5 ms·

The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. It's a cat and mouse game, but I wouldn't discount these efforts as a mere spe

by tasn 2y ago

The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. It's a cat and mouse game, but I wouldn't discount these efforts as a mere speed bump. Screen enforced DRM will make things much harder. A motivated individual with the right tools and hardware hacking know how may be able to jailbreak a screen to record stuff, but that's going to make things out of reach for most people.

geerlingguy 2y ago
With how good modern screens are, and how good cameras are (and how easy both are to hack), you could always play back the video and capture the photons through the air. There was something called Macrovision back in the VHS/DVD days that tried to defeat digital/analog conversion, and I'm sure visual techniques could be devised... But I imagine someone with a good OLED and a good mirrorless camera (or even a cell phone nowadays) could make a pretty good 4K replication of any media that displays.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  Especially when you add HDR to the mix, I think it's still extremely difficult to get a high quality screen recording, if only because it's so hard to get the exposure right.
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    You could record multiple exposures and merge them after the fact (and I agree the result would likely be subpar, but better than it's ever been at any previous point in time)
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      Yeah, I guess it really depends on what your standards are. It's certainly getting better but I have trouble imagining anyone would consider this a good solution. At minimum, if this was what pirates had to resort to, then I would think the DRM has done it's job, in that it very significantly degraded video quality for the pirates.
  - sudosysgen 2y ago
    Modern dedicated cameras have far more dynamic range than any HDR TV in practice. The movies have to be recorded somehow :)
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      > The movies have to be recorded somehow :) I'd imagine they do this via huge (non-consumer level) cameras as well as by professional editors and graders who spend countless hours on the process. But that doesn't really contradict your point. I don't know. I've never seen a good screen recording but I don't download pirated films so perhaps I've never seen an instance of someone really trying to get it right.
      - sudosysgen 2y ago
        The cameras you can buy used for a couple thousand dollars have essentially the same sensors as huge cinema cameras, if not better in this application assuming you'll take stills. Professional editors and color graders have to lower the dynamic range, because there is basically nothing that can get as bright as, say, the sun, and because basically no display can sustain peak brightness over the screen, which introduces an EOTF transfer curves, reducing the peak brightness and thus dynamic range. You're right about pirated films, but that's because they're typically recorded in a run of the mill cinema while it's playing, not in controlled conditions in front of a carefully calibrated screen-camera combination taking a photograph of every frame.
      - geerlingguy 2y ago
        My A7C II ($2000-class mirrorless) has a sensor with far more range than any monitor I've ever been able to afford.
  - kuschku 2y ago
    You'd think so, but I've already run into a situation where DRM broke our screen capture for a live talk recording and I simply set up a camera to record the screen. With a little bit of work (display a few calibration targets and build a quick and dirty LUT to match your display) you can get really convincing results.
    - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
      It was good enough for the moon landing. The video feed from Apollo 11 was some special format that was specially decoded onto a particular monitor. There was a camera pointed at the screen to rebroadcast the feed globally.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  Once upon a time, this was how all video-to-film transfers worked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope
  - loeg 2y ago
    Also called Telecine (or at least, a very related process), as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy
- anfilt 2y ago
  Probably would be better carefully tap into the signal lines to the LCD panel, and record and decode that data to then make a video. However if we assume that even the cable going to the panel is encrypted and the board on the panel is decrypting it. (although I have never messed with a panel like that). However it still has to got to drive the rows and columns of the display, so then data to column and row drivers is still in the open. If we were to even assume the Column/Row drivers chips only accepted encrypted data they still have the individual traces coming out of them. The pitch of the traces is super tiny, but still possible to tap, but would be a massive pain, but still do able. Although you can get devices that strip the encryption from an HDMI signal these days so it's kinda moot. So it's not exactly something anyone would need to do these days.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  This works for me! Nobody needs more than 480i anyhow.
- FMecha 2y ago
  Except Cinavia, which worked on audio level, exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia Although it can only trip on certain devices or media players (mainly Blu-ray players, including PS3 onwards), I did read an idea that suggested Cinavia being placed inside an OS's kernel in a secure enclave to make it system-wide.
orev 2y ago
There are many USB capture dongles with chips that ignore DRM, easily available for cheap at popular online stores. Nobody has to go as far as jailbreaking screens.
mysteria 2y ago
In this case the piracy model might change into something like the software cracking scene where groups with specialized skills and equipment would be the ones doing the uploading. Regular people wouldn't be able to make copies with a capture card to send to their friends but popular films and shows would definitely still be released by those groups.
Bancakes 2y ago
Or I just split the raw pixel values from the monitors t-con board.
soerxpso 2y ago
It doesn't matter at all how out of reach it is for most people. As long as one kid in Russia can do it, the torrent is available for everyone in the world just as soon. This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Denuvo has pulled back into the lead lately, it's taking a very long time for cracks to appear, if they ever do. For example Dragons Dogma 2 came out in March and still hasn't been cracked. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hasn't been cracked for a full year.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Active player counts: Minecraft: ~185,000,000 World of Warcraft: ~7,250,000 Dragons Dogma 2: ~4000 This seems more along the lines of nobody bothers to crack games nobody wants to play.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The peak was the release, after which it promptly cratered. It was below half that within a month and below 14k the next month.
        pxoe 2y ago
baby_souffle 2y ago
> The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. Sure, but the closer you get to the eye ball, the bigger the loophole is. It's not common anymore, but _way_ back in the day, some releases were made *in the projection booth* with a semi-pro camera on a tripod pointed at the screen. (look for old NFO files with `TS` or `TeleSync` in them to get an idea of when this was common-ish) The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  > The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth. This is kind of a pointless tangent, but you might not have to go that far. It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance.
  - baby_souffle 2y ago
    > It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance. I hadn't actually thought about that! For 99.995% of my time on this earth, "screen" meant "flat, glass, viewed from some distance". I guess it's time to spend some time thinking about what new ways to exploit the analogue loophole are... I wonder which part would be harder: designing something to fool the "am I on a head? Where are the eye balls looking?" bits or the optics needed to re-combine the stereo?
  - teeray 2y ago
    Likely not an issue. Convincing consumers to strap a brick to their face has proven to be a persistent challenge, which even Apple has not been able to overcome. However, there is also a nontrivial percentage of the population who medically cannot use VR/AR. This population is large enough that there is a market for "2D Glasses" for removing 3D effects from movies in cinemas. Releasing a title as a VR exclusive means excluding this population from your sales figures entirely.
    - 2y ago
rustcleaner 2y ago
I can always just not consume the media. I will never pay for that hot garbage anyhow. DRM won't make me pay, it'll only take your trash out of my mindspace... which is probably a blessing anyway.

by tasn 2y ago

geerlingguy 2y ago

With how good modern screens are, and how good cameras are (and how easy both are to hack), you could always play back the video and capture the photons through the air. There was something called Macrovision back in the VHS/DVD days that tried to defeat digital/analog conversion, and I'm sure visual techniques could be devised... But I imagine someone with a good OLED and a good mirrorless camera (or even a cell phone nowadays) could make a pretty good 4K replication of any media that displays.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago
Especially when you add HDR to the mix, I think it's still extremely difficult to get a high quality screen recording, if only because it's so hard to get the exposure right.
- Retr0id 2y ago
  You could record multiple exposures and merge them after the fact (and I agree the result would likely be subpar, but better than it's ever been at any previous point in time)
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    Yeah, I guess it really depends on what your standards are. It's certainly getting better but I have trouble imagining anyone would consider this a good solution. At minimum, if this was what pirates had to resort to, then I would think the DRM has done it's job, in that it very significantly degraded video quality for the pirates.
- sudosysgen 2y ago
  Modern dedicated cameras have far more dynamic range than any HDR TV in practice. The movies have to be recorded somehow :)
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    > The movies have to be recorded somehow :) I'd imagine they do this via huge (non-consumer level) cameras as well as by professional editors and graders who spend countless hours on the process. But that doesn't really contradict your point. I don't know. I've never seen a good screen recording but I don't download pirated films so perhaps I've never seen an instance of someone really trying to get it right.
    - sudosysgen 2y ago
      The cameras you can buy used for a couple thousand dollars have essentially the same sensors as huge cinema cameras, if not better in this application assuming you'll take stills. Professional editors and color graders have to lower the dynamic range, because there is basically nothing that can get as bright as, say, the sun, and because basically no display can sustain peak brightness over the screen, which introduces an EOTF transfer curves, reducing the peak brightness and thus dynamic range. You're right about pirated films, but that's because they're typically recorded in a run of the mill cinema while it's playing, not in controlled conditions in front of a carefully calibrated screen-camera combination taking a photograph of every frame.
    - geerlingguy 2y ago
      My A7C II ($2000-class mirrorless) has a sensor with far more range than any monitor I've ever been able to afford.
- kuschku 2y ago
  You'd think so, but I've already run into a situation where DRM broke our screen capture for a live talk recording and I simply set up a camera to record the screen. With a little bit of work (display a few calibration targets and build a quick and dirty LUT to match your display) you can get really convincing results.
  - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
    It was good enough for the moon landing. The video feed from Apollo 11 was some special format that was specially decoded onto a particular monitor. There was a camera pointed at the screen to rebroadcast the feed globally.
jdietrich 2y ago
Once upon a time, this was how all video-to-film transfers worked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope
- loeg 2y ago
  Also called Telecine (or at least, a very related process), as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy
anfilt 2y ago
Probably would be better carefully tap into the signal lines to the LCD panel, and record and decode that data to then make a video. However if we assume that even the cable going to the panel is encrypted and the board on the panel is decrypting it. (although I have never messed with a panel like that). However it still has to got to drive the rows and columns of the display, so then data to column and row drivers is still in the open. If we were to even assume the Column/Row drivers chips only accepted encrypted data they still have the individual traces coming out of them. The pitch of the traces is super tiny, but still possible to tap, but would be a massive pain, but still do able. Although you can get devices that strip the encryption from an HDMI signal these days so it's kinda moot. So it's not exactly something anyone would need to do these days.
rustcleaner 2y ago
This works for me! Nobody needs more than 480i anyhow.
FMecha 2y ago
Except Cinavia, which worked on audio level, exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia Although it can only trip on certain devices or media players (mainly Blu-ray players, including PS3 onwards), I did read an idea that suggested Cinavia being placed inside an OS's kernel in a secure enclave to make it system-wide.

orev 2y ago

There are many USB capture dongles with chips that ignore DRM, easily available for cheap at popular online stores. Nobody has to go as far as jailbreaking screens.

mysteria 2y ago

In this case the piracy model might change into something like the software cracking scene where groups with specialized skills and equipment would be the ones doing the uploading. Regular people wouldn't be able to make copies with a capture card to send to their friends but popular films and shows would definitely still be released by those groups.

Bancakes 2y ago

Or I just split the raw pixel values from the monitors t-con board.

soerxpso 2y ago

It doesn't matter at all how out of reach it is for most people. As long as one kid in Russia can do it, the torrent is available for everyone in the world just as soon. This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.

jsheard 2y ago
Denuvo has pulled back into the lead lately, it's taking a very long time for cracks to appear, if they ever do. For example Dragons Dogma 2 came out in March and still hasn't been cracked. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hasn't been cracked for a full year.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Active player counts: Minecraft: ~185,000,000 World of Warcraft: ~7,250,000 Dragons Dogma 2: ~4000 This seems more along the lines of nobody bothers to crack games nobody wants to play.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The peak was the release, after which it promptly cratered. It was below half that within a month and below 14k the next month.
      - pxoe 2y ago

baby_souffle 2y ago

> The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. Sure, but the closer you get to the eye ball, the bigger the loophole is. It's not common anymore, but _way_ back in the day, some releases were made *in the projection booth* with a semi-pro camera on a tripod pointed at the screen. (look for old NFO files with `TS` or `TeleSync` in them to get an idea of when this was common-ish) The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago
> The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth. This is kind of a pointless tangent, but you might not have to go that far. It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance.
- baby_souffle 2y ago
  > It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance. I hadn't actually thought about that! For 99.995% of my time on this earth, "screen" meant "flat, glass, viewed from some distance". I guess it's time to spend some time thinking about what new ways to exploit the analogue loophole are... I wonder which part would be harder: designing something to fool the "am I on a head? Where are the eye balls looking?" bits or the optics needed to re-combine the stereo?
- teeray 2y ago
  Likely not an issue. Convincing consumers to strap a brick to their face has proven to be a persistent challenge, which even Apple has not been able to overcome. However, there is also a nontrivial percentage of the population who medically cannot use VR/AR. This population is large enough that there is a market for "2D Glasses" for removing 3D effects from movies in cinemas. Releasing a title as a VR exclusive means excluding this population from your sales figures entirely.
  - 2y ago

rustcleaner 2y ago

I can always just not consume the media. I will never pay for that hot garbage anyhow. DRM won't make me pay, it'll only take your trash out of my mindspace... which is probably a blessing anyway.