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0DsunsN5MGI0CWwvuaxZdt
Does this allow you to download the videos without an account?
> Does this allow you to download the videos without an account?
No.
I’m sure some tools work but the in-built one in macOS (QuickTime) doesn’t. I was trying to capture a couple of seconds of video but all I got was a black screen.
I understand wanting to disable video capture but I’ve also noticed image capture being prevented in some cases.
Some people don't care about 4K. Other people think they care about 4K but don't really know the difference.
They compress and screw up the video quality so much that even calling it 1080p is a stretch in my opinion
Most people have houses/screens too small for 4K to be visible anyway, though, so I guess it's easy to get away with providing such a crappy service
I ensure that the "small" people benefit from my consumption- the people who will actually benefit from my $10/$20/$50. But I also have to keep my comfort and ease in mind.
It's stupid because the majority of people don't realize and may be paying for the more expensive 4K option even though they're never getting that...
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444
https://github.com/widevinedump/WV-AMZN-4K-RIPPER
They mention you can email for the CDM and it's not free. Disney is the same.
Just a keypair + certificate.
Edit: If it was included with Prime and not for rent it would display "resume" or "play from beginning".
May have people thinking: "I already have a <STREAM-SERVICE> account, but with this I could at least get 4k."
They put their legitimate key in, and maybe it phones home the key before begining the download?
This comment from a previous thread illuminates some concerning oversights concerning public repository etiquette:
> I also noticed it provides part of the functionality with a .pyc file, without including the normal python source.[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29704610
Don't get me wrong, I am glad they do. But, what is the positive for them?
The negatives (angry copyright lawyers from one of the richest corporations) outweighs the positives (some clout on 1337x or Usenet or wherever these guys dump it)
The challenge, kindness, compassion and the joy of sharing all come to mind.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t a few state funded groups that do it for lulz.
I have been in some scene group chats and I can tell you that many "important" people there don't give a damn about the "spirit of sharing" and just do it for the fun of beating a challenge. They see the sharing of these tools/decryption keys as "throwing food scrapps to homeless people". Lots of ego-driven "I don't give a fuck about anyone" attitude in some groups.
I currently have this problem with Spotify + South Africa, where a bunch of music on my playlist is no longer available.. I do not care about their reasons. Pondering not renewing next year.
if you are looking for anything and it happens to be removed, email me at diogenesjunior@protonmail.com and i will happily provide a copy for free :)
But no, I'm not gonna throw my dollars on every little platform out there like Disney+, HBO, Vudu, Fandango, and other crappy services from other companies just because some content I needed exists only there. Guys, if we look closely this is basically all back to TV Channels all over again. So, no thank you. I'll keep pirating my content with a VPN.
With piracy, I have a choice of multiple subtitle providers.
I have to imagine it's because the internet quickly filled with people not primed to be interested in those concerns and so they became popular in spite of the previous concerns.
Less like the boiling of the frog metaphor and more like they started boiling a mouse and then threw a million frogs in, so the mouse didn't matter anymore.
It's because of a lot of PR and astroturfing.