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My understanding is that netflix uses silverlight for DRM reasons. What I don't understand though is how this drm is effective or why there aren't popular tool

My understanding is that netflix uses silverlight for DRM reasons. What I don't understand though is how this drm is effective or why there aren't popular tools (I am guess there actually are tools though) that circumvent this DRM. Fundamentally, there is a buffer for your screen where the content is being written with a 4 bytes or so per pixel right? Presumably there is something similar with audio? To me it seems like the best way to avoid all of this DRM garbage is to make effective ripping programs. If you did it right you could even use it as a dvr and then watch your media offline locally.

byuu 14y ago
Even if you could rip at the raw 24bpp RGB output and streaming audio, you are talking 356MByte/s (20GByte/m) of data for 1080p. People want the original streams because they have already been nicely compressed. Now sure, you can then recompress this stream, if your CPU is able to compress it in real time as Netflix sends it to you. You'll double your compression artifacts, and any dropped frames compensating for your CPU speed or bandwidth will be lost forever. The end result will probably be between VHS and camrip in terms of quality. If someone really wants a rip, it's easier to get the decrypted form from a DVD or Bluray. Plenty of people have already done the work packaging most stuff like this anyway.
chimeracoder 14y ago
> What I don't understand though is how this drm is effective or why there aren't popular tools (I am guess there actually are tools though) that circumvent this DRM Because there's no point - Netflix's selection is limited enough that it's still easier and faster (and less work) to pirate the content from DVD rips (available on Bittorrent, etc.), in which case you get the added benefit of much higher quality. In other words, the only reason that Netflix isn't used for piracy is because the platform is still "inferior" to the existing piracy options already available!

byuu 14y ago

Even if you could rip at the raw 24bpp RGB output and streaming audio, you are talking 356MByte/s (20GByte/m) of data for 1080p. People want the original streams because they have already been nicely compressed. Now sure, you can then recompress this stream, if your CPU is able to compress it in real time as Netflix sends it to you. You'll double your compression artifacts, and any dropped frames compensating for your CPU speed or bandwidth will be lost forever. The end result will probably be between VHS and camrip in terms of quality. If someone really wants a rip, it's easier to get the decrypted form from a DVD or Bluray. Plenty of people have already done the work packaging most stuff like this anyway.

chimeracoder 14y ago

> What I don't understand though is how this drm is effective or why there aren't popular tools (I am guess there actually are tools though) that circumvent this DRM Because there's no point - Netflix's selection is limited enough that it's still easier and faster (and less work) to pirate the content from DVD rips (available on Bittorrent, etc.), in which case you get the added benefit of much higher quality. In other words, the only reason that Netflix isn't used for piracy is because the platform is still "inferior" to the existing piracy options already available!