8 ms·

The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long e

by reisse 4y ago

The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done. They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

goosedragons 4y ago
I'm sure it's probably a requirement from all the 3rd party media companies. They didn't seem to like VPNs either. But I also wouldn't be surprised if Netflix wants it to keep high quality versions at least off pirate sites.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  4k rips land on usenet super quickly though and they're excellent quality. HDCP is already easily bypassed at this point.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    But probably re-encodes, so filesizes are bigger for close enough quality. A direct crack of the encryption would be best from a space-quality perspective. Doesn’t really matter much though in most of the world as it used to though.
    - echelon_musk 4y ago
      This is incorrect. See the difference between a scene WEB release and a P2P WEB-Rip. > The landscape of the WEB scene has changed in the last four years. > Subsequently, the ability to defeat DRM has become ubiquitous. https://scenerules.org/n.html?id=2020_WDX.nfo https://scenerules.org/n.html?id=2020_WDX.nfo
admax88qqq 4y ago
Full stack protection from decoder the screen is coming. IIRC you can only play 4k Netflix on a smart TV which controls the entire stack from network to pixels
- stefan_ 4y ago
  You know we had that, they called it HDCP. It continues to frustrate users of beamers and what not today, despite the root key being leaked for many years now. Even before the key leak, it never did anything to stop shows appearing as torrents on day one. It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so.
  - gpm 4y ago
    > It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so. Evidence does appear to point to you being right, but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people? A significant investment of time and money, from highly a highly skilled individual, for... bragging rights? Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?
    - lib-dev 4y ago
      Fun technical challenge that many people will be grateful for.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      > but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people? Content owners really seem to underestimate how far people are willing to go for kudos alone on setup cost if the reproduction cost is zero. Also for some people it's a point of philosophy / concern about future-proofing. Guy I knew back in the day was the biggest torrenter around... He was stuffing a hard drive full of '80s cartoons. His attitude on it was that the creators and owners did not care if those half-hour toy commercials would be around in 100 years, but he did.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Netflix doesn’t do it because they want to. They do it because it’s part of the licensing agreements they sign to get content.
- Aissen 4y ago
  If it was the whole story, they'd put their own content (the rare ones for which they have 100% of the rights) with no DRM and the maximum resolution. But they don't do that. In some cases you might get 720p (Netflix content) instead of 540p (third party) with widevine L3.
  - pitaj 4y ago
    It's probably more complexity to exclude certain content than to treat everything the same.
    - koolba 4y ago
      Technical complexity aside, it’d be a business risk to accidentally mislabel a stream as not requiring DRM too.
      - rfoo 4y ago
        Netflix already labels them. They show only their original content to users which are suspected to be behind VPNs. [1] [1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-can-i-only-see-netflix-originals-on-netflix/ https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-can-i-only-see-net...
        _ea1k 4y ago
        The consequences of mislabeling it likely vary based on the severity. Mislabeling and presenting without encryption is likely to be a bigger issue with content providers than accidentally allowing it via a VPN.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
lycos 4y ago
I also wonder that about any audio/video DRM, but like most things it's probably something that is agreed upon in the many licenses that they'll protect the copyrighted material to their best ability. Even though everybody knows it's pointless and even ends up being a nuisance for some legit use cases like this story. Just reminds me of years ago when building websites for clients they always wanted me to block right clicks and put a transparent image over a jpeg so people can't right click/save even though I told them it does nothing against people who want to copy the image. "But it's a bigger hurdle to do so!" well, not really.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  > well, not really But, it literally is.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nimbius 4y ago
they do this because the board has a financial obligation to its shareholders to mitigate risk. they do this because the board also has a contract obligation to its content providers, artists and unions to safeguard against unlawful piracy.
- darig 4y ago
  [dead]
phh 4y ago
> The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? Well that investment is pretty low since Widevine is quite easy to integrate and the licensing cost is 0 for Netflix. The thing is, you do need some Digital Rights Management somewhere. If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just share that mp4 url, and you could watch movies directly off Netflix servers (so it would cost even more than torrenting). You could include temporary tokens in your URLs, but then you need your CDN to be a bit dynamic. Or you could have a completely static CDN, but the files are encrypted, and you download the encryption key off a server dedicated to DRM that will check you're properly authed. And well, here you've re-created Widevine. Widevine do provide more protections than just that, but that's just free for Netflix, they literally just have to switch some booleans. > They seem to make user experience worse for nothing. Yeah I mostly agree. As I mentioned before, there are some usages of DRM that are not completely non-sense. What kills me is the HDCP requirement. Many TVs have HDCP compatibility issues (for instance my Samsung TV has the two 4k60p yuv444 hdcp 1 ports and one 4k60p yuv420 hdcp2 port, so I need to chose between 4k content and true 4k resolution), while HDCP2 is utterly broken: you can find decrypting dongles for 20€ directly from Amazon.
- mholt 4y ago
  > If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, I don't think anyone's suggesting that there's NO authentication. Authentication is a relatively trivial, commonly-accepted necessary nuissance that is distinct from DRM.
- asveikau 4y ago
  > If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just share that mp4 url, You seem to think not having this specific DRM mandates a particular transport and authentication scheme? These are not at all related. Really it sounds like what is being requested is that there not be non-portable binary blobs. That's it.
nl 4y ago
The point is to make the Netflix experience better for the average person than the experience of using a pirated source. And - IMHO - it works. I used to use Bittorrent quite a lot. There was a bunch of US shows I watched that were unavailable in Australia and so I had a pretty decent setup where things would automatically download when torrents were posted. Life happened, I stopped using it and haven't really tried torrents for maybe 10 years. I tried to get a show recently that isn't available here. Wow, that's a pretty bad experience - try to find the correct show, work out what client you need, find one that has seeders, downlaod one and the codec is wrong for my device etc I just gave up. I can get NVidia software working on non-standard Linux builds (which I think is a pretty high level of technical competency) but for most people getting pirated content isn't worth the effort. By putting DRM on the content, they limit distribution to people who know how to remove it and then to people who are experienced at finding what they want on pirate sites. TL;DR: The user experience is much better for most people. Pirated content has such a bad user experience, but people who use it have invested a lot of time working out what works and don't realize the effort it takes.
- Guillaume86 4y ago
  Google the arr stack + Plex. Should give you your own personal Netflix without much work, or so I heard...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lelandbatey 4y ago
    I want to signal boost this a bit because it's so incredible once you see it. The "arr stack" is a suite of interconnected software that automates finding pirate media by integrating with a HUGE number of ways to search for torrents, Usenet, etc. It's all self-hostable and with Overseerr as "pick what to download" frontend and Plex as the media viewer, it works so well that it's a genuine Netflix replacement, so easy that parents can use it.
- torified 4y ago
  What? Piracy is so easy. Go to torrent site, download torrent, click on file. It really couldn't be easier. There's no DRM on the torrent. If you have a semi-modern GPU you can play any codec you might download. I'm really not sure what you're talking about, unless you're going to some weird torrent site. Piracy has a great user experience compared to paying for DRM and having to use a particular app instead of your preferred player.
safety1st 4y ago
IIRC, the reason for incorporating DRM was that the major studios wouldn't license anything to them if they didn't.
phendrenad2 4y ago
It's actually quite simple. DRM exists so regular users can't easily rip the stream and share it with friends. Sure, the video is already available on pirate sites. But theres a big difference between accepting a video file from a friend, and having to navigate the pirate sites (which are also full of viruses).
smeagull 4y ago
I think their licensing agreements probably mandate that Netflix needs some sort of DRM to check a box.
scarface74 4y ago
> They seem to make user experience worse for nothing. The user experience worse for all of the Linux users who want to watch Netflix on a computer? What percentage of the market do you think that is?
Mindwipe 4y ago
>It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents This hasn't been consistently true for a while. Stranger Things season 4 did not appear in high resolutions online for a month after release.
dathinab 4y ago
Widevine is not from Netflix per-se but for all kind of DRM content, including that from other streaming services for all kind of media. Furthermore it is _not_ Netflix decision, but a decision legally forced onto them by companies which whole purpose it is to make money from selling copyright which have huge legal influence in both the US and the EU. (Through Netflix does has some influence on the legal framework leading to to, but very limited compared to e.g. Disney.) If Netflix wants to have any 3rd party content, even "old crappy stuff", they need DRM (or way more power/influence). Even for first party content due to round about legal things they might be required to have DRM, I think. (But I am not completely sure).

by reisse 4y ago

goosedragons 4y ago

I'm sure it's probably a requirement from all the 3rd party media companies. They didn't seem to like VPNs either. But I also wouldn't be surprised if Netflix wants it to keep high quality versions at least off pirate sites.

alfalfasprout 4y ago
4k rips land on usenet super quickly though and they're excellent quality. HDCP is already easily bypassed at this point.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  But probably re-encodes, so filesizes are bigger for close enough quality. A direct crack of the encryption would be best from a space-quality perspective. Doesn’t really matter much though in most of the world as it used to though.
  - echelon_musk 4y ago
    This is incorrect. See the difference between a scene WEB release and a P2P WEB-Rip. > The landscape of the WEB scene has changed in the last four years. > Subsequently, the ability to defeat DRM has become ubiquitous. https://scenerules.org/n.html?id=2020_WDX.nfo https://scenerules.org/n.html?id=2020_WDX.nfo

admax88qqq 4y ago

Full stack protection from decoder the screen is coming. IIRC you can only play 4k Netflix on a smart TV which controls the entire stack from network to pixels

stefan_ 4y ago
You know we had that, they called it HDCP. It continues to frustrate users of beamers and what not today, despite the root key being leaked for many years now. Even before the key leak, it never did anything to stop shows appearing as torrents on day one. It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so.
- gpm 4y ago
  > It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so. Evidence does appear to point to you being right, but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people? A significant investment of time and money, from highly a highly skilled individual, for... bragging rights? Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?
  - lib-dev 4y ago
    Fun technical challenge that many people will be grateful for.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people? Content owners really seem to underestimate how far people are willing to go for kudos alone on setup cost if the reproduction cost is zero. Also for some people it's a point of philosophy / concern about future-proofing. Guy I knew back in the day was the biggest torrenter around... He was stuffing a hard drive full of '80s cartoons. His attitude on it was that the creators and owners did not care if those half-hour toy commercials would be around in 100 years, but he did.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

Netflix doesn’t do it because they want to. They do it because it’s part of the licensing agreements they sign to get content.

Aissen 4y ago
If it was the whole story, they'd put their own content (the rare ones for which they have 100% of the rights) with no DRM and the maximum resolution. But they don't do that. In some cases you might get 720p (Netflix content) instead of 540p (third party) with widevine L3.
- pitaj 4y ago
  It's probably more complexity to exclude certain content than to treat everything the same.
  - koolba 4y ago
    Technical complexity aside, it’d be a business risk to accidentally mislabel a stream as not requiring DRM too.
    - rfoo 4y ago
      Netflix already labels them. They show only their original content to users which are suspected to be behind VPNs. [1] [1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-can-i-only-see-netflix-originals-on-netflix/ https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-can-i-only-see-net...
      - _ea1k 4y ago
        The consequences of mislabeling it likely vary based on the severity. Mislabeling and presenting without encryption is likely to be a bigger issue with content providers than accidentally allowing it via a VPN.
- heleninboodler 4y ago

lycos 4y ago

I also wonder that about any audio/video DRM, but like most things it's probably something that is agreed upon in the many licenses that they'll protect the copyrighted material to their best ability. Even though everybody knows it's pointless and even ends up being a nuisance for some legit use cases like this story. Just reminds me of years ago when building websites for clients they always wanted me to block right clicks and put a transparent image over a jpeg so people can't right click/save even though I told them it does nothing against people who want to copy the image. "But it's a bigger hurdle to do so!" well, not really.

phendrenad2 4y ago
> well, not really But, it literally is.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nimbius 4y ago

they do this because the board has a financial obligation to its shareholders to mitigate risk. they do this because the board also has a contract obligation to its content providers, artists and unions to safeguard against unlawful piracy.

darig 4y ago
[dead]

phh 4y ago

> The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? Well that investment is pretty low since Widevine is quite easy to integrate and the licensing cost is 0 for Netflix. The thing is, you do need some Digital Rights Management somewhere. If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just share that mp4 url, and you could watch movies directly off Netflix servers (so it would cost even more than torrenting). You could include temporary tokens in your URLs, but then you need your CDN to be a bit dynamic. Or you could have a completely static CDN, but the files are encrypted, and you download the encryption key off a server dedicated to DRM that will check you're properly authed. And well, here you've re-created Widevine. Widevine do provide more protections than just that, but that's just free for Netflix, they literally just have to switch some booleans. > They seem to make user experience worse for nothing. Yeah I mostly agree. As I mentioned before, there are some usages of DRM that are not completely non-sense. What kills me is the HDCP requirement. Many TVs have HDCP compatibility issues (for instance my Samsung TV has the two 4k60p yuv444 hdcp 1 ports and one 4k60p yuv420 hdcp2 port, so I need to chose between 4k content and true 4k resolution), while HDCP2 is utterly broken: you can find decrypting dongles for 20€ directly from Amazon.

mholt 4y ago
> If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, I don't think anyone's suggesting that there's NO authentication. Authentication is a relatively trivial, commonly-accepted necessary nuissance that is distinct from DRM.
asveikau 4y ago
> If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just share that mp4 url, You seem to think not having this specific DRM mandates a particular transport and authentication scheme? These are not at all related. Really it sounds like what is being requested is that there not be non-portable binary blobs. That's it.

nl 4y ago

The point is to make the Netflix experience better for the average person than the experience of using a pirated source. And - IMHO - it works. I used to use Bittorrent quite a lot. There was a bunch of US shows I watched that were unavailable in Australia and so I had a pretty decent setup where things would automatically download when torrents were posted. Life happened, I stopped using it and haven't really tried torrents for maybe 10 years. I tried to get a show recently that isn't available here. Wow, that's a pretty bad experience - try to find the correct show, work out what client you need, find one that has seeders, downlaod one and the codec is wrong for my device etc I just gave up. I can get NVidia software working on non-standard Linux builds (which I think is a pretty high level of technical competency) but for most people getting pirated content isn't worth the effort. By putting DRM on the content, they limit distribution to people who know how to remove it and then to people who are experienced at finding what they want on pirate sites. TL;DR: The user experience is much better for most people. Pirated content has such a bad user experience, but people who use it have invested a lot of time working out what works and don't realize the effort it takes.

Guillaume86 4y ago
Google the arr stack + Plex. Should give you your own personal Netflix without much work, or so I heard...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lelandbatey 4y ago
  I want to signal boost this a bit because it's so incredible once you see it. The "arr stack" is a suite of interconnected software that automates finding pirate media by integrating with a HUGE number of ways to search for torrents, Usenet, etc. It's all self-hostable and with Overseerr as "pick what to download" frontend and Plex as the media viewer, it works so well that it's a genuine Netflix replacement, so easy that parents can use it.
torified 4y ago
What? Piracy is so easy. Go to torrent site, download torrent, click on file. It really couldn't be easier. There's no DRM on the torrent. If you have a semi-modern GPU you can play any codec you might download. I'm really not sure what you're talking about, unless you're going to some weird torrent site. Piracy has a great user experience compared to paying for DRM and having to use a particular app instead of your preferred player.

safety1st 4y ago

IIRC, the reason for incorporating DRM was that the major studios wouldn't license anything to them if they didn't.

phendrenad2 4y ago

It's actually quite simple. DRM exists so regular users can't easily rip the stream and share it with friends. Sure, the video is already available on pirate sites. But theres a big difference between accepting a video file from a friend, and having to navigate the pirate sites (which are also full of viruses).

smeagull 4y ago

I think their licensing agreements probably mandate that Netflix needs some sort of DRM to check a box.

scarface74 4y ago

> They seem to make user experience worse for nothing. The user experience worse for all of the Linux users who want to watch Netflix on a computer? What percentage of the market do you think that is?

Mindwipe 4y ago

>It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents This hasn't been consistently true for a while. Stranger Things season 4 did not appear in high resolutions online for a month after release.

dathinab 4y ago

Widevine is not from Netflix per-se but for all kind of DRM content, including that from other streaming services for all kind of media. Furthermore it is _not_ Netflix decision, but a decision legally forced onto them by companies which whole purpose it is to make money from selling copyright which have huge legal influence in both the US and the EU. (Through Netflix does has some influence on the legal framework leading to to, but very limited compared to e.g. Disney.) If Netflix wants to have any 3rd party content, even "old crappy stuff", they need DRM (or way more power/influence). Even for first party content due to round about legal things they might be required to have DRM, I think. (But I am not completely sure).