9 ms·

Can we just stop the shitshow with DRM? I have NEVER encountered a TV show/movie that I could't rip using a torrent either on public p2p sites or a private trac

Can we just stop the shitshow with DRM? I have NEVER encountered a TV show/movie that I could't rip using a torrent either on public p2p sites or a private tracker. But I have seen a lot of my non-technical friends and family having a degraded experience, who pay for their streaming services every month. It was either because they were using a browser or device which was deemed unworthy of full quality streaming by the mighty DRM authors. And now the poor users of the TB-X505X will also have a degraded experience.

antihero 5y ago
It's such a chain - even if a distributer didn't want to use DRM, the buck will stop with a lawyer for the content owners who's job it is to do everything in their power to make sure their clients get paid for the content. Why would one of those make it easier to pirate? Corporate drone logic man.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Because they can sell more views if paying customers are happy. I refuse to pay for Netflix because even if paid I wouldn't be able to watch the content (including Netflix originals where the "rightsholders don't allow it" argument doesn't make much sense) in reasonable quality. Meanwhile, people can watch it from an unlicensed source without paying (legality varies by country but generally low risk for users), and as long as adblock works, the experience really isn't much worse than with Netflix.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    I'm all against DRMs but the friction nowadays is, if you stick to one platform, almost zero, way less than your average pirated experience. Now, if we talk about platforms balkanization and how you have to shell out 50€-$/month if you want to enjoy just the best content from major platforms, that's another topic.
    - midasuni 5y ago
      I agree it’s really cheap. I know people spending three times that for some cable tv service which comes with adverts in the middle of programs! At some point streaming will devolve to that, and it will be back to torrenting as the content providers kill the goose that lays the golden egg
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
      The pirated sites are often streaming sites similar to Netflix. Search for a movie, click play. Quality of service does vary, but the catalogue tends to be much bigger. As you pointed out, "sticking to one platform" isn't an option because the platform most likely won't have the content you're actually looking for. So step 1 is figuring out which platform that is. Step 2 is probably logging in if you don't keep persistent cookies, and that assumes you're subscribed. By this time your movie is already playing if you take the "alternative" approach. Even if you didn't mind shelling out 50 EUR/month + whatever extra per-movie surcharges Disney+ charges, the balkanization would still cause significant friction.
remus 5y ago
Case in point: I can't listen to spotify on my laptop if I've got my external monitors plugged in via USB-C. Not a problem with MP3s of course.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  I've never had this issue. Spotify (on Mac) uses the computer's sound output setting (laptop speakers or monitor), unless you choose another destination with the Spotify 'device' option.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Presumably there's something incompatible with how the Spotify client plays audio and how his system handles audio playback. His point still stands though - with MP3s he can use an alternative player, with Spotify he can't.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      You can use the web client which uses the browsers audio interfacing.
    - midasuni 5y ago
      I use an ncurses Spotify client (I forget what) or a web browser to listen on my computer (normally I do it on the phone and airplay to the required speakers). Never had an issue.
    - karmakaze 5y ago
      My problem with Spotify isn't the DRM, since I use it mostly to play either background music or find different things to listen to--like I used to use satellite radio. The problem with Spotify is that the artists (for the most part) get so little while providing the content.
      - 323 5y ago
        > The problem with Spotify is that the artists (for the most part) get so little while providing the content. That's because there is too much supply of music. Attention is the scarce thing today.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tomxor 5y ago
Yeah, I don't know in what world DRM is supposed to stop people ripping stuff, it only seems to hurt paying users, ultimately if it comes out of a screen you can always capture the output, no amount of DRM will ever prevent this so why bother <insert conspiracy vs Hanlon's razor theories here> . The irony is that as a Linux user (only SD for us), and a user with poor internet and thus shitty streaming speed, DRM pushes me towards torrenting everything I "buy" from these platforms anyway, just for the privileged of being able to watch what i'm paying for without being a blurry over-compressed mess, without having my device rooted by a third party, and not needing to be blessed with a consistent high speed internet connection. I've said it before, torrenting today is as good as the experience of buying music on a physical medium in the 90s... you bought it, took it home, and played it in fully quality uninterrupted, END OF STORY. streaming services still haven't matched this experience.
- derekp7 5y ago
  The "paying users" is exactly the group that DRM is designed to hurt (control). There is a large class of users that won't mess with torrents or whatever for a number of reasons. Ones that apply to me are 1) I don't want my internet service cut if the ISP gets a complaint, 2) Yes, I know I can use a VPN service to get around (1), but then I'd have to find a trusted VPN and there have been ones in the past that were outed as honey pots. 3) You have to be part of the "scene" to work around (1) and (2). 4) I have some disposable income, so at this point in my life I don't feel a "sting" by paying 5 - 7 bucks a month for a streaming service. I'm sure that for other people, lack of familiarity with how to get content through unauthorized means. Now for the control that they want over users like me. If I could easily do it, I'd subscribe to one service, grab a bunch of content to watch later, then unsubscribe a month later and go to the next service in line. Also they want to control how I use the media, such as watching offline (by using the "download to watch later" button they provide, they can ensure that I don't download it to all my friends' devices, and that I still am a paying customer at the time I decide to watch later).
  - therein 5y ago
    They could achieve the same chilling effect on the "I'll just download it by using a chrome extension" crowd by having simple convoluted scheme in the way they retrieve the data. It isn't unseen, downloading them in chunks even is sufficient to throw these people off. Simple xor with a dynamic key with the decoding work done in WASM for more obscurity to throw the common downloader and reverser off would have the same effect without the intrusion into my computing device. But it is what it is really. Not really disagreeing with you.
arbitrage 5y ago
[flagged]
marcodiego 5y ago
You're mixing up things. DRM goal is not to prevent copies, its goal is to give media producers control over the distributors.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  Care to elaborate? What are they gaining from that?
  - wnevets 5y ago
    I'm assuming the commenter you replied to is talking about the fact legitimate distributors usually follow the law. They're going to pay the large sums of money instead of breaking the DRM.
    - mook 5y ago
      But they would be paying the same money without the DRM too; they're paying to be legitimate, regardless of whether the DRM is there.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Giant media conglomerate says to Big distributor: - Hi distributor! Do you want to distribute our content? You just have to make sure players will have this list of anti-features. Big distributor says to manufacturer: - Hi manufacturer! Do you want to play the content we distrubute? You just have to make sure your TV's will have this list of anti-features. And here we are.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      Yep, like the unskippable ads on legitimate DVDs, where you couldn't be certified if you made a DVD player that let you skip those video files like all the others on the disc, and you couldn't legally make an uncertified player because of the DRM.
      - 5y ago
pengaru 5y ago
> But I have seen a lot of my non-technical friends and family having a degraded experience, who pay for their streaming services every month. That's a feature, not a bug, from the perspective of those pushing DRM and other access/consumption controls onto consumers. How many times will someone buy the same content just to find the best combination across all their services and devices to fit their current arrangement? A hell of a lot more than if they just bought a universally playable instance of maximum quality that never gave a poor experience in any viewing context. It's an ugly, exploitive rent-seeking form of "worse is better".
lillecarl 5y ago
You're mixing terms up, you don't rip using a torrent or any other p2p protocol. You download things. You know how Netflix only allows you to stream 1080p in most browsers? That's because they don't support the DRMs content providers use for high-res content. You'll see webrips all the time with 1080p because someone can just record their screen and call it a day, but the 4k content is harder since the DRM prevents everything on your system from recording it. Not sure if webrips are screen recordings or actually downloaded copies, but it doesn't really matter. I have subs for D+ and HBO Max, if they're using DRM I for sure don't notice and don't care about it, I use either the app on my TV or the app on my phone to Chromecast and it's flawless. While content not on these platforms that I've chosen to subscribe to requires me to go though more hoops to get the same experience. It's not that the torrent experience is shit, but things like synced subtitles can be hard to find (requirement when watching with most of my friends and family) for example. I'm part of a quite decent private tracker we'll call "TD" and while I have nothing bad to say about my experience there, I will say the things I pay for work better.
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  > It's not that the torrent experience is shit, but things like synced subtitles can be hard to find (requirement when watching with most of my friends and family) for example. Try out subdl[1]. It can work out the correct subtitles to download (based on a hash of the movie file apparently) and usually works well for me. I used to do this process manually but since trying out this tool I've been able to rely on it >95% of the time. Don't assume the subtitles provided by the paid service are good quality. I've on a few occasions been unsatisfied by the subtitles provided by Netflix, and checked out subtitles from other unofficial sources to find these are much better. This is especially true for foreign language subtitles--the translations Netflix has is really poor quality for some shows and much better ones can be found elsewhere. One excellent example of this is the German show 'The Same Sky' which has terrible English subtitles that actually makes the shows unwatchable. The only consistently good thing about Netflix subtitles is that the timing is more or less correct. Not sure about other streaming service as I don't generally use the others much. [1]: https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl
kybernetikos 5y ago
Recently tried to play a streaming service film on a second screen from my phone, but it wasn't allowed. This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client. But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is. When I travel, I'm often not allowed to view shows that I watch in my home country on the streaming service, even though I'm using my own account on the same machine. On top of all that, I worry that at some point one of the major services will arbitrarily cut off my access and any media I've 'purchased' will be lost. In the old days, your household insurance would pay to replace DVDs stolen or lost to a fire. I doubt that household insurance these days covers loss of access to google or amazon prime video, but the monetary value of these libraries could be enormous. It's all stupid. The big media companies killed the companies offering 'dvd locker' type streaming services, where you legitimately bought and owned the DVDs, but the company allowed you to stream them over the internet. That would have been a nice way of doing it. I find our descent into a culture where nobody owns anything but everything costs as much or more for temporary access as it did for ownership disappointing. Even people whose ideology praises property rights above almost all else don't seem to mind that they actually have those rights in fewer and fewer things of consequence.
- fomine3 5y ago
  > This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client. > But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is. I believe that's why the restriction exists.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    Whatever the reason it results in a bad disjointed experience for the user. Besides I can't work out a way that the restriction makes sense. The app knows that I'm streaming this film not playing it from download, so restricting what I can do based on the fact that I could have downloaded it but didn't would be really weird.
    - 5y ago

antihero 5y ago

It's such a chain - even if a distributer didn't want to use DRM, the buck will stop with a lawyer for the content owners who's job it is to do everything in their power to make sure their clients get paid for the content. Why would one of those make it easier to pirate? Corporate drone logic man.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Because they can sell more views if paying customers are happy. I refuse to pay for Netflix because even if paid I wouldn't be able to watch the content (including Netflix originals where the "rightsholders don't allow it" argument doesn't make much sense) in reasonable quality. Meanwhile, people can watch it from an unlicensed source without paying (legality varies by country but generally low risk for users), and as long as adblock works, the experience really isn't much worse than with Netflix.
- darkwater 5y ago
  I'm all against DRMs but the friction nowadays is, if you stick to one platform, almost zero, way less than your average pirated experience. Now, if we talk about platforms balkanization and how you have to shell out 50€-$/month if you want to enjoy just the best content from major platforms, that's another topic.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    I agree it’s really cheap. I know people spending three times that for some cable tv service which comes with adverts in the middle of programs! At some point streaming will devolve to that, and it will be back to torrenting as the content providers kill the goose that lays the golden egg
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    The pirated sites are often streaming sites similar to Netflix. Search for a movie, click play. Quality of service does vary, but the catalogue tends to be much bigger. As you pointed out, "sticking to one platform" isn't an option because the platform most likely won't have the content you're actually looking for. So step 1 is figuring out which platform that is. Step 2 is probably logging in if you don't keep persistent cookies, and that assumes you're subscribed. By this time your movie is already playing if you take the "alternative" approach. Even if you didn't mind shelling out 50 EUR/month + whatever extra per-movie surcharges Disney+ charges, the balkanization would still cause significant friction.

remus 5y ago

Case in point: I can't listen to spotify on my laptop if I've got my external monitors plugged in via USB-C. Not a problem with MP3s of course.

karmakaze 5y ago
I've never had this issue. Spotify (on Mac) uses the computer's sound output setting (laptop speakers or monitor), unless you choose another destination with the Spotify 'device' option.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Presumably there's something incompatible with how the Spotify client plays audio and how his system handles audio playback. His point still stands though - with MP3s he can use an alternative player, with Spotify he can't.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    You can use the web client which uses the browsers audio interfacing.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    I use an ncurses Spotify client (I forget what) or a web browser to listen on my computer (normally I do it on the phone and airplay to the required speakers). Never had an issue.
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    My problem with Spotify isn't the DRM, since I use it mostly to play either background music or find different things to listen to--like I used to use satellite radio. The problem with Spotify is that the artists (for the most part) get so little while providing the content.
    - 323 5y ago
      > The problem with Spotify is that the artists (for the most part) get so little while providing the content. That's because there is too much supply of music. Attention is the scarce thing today.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tomxor 5y ago

Yeah, I don't know in what world DRM is supposed to stop people ripping stuff, it only seems to hurt paying users, ultimately if it comes out of a screen you can always capture the output, no amount of DRM will ever prevent this so why bother <insert conspiracy vs Hanlon's razor theories here> . The irony is that as a Linux user (only SD for us), and a user with poor internet and thus shitty streaming speed, DRM pushes me towards torrenting everything I "buy" from these platforms anyway, just for the privileged of being able to watch what i'm paying for without being a blurry over-compressed mess, without having my device rooted by a third party, and not needing to be blessed with a consistent high speed internet connection. I've said it before, torrenting today is as good as the experience of buying music on a physical medium in the 90s... you bought it, took it home, and played it in fully quality uninterrupted, END OF STORY. streaming services still haven't matched this experience.

derekp7 5y ago
The "paying users" is exactly the group that DRM is designed to hurt (control). There is a large class of users that won't mess with torrents or whatever for a number of reasons. Ones that apply to me are 1) I don't want my internet service cut if the ISP gets a complaint, 2) Yes, I know I can use a VPN service to get around (1), but then I'd have to find a trusted VPN and there have been ones in the past that were outed as honey pots. 3) You have to be part of the "scene" to work around (1) and (2). 4) I have some disposable income, so at this point in my life I don't feel a "sting" by paying 5 - 7 bucks a month for a streaming service. I'm sure that for other people, lack of familiarity with how to get content through unauthorized means. Now for the control that they want over users like me. If I could easily do it, I'd subscribe to one service, grab a bunch of content to watch later, then unsubscribe a month later and go to the next service in line. Also they want to control how I use the media, such as watching offline (by using the "download to watch later" button they provide, they can ensure that I don't download it to all my friends' devices, and that I still am a paying customer at the time I decide to watch later).
- therein 5y ago
  They could achieve the same chilling effect on the "I'll just download it by using a chrome extension" crowd by having simple convoluted scheme in the way they retrieve the data. It isn't unseen, downloading them in chunks even is sufficient to throw these people off. Simple xor with a dynamic key with the decoding work done in WASM for more obscurity to throw the common downloader and reverser off would have the same effect without the intrusion into my computing device. But it is what it is really. Not really disagreeing with you.

arbitrage 5y ago

[flagged]

marcodiego 5y ago

You're mixing up things. DRM goal is not to prevent copies, its goal is to give media producers control over the distributors.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
Care to elaborate? What are they gaining from that?
- wnevets 5y ago
  I'm assuming the commenter you replied to is talking about the fact legitimate distributors usually follow the law. They're going to pay the large sums of money instead of breaking the DRM.
  - mook 5y ago
    But they would be paying the same money without the DRM too; they're paying to be legitimate, regardless of whether the DRM is there.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Giant media conglomerate says to Big distributor: - Hi distributor! Do you want to distribute our content? You just have to make sure players will have this list of anti-features. Big distributor says to manufacturer: - Hi manufacturer! Do you want to play the content we distrubute? You just have to make sure your TV's will have this list of anti-features. And here we are.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Yep, like the unskippable ads on legitimate DVDs, where you couldn't be certified if you made a DVD player that let you skip those video files like all the others on the disc, and you couldn't legally make an uncertified player because of the DRM.
    - 5y ago

pengaru 5y ago

> But I have seen a lot of my non-technical friends and family having a degraded experience, who pay for their streaming services every month. That's a feature, not a bug, from the perspective of those pushing DRM and other access/consumption controls onto consumers. How many times will someone buy the same content just to find the best combination across all their services and devices to fit their current arrangement? A hell of a lot more than if they just bought a universally playable instance of maximum quality that never gave a poor experience in any viewing context. It's an ugly, exploitive rent-seeking form of "worse is better".

lillecarl 5y ago

You're mixing terms up, you don't rip using a torrent or any other p2p protocol. You download things. You know how Netflix only allows you to stream 1080p in most browsers? That's because they don't support the DRMs content providers use for high-res content. You'll see webrips all the time with 1080p because someone can just record their screen and call it a day, but the 4k content is harder since the DRM prevents everything on your system from recording it. Not sure if webrips are screen recordings or actually downloaded copies, but it doesn't really matter. I have subs for D+ and HBO Max, if they're using DRM I for sure don't notice and don't care about it, I use either the app on my TV or the app on my phone to Chromecast and it's flawless. While content not on these platforms that I've chosen to subscribe to requires me to go though more hoops to get the same experience. It's not that the torrent experience is shit, but things like synced subtitles can be hard to find (requirement when watching with most of my friends and family) for example. I'm part of a quite decent private tracker we'll call "TD" and while I have nothing bad to say about my experience there, I will say the things I pay for work better.

kiwijamo 5y ago
> It's not that the torrent experience is shit, but things like synced subtitles can be hard to find (requirement when watching with most of my friends and family) for example. Try out subdl[1]. It can work out the correct subtitles to download (based on a hash of the movie file apparently) and usually works well for me. I used to do this process manually but since trying out this tool I've been able to rely on it >95% of the time. Don't assume the subtitles provided by the paid service are good quality. I've on a few occasions been unsatisfied by the subtitles provided by Netflix, and checked out subtitles from other unofficial sources to find these are much better. This is especially true for foreign language subtitles--the translations Netflix has is really poor quality for some shows and much better ones can be found elsewhere. One excellent example of this is the German show 'The Same Sky' which has terrible English subtitles that actually makes the shows unwatchable. The only consistently good thing about Netflix subtitles is that the timing is more or less correct. Not sure about other streaming service as I don't generally use the others much. [1]: https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl

kybernetikos 5y ago

Recently tried to play a streaming service film on a second screen from my phone, but it wasn't allowed. This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client. But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is. When I travel, I'm often not allowed to view shows that I watch in my home country on the streaming service, even though I'm using my own account on the same machine. On top of all that, I worry that at some point one of the major services will arbitrarily cut off my access and any media I've 'purchased' will be lost. In the old days, your household insurance would pay to replace DVDs stolen or lost to a fire. I doubt that household insurance these days covers loss of access to google or amazon prime video, but the monetary value of these libraries could be enormous. It's all stupid. The big media companies killed the companies offering 'dvd locker' type streaming services, where you legitimately bought and owned the DVDs, but the company allowed you to stream them over the internet. That would have been a nice way of doing it. I find our descent into a culture where nobody owns anything but everything costs as much or more for temporary access as it did for ownership disappointing. Even people whose ideology praises property rights above almost all else don't seem to mind that they actually have those rights in fewer and fewer things of consequence.

fomine3 5y ago
> This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client. > But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is. I believe that's why the restriction exists.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  Whatever the reason it results in a bad disjointed experience for the user. Besides I can't work out a way that the restriction makes sense. The app knows that I'm streaming this film not playing it from download, so restricting what I can do based on the fact that I could have downloaded it but didn't would be really weird.
  - 5y ago