6 ms·

> Can't DRM between the screen and your eyes. No, but media can be watermarked in imperceptible ways, and then if all players are required to check and act on

> Can't DRM between the screen and your eyes. No, but media can be watermarked in imperceptible ways, and then if all players are required to check and act on such watermarks, the gap becomes narrow enough to probably be effective. See Cinavia.

jasomill 7mo ago
Sure, but we already have good enough players, open source even, that don't support this technology, and recent codecs have, if anything, become more open, so this only seems problematic for playback on non-general purpose computing devices like smart TVs, set top boxes, and maybe smartphones, tablets, and battery-powered PCs if the tech is incorporated into hardware decoders for all acceptable codecs.
fc417fc802 7mo ago
> if all players are required Massive if. Why would I voluntarily purchase gimped hardware? Cinavia depended on being implemented by the player itself. It's difficult to see how (for example) a smart tv could implement it for streams coming in via HDMI from a computer the user has full control of.
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  You would purchase a Blu-ray player in order to play Blu-rays, pretty simple. They have this watermarking.
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    Right. To play legally purchased blu-rays. Who pirates movies and then burns them on a disk? And if someone did do that why would they be using a gimped blu-ray player instead of a media PC? The only thing this scheme was ever going to catch was full blown counterfeit disks sold on a street corner to your average joe. I think that was only ever much of a thing in the developing world. Or was it just before my time?
    - direwolf20 7mo ago
      The idea would be that when you see a recording of a Blu-ray, you can track down who bought the Blu-ray. However that part was never implemented. However it WAS implemented on Netflix which is why pirates don't like using Netflix as a source. Any time a pirated movie is released from a Netflix source, that person gets blacklisted from Netflix because it's watermarked with their user ID.
      - fc417fc802 7mo ago
        Really? I see no mention of that for Cinava and don't see how that could have worked in practical terms. I'm aware of what Netflix and other streaming services do. That actually makes sense.
- RiverCrochet 7mo ago
  Macrovision is a crude DRM scheme that was required by law to exist in all VCRs towards the end of their time in the 90s. Requiring TVs to check for and only display video for streams that present a certificate through such an embedded data stream could simply be called "Macrovision Next Generation Content Assurance."
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    Sure, setting aside notions of common sense and accountability to the public a western government could hypothetically impose the equivalent (inverse?) of the EURion constellation on all digital displays. Of course you'd also need to patch the hole of authorized devices (ex laptops) running FOSS video players playing back pirated streams. Which is to say that it doesn't actually solve the "problem" unless it turns into a full blown war on general purpose computing. But wait! Even that's not good enough because my (now illicit) pirate box can present the stream embedded in a webpage for the locked down device that I don't control to play back on the DRM'd TV. So I guess now we're also going to want a scheme to prevent government approved devices from establishing network connections with unapproved ones?
    - fc417fc802 7mo ago
      Okay thinking about it some more it could be made to work provided that the watermarks could be either muxed or rewritten by devices in the middle of the chain. However the entire thing would be a bit on the complex side, would require reendcoding a given video stream in real time on the fly at each relevant point (ex at the streaming service CDN edge node and then again at the client device), and would most likely be rendered pointless unless all display devices were legally mandated to require the presence of the watermark in order to function. Keep in mind that distributors absolutely do not want to reencode video per client at the edge. IIUC they go a long way out of their way to avoid ever having to do that, with the current watermarking scheme working by randomly selecting chunks to send from two or more pre-encoded video streams. Meanwhile AI appears poised to give us unlimited approximately free (plus a few kW hours) entertainment at least assuming it doesn't end up somehow killing us all.

jasomill 7mo ago

Sure, but we already have good enough players, open source even, that don't support this technology, and recent codecs have, if anything, become more open, so this only seems problematic for playback on non-general purpose computing devices like smart TVs, set top boxes, and maybe smartphones, tablets, and battery-powered PCs if the tech is incorporated into hardware decoders for all acceptable codecs.

fc417fc802 7mo ago

> if all players are required Massive if. Why would I voluntarily purchase gimped hardware? Cinavia depended on being implemented by the player itself. It's difficult to see how (for example) a smart tv could implement it for streams coming in via HDMI from a computer the user has full control of.

direwolf20 7mo ago
You would purchase a Blu-ray player in order to play Blu-rays, pretty simple. They have this watermarking.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  Right. To play legally purchased blu-rays. Who pirates movies and then burns them on a disk? And if someone did do that why would they be using a gimped blu-ray player instead of a media PC? The only thing this scheme was ever going to catch was full blown counterfeit disks sold on a street corner to your average joe. I think that was only ever much of a thing in the developing world. Or was it just before my time?
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    The idea would be that when you see a recording of a Blu-ray, you can track down who bought the Blu-ray. However that part was never implemented. However it WAS implemented on Netflix which is why pirates don't like using Netflix as a source. Any time a pirated movie is released from a Netflix source, that person gets blacklisted from Netflix because it's watermarked with their user ID.
    - fc417fc802 7mo ago
      Really? I see no mention of that for Cinava and don't see how that could have worked in practical terms. I'm aware of what Netflix and other streaming services do. That actually makes sense.
RiverCrochet 7mo ago
Macrovision is a crude DRM scheme that was required by law to exist in all VCRs towards the end of their time in the 90s. Requiring TVs to check for and only display video for streams that present a certificate through such an embedded data stream could simply be called "Macrovision Next Generation Content Assurance."
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  Sure, setting aside notions of common sense and accountability to the public a western government could hypothetically impose the equivalent (inverse?) of the EURion constellation on all digital displays. Of course you'd also need to patch the hole of authorized devices (ex laptops) running FOSS video players playing back pirated streams. Which is to say that it doesn't actually solve the "problem" unless it turns into a full blown war on general purpose computing. But wait! Even that's not good enough because my (now illicit) pirate box can present the stream embedded in a webpage for the locked down device that I don't control to play back on the DRM'd TV. So I guess now we're also going to want a scheme to prevent government approved devices from establishing network connections with unapproved ones?
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    Okay thinking about it some more it could be made to work provided that the watermarks could be either muxed or rewritten by devices in the middle of the chain. However the entire thing would be a bit on the complex side, would require reendcoding a given video stream in real time on the fly at each relevant point (ex at the streaming service CDN edge node and then again at the client device), and would most likely be rendered pointless unless all display devices were legally mandated to require the presence of the watermark in order to function. Keep in mind that distributors absolutely do not want to reencode video per client at the edge. IIUC they go a long way out of their way to avoid ever having to do that, with the current watermarking scheme working by randomly selecting chunks to send from two or more pre-encoded video streams. Meanwhile AI appears poised to give us unlimited approximately free (plus a few kW hours) entertainment at least assuming it doesn't end up somehow killing us all.