6 ms·

Even Widevine L1 is effectively broken. The actual protection offered by it is negligible. Will it stop the average Netflix user from "Right Click -> Save File"

Even Widevine L1 is effectively broken. The actual protection offered by it is negligible. Will it stop the average Netflix user from "Right Click -> Save File" on any episode? Sure. But it does nothing to prevent pirated content from being released on the internet and other people downloading said content. I oppose piracy, but I really wish rightsholders would give up on requiring DRM at this point. It only makes things more annoying for people who legitimately bought the content. At least the music industry went back to offering DRM-free downloads. I hope the video industry gets there as well.

kuschkufan 3y ago
I'd say the music industry went to Spotify and other streaming services. Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sales. And music streaming services do use DRMs like Widevine too, unfortunately.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sales. The music industry did that to themselves though. They went for digital because they thought they could re-sell the same content at 400% mark-up to their previous customers, but in turn they let the genie out of the bag in terms of reproducibility without loss. That's the main reason you see all these 'remastered' releases: to be able to squeeze the lemon a bit more. If they had just stuck to vinyl and cassettes they could have milked that cow for decades to come (but not at the quality level of what they music industry puts out at the moment).
  - pjc50 3y ago
    The music industry never went to digital downloads. They were entirely forced to by competition from Napster from digital CD rips.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      They went to digital when they introduced the CD. That opened the door to people ripping those CDs, if they hadn't gone digital they could have avoided that entirely.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      CD's were the first digital versions. That's what enabled the lossless reproduction that GP is talking about. I don't agree with GP though that they did it to themselves. I think they would have been quickly forced to digitize anyway had they tried to resist the CD
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Sony and Philips (the parents of the CD) were doing this while they were at the same time part of the music industry as such. They didn't resist the CD, they pretty much invented it. It's possible that otherwise another entity would have come up with a practical digital format but without the support of the music industry such a format would have surely failed, especially because initially there were no recordable optical media, which is what you need if you want to introduce a new format without having access to a very large catalogue of music.
        freedomben 3y ago
        ah, fair point, thanks!
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    They went to digital releases because they wanted access to a large customer base. Buying physical music is a chore I certainly don't have time for, nor would I be able to listen to music from an LP or cassette in any of the scenarios I normally listen to music. Plus, LP and cassette audio quality is Very Bad, and LPs wear out. Music was pirated before digital music was a thing, but it brought a way bigger market. The problem now is with how newer streaming services haven't figured out how to pay artists, or have been unwilling to do so. Although, perhaps the value of music has just changed with time.
    - Fatnino 3y ago
      I can tell you first hand that cassette audio could wear out too.
  - rickdeckard 3y ago
    I'm not following. None of the crucial elements for this evolution was actually developed by the music industry If the music industry would have stuck to vinyl and cassettes, the digital era would have still happened. - At some point people would have recorded their vinyls/cassettes to WAV and store offline. - Lossy compression comes along, - People start sharing content online - Music industry is disrupted
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Digitizing a phonograph is a lot harder than ripping a CD.
      - rickdeckard 3y ago
        Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        > Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. The quality of which would have been lower than that of a CD. Incidentally: many phonograph/amplifier combinations had the option (or even a built in) cassette recorder so that part was readily available from the 70's onward. > Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. You're welcome to your opinions as well. > Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. Yes, they do. But they're not close to the quality that you get when you use FLAC on a CD image, or a high quality MP3 encoding (lossy, but not quite that lossy). In order to rip vinyl you will have to do your own A->D, you've already gone through a whole pile of analogue stuff, you will have picked up some hum, lost some high and lost a lot of low. CD audio put master tape quality in the hands of millions and then when MP3 happened suddenly all of that was instantly available. If the required steps had been reliant on someone doing all of that work it would have been a lot less quick in terms of adoption. Building the hardware to do this properly so that you'd get something equivalent to a HiFi set on subsequent output isn't all that easy, especially not if you care about modulation depth. > The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label. That was another required step, but the widespread availability of master tape grade digital content was an enabler as well and I really don't see why you would deny that. FWIW I'm the guy that encoded the dutch broadcast archive for TROS so that they could easily call up tracks without running to the physical archive. Trucks with CDs would arrive and harddrives would go the other way. We did many thousands of them. Without the CDs ripping at 40 speed or so that would have absolutely never happened. Ripping a vinyl record at any level of quality will take you more than an hour, there are all kinds of environmental factors, you'll wear out needles like there is no tomorrow and you're going to be busy fiddling with tone arm pressure and all kinds of finicky bits if you want to get even close to something that's good enough for broadcasters.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  Fortunately, the RIAA actually has an easy-to-read graph of where music industry revenue comes from: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/. In 2022, ~$500m came from music download sales, whereas ~$1700m came from physical sales. And ~$15000m came from streaming. From 2012 to 2017, music download sales were ahead of physical sales.
baybal2 3y ago
[dead]
dna_polymerase 3y ago
I'm not particularly fond of piracy either, but I get people doing it. If I were to consume more media content, I'd probably do the same, the whole shenanigans around which show/movie is with what provider today ruined the experience of modern streaming platforms. Early Netflix (streaming) was perfect, but the movie studios/distributors ruined it, they deserve to suffer.
- vextea 3y ago
  Yes and no, whilst centralization is convenient I don't like the implications of everything being served on say Netflix with no alternatives.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    Early Netflix was also not centralized, as they served pre-existing content. Streaming-service exclusives is what ruined this - but as it's an effective revenue generator (it is the only reason anyone would have 5 different streaming subscriptions), that part is unlikely to go away... But right now, I'd say distributors and national license agreements are the biggest issue. Having to VPN around to find content is a pain, and because each country has its own version of content, which subtitles are available also differ - for example, Danish Netflix generally only has Nordic languages for subtitles, and does not have English subtitles. And then all you get is some low streaming quality. This is the kind of thing that powers the whole "piracy has better UX" argument - having to VPN around, not have the right languages, and getting a poor quality vs. the effort to download a version with whatever subtitles you want. Disney+ is so far the only service I've seen where this is largely a non-issue - but I also want to see stuff not owned by Disney.
  - ldoughty 3y ago
    It's arguable to me whether it's better to centralize vs having seasons 1-3 at one streaming service and 4-7 at another. But I'm not a fan of any of them right now. The market incentive for e.g. Netflix to continue a series ends when they reach a statistical benchmark of assumed new / restarted subscriptions. There's not enough incentive to run a series unless it's like GOT, which brought HBO large numbers of new subscribers every season. Too few people are willing to make a stand and quit Netflix in protest.
rickdeckard 3y ago
> Even Widevine L1 is effectively broken Is there any evidence that Widevine L1 itself is actually broken, instead of let's say Netflix still offering legacy routes to provide HiRes content to some STB's and other devices (routes which are then used by pirates to download the content)?
- dtx1 3y ago
  https://torrentfreak.com/widevine-dump-leaked-code-downloads-hd-video-from-disney-amazon-and-netflix-211227/ https://torrentfreak.com/widevine-dump-leaked-code-downloads...
  - Mindwipe 3y ago
    That's L3, not L1.
    - dtx1 3y ago
      Quote from the Article > That said, there is also a free L1 Content Decryption Module posted in the ‘LenovoTB-X505X-L1-KEY’ repository. A trusted source confirmed to TorrentFreak that this CDM is indeed working. However, as Widevinedump also notes, it may not be active for much longer.
      - Mindwipe 3y ago
        That key was revoked the day the article was published.
        snvzz 3y ago
        A noble sacrifice. Some paying customers will be affected, but it's for the greater good. The streams will continue to get dumped, with different keys.
- Cu3PO42 3y ago
  CVE-2018-6242 allows dumping keys from affected Nvidia Tegra processors that are used, for example, in Nvidia Shields. That hardware flaw is unpatchable in existing units and revoking their keys would mean rendering a large swath of media center devices unable to do their job.
fifteen1506 3y ago
Yup, my Netflix on a recent Android box frequently throws some error code I can't be bothered to check. STB man, plug and play, if I wanted to debug issues I'd use Linux.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  I got -1 don't know why but be advised I do use Linux. But the amount of time I am willing to waste troubleshooting depends on the OS and its advantages to me.
Mindwipe 3y ago
Widevine L1 certainly seems to be holding up well enough to prevent major Netflix shows being released in 4K via torrent sites for weeks or months after launch.
- realusername 3y ago
  And it's holding up content against real customers for years.
- everdrive 3y ago
  Is this just due to the fact that Netflix will only send 720p to a Linux PC running chrome?
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    That fact is directly due to the above, not the other way around.
  - rtsil 3y ago
    I assume the parent was ironic since 4K/Dolby Vision versions of top Netflix shows are actually released by pirates on the very day they are available on the platform.
    - Mindwipe 3y ago
      No, they're not. It's actually quite rare for that to happen. Nobody uploaded Stranger Things S4 in UHD until after the season had finished for example.
throwaway2621 3y ago
My understanding is that technically DRM doesn’t really need to work perfectly to achieve its objective. DRM works in conjunction with anti-circumvention laws. Making a private copy of a copyrighted material is legal in many jurisdictions, it is however illegal to circumvent DRM. So effectively by protecting content with any reasonable DRM, the content owner gets more control on the user than copyright law give them. Without DRM you could subscribe to a streaming service and legally record all the content without infringing any copyright. With DRM you are forbidden to do so and anybody helping you doing it is in hot waters: end result no equivalent of a VCR for the internet era.
- phh 3y ago
  > Making a private copy of a copyrighted material is legal in many jurisdictions, it is however illegal to circumvent DRM. I believe that Europe developers are the most prolific in matters related to multimedia, including DRM. And well, European Union does protect the research against DRM. It's "only" for interoperability reason, but since DRMs are never universal, that should be fine.

kuschkufan 3y ago

I'd say the music industry went to Spotify and other streaming services. Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sales. And music streaming services do use DRMs like Widevine too, unfortunately.

jacquesm 3y ago
> Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sales. The music industry did that to themselves though. They went for digital because they thought they could re-sell the same content at 400% mark-up to their previous customers, but in turn they let the genie out of the bag in terms of reproducibility without loss. That's the main reason you see all these 'remastered' releases: to be able to squeeze the lemon a bit more. If they had just stuck to vinyl and cassettes they could have milked that cow for decades to come (but not at the quality level of what they music industry puts out at the moment).
- pjc50 3y ago
  The music industry never went to digital downloads. They were entirely forced to by competition from Napster from digital CD rips.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    They went to digital when they introduced the CD. That opened the door to people ripping those CDs, if they hadn't gone digital they could have avoided that entirely.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    CD's were the first digital versions. That's what enabled the lossless reproduction that GP is talking about. I don't agree with GP though that they did it to themselves. I think they would have been quickly forced to digitize anyway had they tried to resist the CD
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Sony and Philips (the parents of the CD) were doing this while they were at the same time part of the music industry as such. They didn't resist the CD, they pretty much invented it. It's possible that otherwise another entity would have come up with a practical digital format but without the support of the music industry such a format would have surely failed, especially because initially there were no recordable optical media, which is what you need if you want to introduce a new format without having access to a very large catalogue of music.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        ah, fair point, thanks!
- arghwhat 3y ago
  They went to digital releases because they wanted access to a large customer base. Buying physical music is a chore I certainly don't have time for, nor would I be able to listen to music from an LP or cassette in any of the scenarios I normally listen to music. Plus, LP and cassette audio quality is Very Bad, and LPs wear out. Music was pirated before digital music was a thing, but it brought a way bigger market. The problem now is with how newer streaming services haven't figured out how to pay artists, or have been unwilling to do so. Although, perhaps the value of music has just changed with time.
  - Fatnino 3y ago
    I can tell you first hand that cassette audio could wear out too.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  I'm not following. None of the crucial elements for this evolution was actually developed by the music industry If the music industry would have stuck to vinyl and cassettes, the digital era would have still happened. - At some point people would have recorded their vinyls/cassettes to WAV and store offline. - Lossy compression comes along, - People start sharing content online - Music industry is disrupted
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Digitizing a phonograph is a lot harder than ripping a CD.
    - rickdeckard 3y ago
      Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        > Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. The quality of which would have been lower than that of a CD. Incidentally: many phonograph/amplifier combinations had the option (or even a built in) cassette recorder so that part was readily available from the 70's onward. > Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. You're welcome to your opinions as well. > Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. Yes, they do. But they're not close to the quality that you get when you use FLAC on a CD image, or a high quality MP3 encoding (lossy, but not quite that lossy). In order to rip vinyl you will have to do your own A->D, you've already gone through a whole pile of analogue stuff, you will have picked up some hum, lost some high and lost a lot of low. CD audio put master tape quality in the hands of millions and then when MP3 happened suddenly all of that was instantly available. If the required steps had been reliant on someone doing all of that work it would have been a lot less quick in terms of adoption. Building the hardware to do this properly so that you'd get something equivalent to a HiFi set on subsequent output isn't all that easy, especially not if you care about modulation depth. > The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label. That was another required step, but the widespread availability of master tape grade digital content was an enabler as well and I really don't see why you would deny that. FWIW I'm the guy that encoded the dutch broadcast archive for TROS so that they could easily call up tracks without running to the physical archive. Trucks with CDs would arrive and harddrives would go the other way. We did many thousands of them. Without the CDs ripping at 40 speed or so that would have absolutely never happened. Ripping a vinyl record at any level of quality will take you more than an hour, there are all kinds of environmental factors, you'll wear out needles like there is no tomorrow and you're going to be busy fiddling with tone arm pressure and all kinds of finicky bits if you want to get even close to something that's good enough for broadcasters.
jcranmer 3y ago
Fortunately, the RIAA actually has an easy-to-read graph of where music industry revenue comes from: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/. In 2022, ~$500m came from music download sales, whereas ~$1700m came from physical sales. And ~$15000m came from streaming. From 2012 to 2017, music download sales were ahead of physical sales.

baybal2 3y ago

[dead]

dna_polymerase 3y ago

I'm not particularly fond of piracy either, but I get people doing it. If I were to consume more media content, I'd probably do the same, the whole shenanigans around which show/movie is with what provider today ruined the experience of modern streaming platforms. Early Netflix (streaming) was perfect, but the movie studios/distributors ruined it, they deserve to suffer.

vextea 3y ago
Yes and no, whilst centralization is convenient I don't like the implications of everything being served on say Netflix with no alternatives.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Early Netflix was also not centralized, as they served pre-existing content. Streaming-service exclusives is what ruined this - but as it's an effective revenue generator (it is the only reason anyone would have 5 different streaming subscriptions), that part is unlikely to go away... But right now, I'd say distributors and national license agreements are the biggest issue. Having to VPN around to find content is a pain, and because each country has its own version of content, which subtitles are available also differ - for example, Danish Netflix generally only has Nordic languages for subtitles, and does not have English subtitles. And then all you get is some low streaming quality. This is the kind of thing that powers the whole "piracy has better UX" argument - having to VPN around, not have the right languages, and getting a poor quality vs. the effort to download a version with whatever subtitles you want. Disney+ is so far the only service I've seen where this is largely a non-issue - but I also want to see stuff not owned by Disney.
- ldoughty 3y ago
  It's arguable to me whether it's better to centralize vs having seasons 1-3 at one streaming service and 4-7 at another. But I'm not a fan of any of them right now. The market incentive for e.g. Netflix to continue a series ends when they reach a statistical benchmark of assumed new / restarted subscriptions. There's not enough incentive to run a series unless it's like GOT, which brought HBO large numbers of new subscribers every season. Too few people are willing to make a stand and quit Netflix in protest.

rickdeckard 3y ago

> Even Widevine L1 is effectively broken Is there any evidence that Widevine L1 itself is actually broken, instead of let's say Netflix still offering legacy routes to provide HiRes content to some STB's and other devices (routes which are then used by pirates to download the content)?

dtx1 3y ago
https://torrentfreak.com/widevine-dump-leaked-code-downloads-hd-video-from-disney-amazon-and-netflix-211227/ https://torrentfreak.com/widevine-dump-leaked-code-downloads...
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  That's L3, not L1.
  - dtx1 3y ago
    Quote from the Article > That said, there is also a free L1 Content Decryption Module posted in the ‘LenovoTB-X505X-L1-KEY’ repository. A trusted source confirmed to TorrentFreak that this CDM is indeed working. However, as Widevinedump also notes, it may not be active for much longer.
    - Mindwipe 3y ago
      That key was revoked the day the article was published.
      - snvzz 3y ago
        A noble sacrifice. Some paying customers will be affected, but it's for the greater good. The streams will continue to get dumped, with different keys.
Cu3PO42 3y ago
CVE-2018-6242 allows dumping keys from affected Nvidia Tegra processors that are used, for example, in Nvidia Shields. That hardware flaw is unpatchable in existing units and revoking their keys would mean rendering a large swath of media center devices unable to do their job.

fifteen1506 3y ago

Yup, my Netflix on a recent Android box frequently throws some error code I can't be bothered to check. STB man, plug and play, if I wanted to debug issues I'd use Linux.

fifteen1506 3y ago
I got -1 don't know why but be advised I do use Linux. But the amount of time I am willing to waste troubleshooting depends on the OS and its advantages to me.

Mindwipe 3y ago

Widevine L1 certainly seems to be holding up well enough to prevent major Netflix shows being released in 4K via torrent sites for weeks or months after launch.

realusername 3y ago
And it's holding up content against real customers for years.
everdrive 3y ago
Is this just due to the fact that Netflix will only send 720p to a Linux PC running chrome?
- zamadatix 3y ago
  That fact is directly due to the above, not the other way around.
- rtsil 3y ago
  I assume the parent was ironic since 4K/Dolby Vision versions of top Netflix shows are actually released by pirates on the very day they are available on the platform.
  - Mindwipe 3y ago
    No, they're not. It's actually quite rare for that to happen. Nobody uploaded Stranger Things S4 in UHD until after the season had finished for example.

throwaway2621 3y ago

My understanding is that technically DRM doesn’t really need to work perfectly to achieve its objective. DRM works in conjunction with anti-circumvention laws. Making a private copy of a copyrighted material is legal in many jurisdictions, it is however illegal to circumvent DRM. So effectively by protecting content with any reasonable DRM, the content owner gets more control on the user than copyright law give them. Without DRM you could subscribe to a streaming service and legally record all the content without infringing any copyright. With DRM you are forbidden to do so and anybody helping you doing it is in hot waters: end result no equivalent of a VCR for the internet era.

phh 3y ago
> Making a private copy of a copyrighted material is legal in many jurisdictions, it is however illegal to circumvent DRM. I believe that Europe developers are the most prolific in matters related to multimedia, including DRM. And well, European Union does protect the research against DRM. It's "only" for interoperability reason, but since DRMs are never universal, that should be fine.