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Pirates Plunder 4K Hateful Eight, but Did They Crack DCP?
- wmf 10y agoDid the studio send a 4K master to Okko (which appears to be in Russia BTW) even though they only need HD?
- bravo22 10y agoTime will tell. DCP has a lot of security built-in. Both in hardware (FIPS certified, anti-intrusion, etc.) and in Software -- encryption up the wazoo. Studios rely on a lot of insecure distribution and storage mechanisms for the big DCP file and instead rely heavily on the secure key exchange. If they have cracked DCP, somehow, then it is a major coup.
- wmf 10y agoPresumably the studio sends a master to Okko and then Okko transcodes it into various formats for streaming. Imagine an insider sets the transcoder to output 4K H.264 and then leaks the resulting file. It sounds like encryption won't help here.
- bravo22 10y agoThey wouldn't send a DCP stream for transcoding. DCP stream can only be decoded by the media block inside the projector and the output physically goes to the projector chip. The system has safe guards against physical intrusion. If you open the projector, it wipes all the keys. The level of paranoia in that thing is insane. They keys only get programmed by the studios at manufacture time, and there is no servicing of the parts in the decode chain. The whole module has to be replaced. I actually worked on a media block design about 10 years ago.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoInsane, the levels we'll go to in order to secure content from hitting someone's eyeballs and ears before ensuring money changed hands in the vague direction of the content creators at some point.
- hudibras 10y agoWhen you say "projector," do you mean a projector like in a movie theater (shooting rays of light out at a screen, etc.) or something else?
- saganus 10y agoWow. That's truly insane. However I guess anyone who values something so much would also go to great lengths to protect it. Still... wow. I mean, how much does it cost to design and implement that system alone? tens of millions of usd at least?
- kalleboo 10y agoIf you're protecting movies that each cost $300 million to produce and made $1 billion in box office takes (just checking the latest Avengers movie for that number), then spending $10 million on a copy protection scheme looks like it makes sense.
- 10y ago
- sprocket35 10y agoIt's worth noting that the DCP format doesn't have a master key - each "reel" of an encrypted film has its own content key, which is decrypted by each DCP player's private FIPS protected key combined with a public Key Delivery Message from the distributor. So if the DCP was indeed cracked, it was either because they gained access to the FIPS module in a DCP playback server, or they gained access to the plaintext content keys where the KDMs are generated. If they have the server's private key, they will be able to decrypt every other film that they have a KDM for and we should expect to see more DCP releases.
- usrusr 10y ago> they will be able to decrypt every other film that they have a KDM for and we should expect to see more DCP releases. If you have individually encrypted copies, it would be stupid to not also individually watermark them on the content level. With a bit of targeted key invalidation, this could well be contained to a one time breach.
- tomerv 10y agoThere is just one encrypted copy, with one key. But that key has many copies, each encrypted with a different copy. The device takes its private key, and uses it to acquire the "master" key, which is then used to decrypt the media. Of course, every movie release has its own "master" key.
- sp332 10y agoEven AACS on bluray discs can have multiple different copies of some parts of the video to watermark different sets of device keys. I know footage from theaters can be watermarked too, so I'd be very surprised if this distribution method didn't also have some kind of identification.
- djsumdog 10y agoSo DCP players in cinemas have to have access to a network? (or someone has to get the key and move it over via USB stick or something like that?)
- rblatz 10y agoI'm no expert on DCP or encryption. But from what I've read DCP uses AES 128, they probably didn't crack that. But also each projector gets its own unique key to decode the movie. Which I assume is somehow combined with the key in the projector to create the real decryption key. So my first guess is that they had the ability to snoop on multiple key exchange messages and some how used that knowledge to find a shortcut to solve AES based on the gleaned knowledge from all the gathered keys, or they broke into a projector and took its internal key.
- wmf 10y agoIt sounds like no projectors are involved here.
- sprocket35 10y agoSome of the projectors are connected to the DCP playback server via encrypted HD-SDI. The content is link-encrypted between the server and projector using Texas Instrument's "Cinelink" technology. If the TI "Enigma" module's private key was leaked, this would enable recording the plaintext SMPTE 292M video stream in real-time. The audio is un-encrypted obviously and easy to record, but it is watermarked so they would be able to trace back the recording to a specific KDM.
- wyager 10y agoJesus, they put so much effort into "encrypting" this data when it fundamentally needs to be available in a decrypted format for the users to watch it. At the end of the day, there's always the analog hole (or, more likely, the digital hole between the rendering chip and the MEMS array or LCD or whatever other mechanism lives inside the projector). No matter how many convoluted layers of encryption they throw at these things, there's always somewhere you can stick a camera or a few high-bandwidth digital signal analyzers and recover the content with at worst slightly degraded quality.
- sprocket35 10y ago
- brunoqc 10y agoNot really related but I didn't know about the integral cut of Kill Bill (it's possible to find it online). Any other gems like this? Maybe there's websites about this.
- Tobold 10y agoApparently there is ONE theater in the world (in California of course!) that shows it and it's REALLY GOOD. EDIT: The one floating around the internet seems to be a fan cut. I'm curious how it holds up to the actual thing. That's what I heard. Also the the Roadshow cut of Hateful Eight. That was shown in more places. I could have seen it, but they asked for an arm and a leg, and I need those!
- jonah 10y agoI saw the Roadshow cut at our local art house. It was beautiful. IIRC it was definitely not even 2x the cost of a regular ticket and it came with a commemorative booklet.
- themartorana 10y agoI wonder if there's any way to measure the actual financial impact on this movie, which I'm guessing is close to zero (and the MPAA will tell you is millions of dollars). The amount of work and security put into these encryption schemes is sizable to say the least. But is anyone that wouldn't pirate it later going to pirate it now?
- bArray 10y agoI think the MPAA count each watch as a potential purchase - when it's simply not true at all. I'll admit that I sometimes watch a poor cam video before going to the cinema. It costs £10 a ticket plus food and fuel - about £15. Critiques often don't represent what I like in films, so I would just not go. Pirated films probably encourages people to watch films. It can create a bigger hype around a film. I think the war on piracy somewhat echoes the issues of the war on drugs.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoAll I know is that the music industry learned a long time ago DRM didn't work and wasn't worth it, and I can now buy MP3 files on any service, and play them on any device. And while I don't engage in movie piracy myself, I hope these pirates are successful in driving studios to that same point, where I can happily shell over $30 for a 4K file and use it how I want to.
- 6nf 10y agoThere's a difference though. DRM music files are sold directly to consumers. These consumers have to be able to decrypt the files on their own computers / devices which makes DRM useless. The movie files in this case are not meant for consumers. They're only decrypted on specialised equipment not accessible to the general public. If you manage to get your hands on a DCP file there's nothing you can do to decrypt it without access to the specific projector system it was intended for (unless someone screwed up somewhere of course)
- ultramancool 10y agoYeah, but let's be honest, if I had a job as a manager at a theater and a moderate amount of reverse engineering skill or a small team of friends with those, well, time, access and tools combine quite well... Sure, they make it look all secure, pass it through all that crypto and stuff but ultimately it has to be passed to the projector chip in some form which is unencumbered to be turned into light. At which point it's fairly trivial to dump. Anti-tampers on the case are probably fairly limited.
- hvidgaard 10y agoAccording to another comment here, the anti tamper mechanics on those projecters are not limited. They are in fact quite aggressive. If they have been any kind of smart when designing them, the decoded stream takes a limited, shielded, and highly tamper resistant path to the projector chip, and each and every critical component are paired with each other such that switching one of the out automatically destroy all keys.
- 10y ago
- nrclark 10y agoAnother option is that somebody got ahold of some HDCP chips that fell off the back of a truck. There are Chinese companies (Explore Semi and friends) that make HDCP repeater chips with decryption / encryption capabilities. Those bad boys can take an HDCP-protected input stream and strip the encryption right off. DCP controls chip sales very tightly in the US, but I imagine it's a practical impossibility in Shenzhen.
- OedipusRex 10y agoSo it's a better quality Chinese knock off? We need a word for this.
- chii 10y ago"consumer friendliness"
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago"Chinese knock-up"?
- rangibaby 10y agoAccording to the "Big Book of Hoaxes", Alceo Dossena's works were sold with a certificate certifying them as "genuine fakes".
- camkego 10y agoYou don't even need go get the chips, devices like this strip the HDCP and turn the stream into MJPEG. http://blog.danman.eu/reverse-engineering-lenkeng-hdmi-over-ip-extender/ http://blog.danman.eu/reverse-engineering-lenkeng-hdmi-over-... Here is their 4K device, don't know if it works like the HD device, but it would seem there is a fair chance it does. http://www.lenkeng.net/Index/detail/id/147 http://www.lenkeng.net/Index/detail/id/147 You can buy these devices on eBay.
- Yaggo 10y agoThe DVD format in NTSC regions has 480 pixel vertical resolution. Even the half-century old NTSC spec has more vertical lines (525). I find it amazing that DVDs are still being sold.
- KayEss 10y agoThat's not how it works. Those 525 lines include the beam moving from the bottom right of the screen back to the top left to start to display the next frame (vertical blanking). There are only around 480 lines visible on the screen. The non-image lines is where things like teletext would be transmitted.
- United857 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan
- ryandamm 10y agoFrom Wikipedia's article on NTSC: "483 scan lines make up the visible raster" The 525 includes a lot of other stuff. Easy mistake because PAL shows 576 lines (out of 625), but only at 25 full frames / 50 interlaced half-frames per second as opposed to 30p/60i for NTSC. (PAL DVDs are also 576.) While they're all constrained by the scanline in the vertical direction, the analog standards are resolution-limited in the horizontal raster by the bandwidth / frequency response of your signal chain; I've seen beta-derived analog NTSC that's gorgeous, far better than DVD. Especially on a really well-corrected CRT monitor (really!). The decision to go to an even 480p for DVD probably derives from the 8x8 pixel blocks of the MPEG-2 compression. Having raster dimensions that are evenly divisible by 8 is a good thing for a lot of these block-based codecs; I believe MPEG-2 couldn't go below 8x8 (h.264 can accommodate smaller and non-square macroblocks, though). That said, there's a nugget of truth in your comment. When we go to digital, we often get better average fidelity, but worse maximum fidelity. A beautiful analog system can be really great. Maybe in twenty years we'll have a hipster revival of 70mm film prints? It's the new vinyl... (I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek; reports from Ang Lee's latest movie are that the digitally-captured 4096p120 stereo 3D is better than the real thing. I saw 30-year film industry veterans were walking out of a test screening shaking their heads in disbelief -- I couldn't get in because the line was around the hall.)
- montecarl 10y agoI had to look it up. I won't post a link here but the file appears to be 38.06 GiB!
- cornstalks 10y agoWhich the article mentions: ...due to its 40GB+ size. and is visible in the screenshot: https://torrentfreak.com/images/hateful.png https://torrentfreak.com/images/hateful.png
- voltagex_ 10y agoInterestingly, that's less than a 50GB Blu-Ray, so tell me, why did we need a different disc format for UHD Blu-Ray?
- wmf 10y agoBecause Hollywood has higher quality standards than pirates?
- aorth 10y agoThe article links to the leak, where there are screenshots from both the DCP and US Blu-ray versions of the movie. The new (DCP) source looks way better, has much more detail. Both are in H.264 format at obscenely-high bit rates. Other than cutting the file size in half for the same bit rates, I wonder how H.265 would fare on this epic movie!
- slr555 10y agoThe "economics" here are interesting. One of the sources attributes the piracy to a "market failure". This is not accurate. As price falls to zero and supply is infinite (piracy) there is nothing to restrain demand. Sure I want all those Tarantino special cuts if they don't cost me anything. Got Tarkovsky in 4K? I'll take that too. Pirates try to justify their thefts in economic terms but at the end of the day they are no different than someone taking socks from Walmart. They want goods or services that others have worked to produce without compensating them for their work. Seriously, just own it dude. I stole this movie because I wanted it and I could. The Hateful Eight 4K is tearing down the academic pay wall to bring knowledge to the masses. It's a free movie and Cheetos.
- humanrebar 10y ago> Pirates try to justify their thefts in economic terms but at the end of the day they are no different than someone taking socks from Walmart. I agree that people just want free stuff, but stealing a physical object deprives someone of that object. Copying media is strictly a violation of a business model. There is minimal (if any) marginal cost to the owner. Better analogies include sneaking into a (not full) movie, hopping a turnstile, or not putting money into the meter (again, when other spaces are available).
- slr555 10y agoTo the contrary the analogy is apt because when one takes the socks you are not harming the next consumer (sure the cost of shrinkage is passed on) and there are lots of places to get socks. But the party that is well and truly fucked the most is the producer of the socks who will derive no benefit from work spent, designing, promoting, producing or delivering the socks. Your literal minded response suggests that, a product with a low incremental cost is a valid measure of of the total cost of production, which it is not. The cost is writers, actors, foley artists, costumers, grips etc. All of whom lose money when someone decides it's okay to steal a copy. That is a thief who will never pay a legitimate fee for what they have taken.
- eropple 10y ago
- contingencies 10y agoTo clarify for all the other non HD-video nerds, this seems to be regarding DCP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package not HDCP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content... (which is already broken, and was itself the industry response to the breaking of DVD CSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System). The use of DCP seems to be limited to very high resolution releases. HDCP is still what current era consumer hardware uses, and it's totally wide open. As always with DRM, it's defective by design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_by_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_by_Design If you can view it, you can copy it... it's just a matter of time, motivation, and desired quality.
- sillysaurus3 10y agoThe point of DRM is to make that time, motivation, and quality equation not make sense. Every day that a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue. I'm not defending DRM, but it's important to know one's enemy.
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoI agree in principle, but I think the adage that "Every day that a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue" is a bit of a false equivalency.
- robocat 10y agoThere is almost a controlled experiment here (similar data to many economics papers). For each movie, copies are released over time and a correlation can be looked at between quality of rip, distribution by file sharing, and box office receipts.
- AnthonyMouse 10y agoThat would actually be an interesting study. The "problem" is that it would obviously show that the impact of torrenting is much less than one lost sale per download. And reflect that even the downloads that are lost sales are offset to some degree by the people who download to sample and then buy when they otherwise wouldn't have, and the free promotion from the people who downloaded it talking about it with other people etc. The result is that the likely "negative impact" would be small or could even be positive, which isn't the narrative Hollywood wants to spin. Because they actually want DRM for entirely different reasons than that, specifically because it allows them to control content delivery and thus prevent independent content from being displayed on equal footing with big studio content.
- supercoder 10y agocool, downloading now.
- spaz12 10y agoThe filesize of 40GB is very low for a DCP, your standard 90 minute film is typically over 100GB. I recall Hateful Eight being over 200GB. If they released the actual DCP .mxf files it would be proof that the DCP was truly cracked.
- Tobold 10y agoI'm assuming they reencoded it to something more efficient than mjpeg2000 (no idea what the "standard" pirate codec for 4k is). EDIT: According to another comment it's H264.
- voidbrain 10y agoAs far as I know, MXF basically contains JPEG pictures and because of that, it can't use motion prediction algorithms used in modern video codes, so the size of 40 GB for a 4K video in H.264 format is possible. But I agree that it's better to see the original decrypted container.
- mirimir 10y ago> Fans would easily spend on the roadshow cut of Hateful Eight or the integral cut of Kill Bill. Both are not available to buy. Why might that be? Maybe the market is too small. But in that case, why would they care about piracy? Strange.
- wccrawford 10y agoBecause it was part of the marketing campaign to get people to see it in the theatres. It was an experience that you were unable to get in any other way, and so it was more special and (theoretically) should draw more people to it. I went to it, and all the little touches (like the pamphlets) were really well done, and it was indeed a special, memorable experience. It's like limited-edition figures or tins. Some people buy them because they're limited, and it's part of the selling point. The company can't later release it because it'd no longer fit the original sales spiel.
- mirimir 10y agoOK, I get it. Thanks.
- yRetsyM 10y ago> Commenting on the release, Sebastian Haselbeck of Tarantino fansite Tarantino.info says that while he’s not a fan of piracy, he believes that a failure to serve the market is the real problem. > “I strongly condemn piracy and find it generally damaging, but it is a symptom, not the source, of market failure,” he told TF. That's it right there. Music piracy took a long time to sort out because it was inaccessible. Now through Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube I struggle to find anyone who pirates music in my peers (it was prolific). It's not perfect yet and I think there's still some change to come but it's certainly ahead of the film industry.
- kalleboo 10y agoWorth noting is that YouTube was (and is) piracy in many cases
- ljk 10y agoyup, there are a lot of re-uploaded videos and also command-line tools for downloading youtube videos
- gioele 10y ago> yup, there are a lot of re-uploaded videos and also command-line tools for downloading youtube videos The former _may_ classify as copyright infringement. The latter definitely does not.
- Houshalter 10y agoIt violates YouTube's terms of service and hurts the artists.
- ekianjo 10y ago> It violates YouTube's terms of service Yes > and hurts the artists. Evidence required.
- KaiserPro 10y agoEx VFX-er here. Firstly DCPs are not wrappers that contain MXFs. From what I remember DCP predates MXF. From memory (its been 8 years since I've actually dealt with creating them) They are effectively zip files that contain JPEG2000, lots of metadata and some sound tracks. Crucially, the authoring and encryption are controlled by a central authority. Each projector needs to be registered with a KDM to make sure it can receive decryption keys. http://www.artsalliancemedia.com/software/screenwriter#features http://www.artsalliancemedia.com/software/screenwriter#featu... is one system for managing projectors. Getting a distribution DCP is pretty hard, also Keys are short lived. But, someone people create non-encrypted DCPs for various purposes. If its a MXF, then that suggests its either from a finishing house, or more likely a producer's laptop. (ie how wolverine got leaked, a pissed up producer leaving an unencrypted laptop on a plane. Even though their flight was pointless, as there are many remote viewing systems about. )
- b1c837696ba28b 10y agoDCP developer here. DCP track files are MXF. SMPTE ST 377:2004 (MXF) predates SMPTE ST 429-3:2007 (DCP Sound and Picture.) ST 377 is a normative reference of ST 429-3. There is no zip file. There is no central registration for encryption. Each Media Block has a 2k RSA key (usually generated inside the FIPS 140 boundary), and each content distributor has a collection of the respective X.509 certificates.
- shafiqissani 10y agoI will pay 200gbp per month to the service provider that can provide 4k offline viewing with the variety of content available through torrent sites. I bet there is not one legal service available online where you can view 4k media without streaming and without country specific restrictions.
- mcintyre1994 10y agoIs there such a legal service in any resolution, excluding public domain content?
- anotheryou 10y agoWhy was it hard to just screen capture 4k before? (sounds like it)