"Widevine Dump":Leaked Code Downloads HD Video from Disney+, Amazon, and Netflix

That said, it can't be all too hard as Netflix exclusives are all over the open seas.

a good attempt imo. if i had the time and the necessary technical competency, i would've loved to jump into it. for many years piratebay was my default homepage. now, lookmovie or vumoo gets my occasional streaming fix

Even the digital property liberators/internet pirates don’t test their software. I feel like I’m on an island with a small population of test enthusiasts.

So while it’s relatively easy to get the raw stream, if you want to re-distribute it, you’ll have to compress it again.

With these leaks, you can get the compressed and decrypted files and re-distribute without any added compression loss.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

Don't fork, just clone to your local system. When it gets taken down the forks will disappear, whereas the clones will not. You can also just download a zip file.

https://github.com/widevinedump?tab=repositories

You can also record the HDMI signal, which HDCP is supposed to guard against. But it was cracked even before it was being used/enforced. So now it only serves to create incompatibility issues and bugs for paying users. Even though it has been irrelevant for more than a decade.

I guess the reason for why it still exist is because it prevents/hinders legal products to circumvent it, since that is against the law in many jurisdictions.

Anyway, the downside of both solutions is that you have to re-encode the video, which will never be as good as the original source you get directly from streaming it. Though I'd imagine the difference is quite negligible. More effort though!

The lack of automated tests doesn't mean they don't test their software.

Ultimately, what's the point. The tool either works, or it doesn't. Then you patch what doesn't work so it does work.

Heck even the Linux kernel isn't tested.

Unit tests are so management can have a good metric to sell code quality. I don't know any time unit testing has actually benefited shipping faster (which really is the only bottom line those above you care about)

Edit: nvm I understood which key you were talking about. I would have replied, but I'm rate limited.

Edit: looks like I'm wrong about this, and the Widevine L1 keys can be changed with a firmware update. There's an interesting breakdown of how it works on Qualcomm chips here: http://bits-please.blogspot.com/2016/04/exploring-qualcomms-...

It's more like a proof of concept than production code.

This method grabs the untouched video stream.

While developing a feature or fixing a bug, it speeds you up overall, in spite of the initial investment in writing the test.

As a bonus, you can keep them running permanently, to prevent new bugs or regressions.

You actually cannot without an HDCP decryptor, which tends not to be sold in a lot of countries since it's primarily used illegally.

The idea with encrypted video such as Widevine, is that any time it passes over an unapproved device (such as an HDMI cable), it is encrypted on it's way to a device authorized to decrypt the signal.

Also, HDMI is a digital format, and you lose nothing in transfer over it.

Don't want to be (too) condescending, but, as an old-timer it's kind of wild to me that people who work with tech a lot do actually sometimes need to be reminded of this.

Effortless rewind, skip filler (car chases, sex), play at x1.25 speed, etc.

aka the "Blu-Ray experience".

If that means I gotta bypass the DRM and download, so be it.

--

Some shows have my complete rapt attention. I'll keenly watch (and rewatch) every single frame. Like Netflix's Maniac. OMG. So frikkin good. (So many other examples.)

Other shows, especially rewatching a series, I just want to focus on the character development, dialog, and plot points.

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  API_URL="https://api.github.com/users/widevinedump/repos"
  for url in $(curl -s $API_URL | jq -r '.[].html_url')
  do
    echo "Cloning: $url"
    git clone $url
  done

A component that decrypts streams locally, which DRM makers intend will be restricted enough to not leak the keys it uses.

It's of huge benefits to me when I have to make a small tweak (fix a bug, or add a new specific corner case) into an existing codebase that I didn't write and don't know very well. Being able to make a small change and being confident that it will not send everything burning in hell.

Edit: Yep this is what is happening, but there is an L1 CDM in the Lenovo repo. I should read the article before jumping in to the comments/code. :)

Apart from the Linux Test Project [0], run by all the big Linux names, who regularly issue very detailed bug reports and usually patches as well, you mean?

[0] https://linux-test-project.github.io/

They are trivially easy to buy online though

Hey that's me! Every time I open a website that has DRM to the max like Spotify or Netflix, my second monitor goes black for like 10 seconds. Fun times.

I have worked on large systems devoid of tests. Not recommended. I literally witnessed multi-million dollar losses that would have been prevented by requiring tests.

Linux kernel self-tests:

https://kselftest.wiki.kernel.org/

Kselftest is run everyday on several Linux kernel trees on the 0-Day and Linaro Test Farm and other Linux kernel integration test rings.

Most recent update to the source code was yesterday 2021-12-26:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-kselftest/list/

The Widevine spec doesn't say either, it just says that all processing is within the Trusted Execution Environment, so I suppose the keys could be loaded/updated in firmware. I'm looking for more docs now...

Edit: looks like I was wrong and they can be changed with firmware updates: http://bits-please.blogspot.com/2016/04/exploring-qualcomms-...

If the device just happens to support 4k, you may be out of luck. You could try sueing the parties that are supposed to deliver the 4k content and have revoked the key, but I doubt you'll get much out of them.

If you rely on DRM, the media industry has all the keys. You're left to their whims when it comes to content consumption, and there's very little you can do.

was what did it for me. basically claiming superiority prior to any actual engagement/discussion.

There's a lot of empirical research about this. A. Lot. Starting in the 80's, even. It's as close as it gets to empirically proven that software testing greatly reduces bugs and regressions, and accelerates delivery over the long term. It's not as clear if the acceleration is entirely freed up resources that would otherwise be spent fixing bugs, or if it also makes people develop faster. Also, it's pretty clear that Automated testing doesn't accelerate short or short term projects.

GitHub et al have taken over so ubiquitously that many developers I know have no idea that a bunch of what they do isn't even Git, and a bunch of what they don't do, is.

I wonder if GitHub will volunteer your detached fork for an experiment in touching hard drives with magnets

For whatever I reason, I have to use Firefox to watch Disney+. (Mac Safari will always eventually ABEND. Shouldn't Apple regression test Safari on the Top X most popular sites?!)

As for spotty rewind, like with Netflix, another comment might have the explanation (root cause); streams are broken into individually encrypted chunks. So of course there's lag (latency) when jumping around the timeline.

My educated guess, having used TEE/TrustZone for keys is that they could update the payload (the "Trusted Executable") with a new one to resolve the issue.

Why do so many people doing illegal/shady shit online use Discord? You might as well be using Facebook at the point.

For code that's expected to be stable for a LONG time - sure, write lots of good tests.

For code that breaks at someone else's whim, which has a small shelf life, or which has a large surface area, think really, really hard about whether the test is actually going to be worth it.

Depending on your settings it's pretty visible. You'd need to reencode at a significantly higher bitrate to minimize quality loss

So the repo is a bit like youtube-dl in that it puts the pieces together and finds the right links.

https://github.com/widevinedump/WV-AMZN-4K-RIPPER/tree/main/...

I just restart the AppleTV and everything works again. I don't know what causes it, but it's been going on for at least five years across multiple AppleTVs, two televisions (Samsung and LG), and OS updates. But it persists, just like the AppleTV bug that kills all audio if I turn off the TV without turning off the AppleTV first. Again, the solution is to restart the AppleTV.

But I have seen a lot of my non-technical friends and family having a degraded experience, who pay for their streaming services every month. It was either because they were using a browser or device which was deemed unworthy of full quality streaming by the mighty DRM authors. And now the poor users of the TB-X505X will also have a degraded experience.

Corporate drone logic man.

I tried a couple of screen recording tricks and it appears that Netflix is easily captured on Chrome....

https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmWPo4VqWwrdU3A7fm9Ze3Qm31D...

For example: ``` git clone http://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmWPo4VqWwrdU3A7fm9Ze3Qm31DH... ```

To pin and help seed on your local IPFS node ``` ipfs pin add /ipfs/QmWPo4VqWwrdU3A7fm9Ze3Qm31DHBz4bZPNeFPojS8huSg ``` Cloudflare IPFS can be replaced with other ipfs nodes like dweb.link or your local one.

The irony is that as a Linux user (only SD for us), and a user with poor internet and thus shitty streaming speed, DRM pushes me towards torrenting everything I "buy" from these platforms anyway, just for the privileged of being able to watch what i'm paying for without being a blurry over-compressed mess, without having my device rooted by a third party, and not needing to be blessed with a consistent high speed internet connection.

I've said it before, torrenting today is as good as the experience of buying music on a physical medium in the 90s... you bought it, took it home, and played it in fully quality uninterrupted, END OF STORY. streaming services still haven't matched this experience.

It's not universally true and depends on how consequential the scenes are. If you could flash "<insert fight scene here where X gets the upper hand>" instead and not miss much, I don't want it.

Movies with top, top notch action and/or better integrated action are exceptions. The original Matrix, John Wick movies, Baby Driver, The Italian Job, Mission Impossible, etc.

Superhero movies are usually not (it feels like they paste the drama and the action together in editing and it's dreadful).

> (this sentence applies to the furious films as well, skipping the chase scenes there gives you the dumbest drama of all time)

Well, yes, and I don't watch those movies :d.

(I don't actually skip these car chases, but I do often zone out.)

Discord can, and is highly incentivized to, identify and track you across the internet.

Idk if they do this, but it shouldn’t be that hard in this day and age to build a profile on users based on messages and activity. That can be cross referenced with other sources of data to identify you, especially if it’s done manually by like an FBI agent or whatever.

Of course, you'll still be able to cam-record the actual output, or steal the image from the TFT/OLED electronics, but no easy bypass.

https://pragprog.com/titles/bopytest/python-testing-with-pyt...

I wouldn't go back to subscription-based services, even if that means I have to wait for a disc release. At least there's a market for used Blu-Rays so I don't have to pay a fortune.

  ssh user@rsync.net "git clone --mirror https://github.com/widevindump/Netlix-4K-Script github/2021-12-27-widevindump_Netlix-4K-Script"

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/git.html

"There are only two types of music. Good music and bad music." -- Duke Ellington.

But the sequels are a different story. Those were unnecessary and absurd.

As a rule of thumb, anything that was made by humans can be unmade by humans. All you can do is make the pirate life harder, but never impossible.

Personally when I rewatch the Back to the Future trilogy, I skip much of the car chasing stuff.

DRM is dumb. I used to work on DRM. It was dumb then, it's dumb now.

Have you actually used blu-ray or are you thinking about DVDs (and Blu-rays are a natural evolution in your mind?)

Because, honestly, Blu-rays are atrocious.

Every so often I actually buy a BluRay, not only to support the work but also because in the case of losing internet (but not power) I'd like to watch a small selection of carefully curated movies.

I was in such a position 2 years ago, I had moved home and the internet had not yet been installed.

Did you know that in order to play blurays on the Playstation 4 (a Sony product, where Sony is also the maker of the BluRay spec and it was even a Sony movie!) that the device must be connected to the internet to play bluray's?? I didn't.. that was a shock.

So I took to Linux, which... just couldn't play it...

Why?

The DRM keys could not be installed along with VLC (or something), after googling for half a day on my phones 4G to figure it out I ended up not significantly wiser and realised I'd been hoarding a bunch of useless plastic.

I refuse to pay for Netflix because even if paid I wouldn't be able to watch the content (including Netflix originals where the "rightsholders don't allow it" argument doesn't make much sense) in reasonable quality.

Meanwhile, people can watch it from an unlicensed source without paying (legality varies by country but generally low risk for users), and as long as adblock works, the experience really isn't much worse than with Netflix.

It seems like these DRM efforts are futile, but then I remember that it's really just about keeping piracy outside of the grasp of "common folks". They will never be able to stop piracy if someone is determined enough.

Adults might be giving them the kudos, but the hard work (again, in my experience) is young adults, of school age.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29668260

I'm still not convinced it wasn't a troll thread. Its like its either a troll, or a coding academy class just graduated alongside a bunch of self-starters that made "coding" their pandemic project, where some popular TikTok content creator must be telling people to hang out on hackernews.

edit: I tried to keep it simple so that a null-edit would suffice to scrub the comment in question. But since I have to explain - the author runs the service for which they're providing instructions. This creates a straightforward argument that they intend their service to be used for storing forbidden files. Such "contributory infringement" is exactly how the copyright cartels have gone after youtube-dl, Popcorn Time, and many other general tools.

I'd be a little leery of running that outside of a sandbox.

I think I killed my bluray drive but I'd consider buying another one if I can rip decent enough quality movies from them.

The exposure, the name recognition, the PR coup that this would be ... would dwarf every effort we have ever made in over 20 years of trying to publicize our company.

Seriously: If you work for any of these "aggrieved" content providers and if you really want me to buy the Aspen house ten years early, dear god please sue us.

Bullitt was definitely unmatched for a long time.

  - Hi distributor! Do you want to distribute our content? You just have to make sure players will have this list of anti-features.

  - Hi manufacturer! Do you want to play the content we distrubute? You just have to make sure your TV's will have this list of anti-features.

I wish I were wrong, but I've seen no indication that courts respect digital privacy the way that physical boundaries have come to be respected (eg the US's 4th Amendment) - if you have the ability to do something about possibly forbidden communications, then you will be forced to. Digital privacy rights feel at least a few decades off, and that's assuming the centralizers don't continue to successfully embrace-extend-extinguish.

Then it's just a matter of opening the disc directly in Handbrake.

Now for the control that they want over users like me. If I could easily do it, I'd subscribe to one service, grab a bunch of content to watch later, then unsubscribe a month later and go to the next service in line. Also they want to control how I use the media, such as watching offline (by using the "download to watch later" button they provide, they can ensure that I don't download it to all my friends' devices, and that I still am a paying customer at the time I decide to watch later).

Unfortunate that a pretty basic piece of functionality is forever lost once the activation servers are taken down.

You meant to say "it's much better than buying experience has ever been". You throw an RSS feed into your torrent client once and get desktop or email notifications when a new episode is downloaded and ready to play. If there's enough disk space, you can add whole categories in there and have hundreds of shows available locally at any time.

These are all rights that (AFAIK, IANAL) we legally have but can't exercise because media producers took the control over distributors of content and devices manufacturers.

We have nothing equivalent to a VHS recorder where can simply press a button, recording whatever is on TV to a removable media and play it anywhere else! We can't even buy a non-smart (actually calling it smart is dumb) TV for a reasonable price anymore!

Video rental stores are all closed where I live. Media consuming has degraded to before 90's experience.

That's a feature, not a bug, from the perspective of those pushing DRM and other access/consumption controls onto consumers.

How many times will someone buy the same content just to find the best combination across all their services and devices to fit their current arrangement? A hell of a lot more than if they just bought a universally playable instance of maximum quality that never gave a poor experience in any viewing context.

It's an ugly, exploitive rent-seeking form of "worse is better".

https://www.vidangel.com/

You know how Netflix only allows you to stream 1080p in most browsers? That's because they don't support the DRMs content providers use for high-res content.

You'll see webrips all the time with 1080p because someone can just record their screen and call it a day, but the 4k content is harder since the DRM prevents everything on your system from recording it.

Not sure if webrips are screen recordings or actually downloaded copies, but it doesn't really matter.

I have subs for D+ and HBO Max, if they're using DRM I for sure don't notice and don't care about it, I use either the app on my TV or the app on my phone to Chromecast and it's flawless.

While content not on these platforms that I've chosen to subscribe to requires me to go though more hoops to get the same experience.

It's not that the torrent experience is shit, but things like synced subtitles can be hard to find (requirement when watching with most of my friends and family) for example.

I'm part of a quite decent private tracker we'll call "TD" and while I have nothing bad to say about my experience there, I will say the things I pay for work better.

The only way to get Netflix in high def (1080p and 4k) from a web browser is to use a browser that is made by the same company as the OS it's running on.

e.g.:

- Microsoft Edge running on Windows 10 or 11 (if running Edge on some other OS, output will cap at 720p)

- Chrome running on Chrome OS (if running Chrome on some other OS, output will cap at 720p)

- Safari running on MacOS

In any scenario not listed above, Netflix serves a max of 720p.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23931

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764

https://github.com/sebgl/htpc-download-box

put it behind a VPN (included) and bam... all your stuff, globally gotten and none of the BS with "Wildvine" and it's ilk.

ssh user@rsync.net "git clone --mirror https://github.com/widevindump/Netlix-4K-Script github/2021-12-27-widevindump_Netlix-4K-Script"

... which works because the 'git' binary is maintained on rsync.net and can be executed over ssh[1].

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/git.html

At some point streaming will devolve to that, and it will be back to torrenting as the content providers kill the goose that lays the golden egg

Try out subdl[1]. It can work out the correct subtitles to download (based on a hash of the movie file apparently) and usually works well for me. I used to do this process manually but since trying out this tool I've been able to rely on it >95% of the time.

Don't assume the subtitles provided by the paid service are good quality. I've on a few occasions been unsatisfied by the subtitles provided by Netflix, and checked out subtitles from other unofficial sources to find these are much better. This is especially true for foreign language subtitles--the translations Netflix has is really poor quality for some shows and much better ones can be found elsewhere. One excellent example of this is the German show 'The Same Sky' which has terrible English subtitles that actually makes the shows unwatchable. The only consistently good thing about Netflix subtitles is that the timing is more or less correct.

Not sure about other streaming service as I don't generally use the others much.

[1]: https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl

On top of all that, I worry that at some point one of the major services will arbitrarily cut off my access and any media I've 'purchased' will be lost. In the old days, your household insurance would pay to replace DVDs stolen or lost to a fire. I doubt that household insurance these days covers loss of access to google or amazon prime video, but the monetary value of these libraries could be enormous.

It's all stupid. The big media companies killed the companies offering 'dvd locker' type streaming services, where you legitimately bought and owned the DVDs, but the company allowed you to stream them over the internet. That would have been a nice way of doing it.

I find our descent into a culture where nobody owns anything but everything costs as much or more for temporary access as it did for ownership disappointing. Even people whose ideology praises property rights above almost all else don't seem to mind that they actually have those rights in fewer and fewer things of consequence.

Discord in most cases will prevent people from doing this. Most people should be ready to click all the crosswalks, buses, traffic lights forever in a loop.

There is a possible reason: insurance.

Once insurers are involved it drives behaviours in media production that may at first not appear to make sense -- protecting content in it's various forms leads into technical constrains however it can just as easily lead into "theatre".

Synonyms for discord

conflict, disaccord, discordance, discordancy, disharmony, dissension (also dissention), dissent, dissidence, dissonance, disunion, disunity, division, friction, infighting, inharmony, schism, strife, variance, war, warfare

Seems pretty fitting? :)

I think that the end goal for the media companies is to add watermarking to all media and require watermark detection on all video-recording equipment, to include cameras. This would be terribly bad, but I think it is technically possible.

if DRM is at least stifleing competition, thats antitrust brewing up

>You'll see webrips all the time with 1080p because someone can just record their screen and call it a day.

I've checked my tracker and practically all TV shows from Netflix that are in 4K can be downloaded in 4K. And I am 99% sure they are not screen caps, for example the entire second season of The Witcher was released 17 December at 09:01, and my tracker had it ready to download at 12:26 at 4K with 3 audio tracks and 2 subtitle tracks. The runtime of this season on imdb is about 8 hours, so it would be impossible to screencap, which means they had a bypass for the DRM ready ahead of time.

Of course these are just examples that I made up and I would never enter or use such filthy and illegal websites.

And for the mobile and smart TV experience there is Plex. It even has features which aren't possible with the legitimate services, such as "Watch Together" which allows you to watch stuff with friends over the internet.

About the watermark scheme, if it was standardized for inclusion in any video-recording equipment, then the standard would leak and people would learn how to neuter it. Or people would flash their camera's firmware to patch out the detection code.

There's simply too many places where the scheme cannot be secure, by design. It's hard to stop finding weak points in the DRM scheme.

The torrenting experience IMO is still fairly limited compared to either the BluRay experience for "max quality" viewing at home (but with easy portability of the disc too) or the "play it anywhere you're logged in without being tied to a particular device or hard drive" experience of streaming. When it comes to movies, you can often get both of those with a single purchase, too!

They’ve been buying dreams long enough, may as well be the one that sells it to them.

Netflix DRM might indeed be broken(I don't know), but I do get the purpose of it. Now only nerds in nerd communities can do illegal stuff in HQ then.

Plex is great indeed, I might sub to a seedbox with shared account and set it up again some day, though I like the thought of using Jellyfin since it's open source.

D+ supports group watch.

I mean, if something is available on a streaming service the experience is good, but torrenting doesn't have to be as bad as it is for me (I don't run servers at home, and I don't want "server software" on my desktop either really).

I just think we shouldn't complain that those who distribute content wants to protect it, even if the protection is subpar.

As far as I am concerned BlueRay loses on all fronts.

Even when the paid service supports it, they can add complications, for example. Amazon Prime group watch doesn't work between my Irish subscription and my friend's UK subscription even when the media is available in both regions.

to the first part, some of the "antenna to HDMI" boxes let you plug in an SSD, and will let you have a "recording loop" like a DVR, and also let you DVR scheduled shows. If you then take that drive and plug it in to a computer, it will have files that open with VLC/mpv/mplayer/whatever.

And to the second part, I used a large monitor as a TV for a long while, and my primary screen is a projector, both of which are just dumb "bits to nits" devices. The downside is having to have external speakers.

I can see why they don't cover this edge case if I'm to be entirely honest.

What you probably will not find is one of these devices with support for netflix. No big name brand offer this feature. Probably not supporting this feature is required to get permission to support netflix.

> And to the second part, I used a large monitor as a TV for a long while, and my primary screen is a projector, both of which are just dumb "bits to nits" devices. The downside is having to have external speakers.

Yes. No "integrated" set. TV's now are locked down computers which take as much control away from the owner as possible.

What I'm saying is: People want to get paid, and if people don't get paid content doesn't get made. I don't like how this works either, but we must also understand that It's complex for that exact reason: Money.

I'm not saying you're stealing since you're not taking anything from someone (Stealing a bike leaves one less left) but you're also not paying for something someone made for paying customers. As long as we have country borders this will be a problem only overcome by people who feel above the law and copy content illegaly.

Somehow the pirates get it right from the beginning, and consistently across all seasons.

But it is what it is really. Not really disagreeing with you.

Due to a bad connection the 6.0 clone didn't finish. So, naturally, I tried again and was receiving a login prompt....so I go to the URI in a browser and ... 404. But the 6.1 repo was available...

Before that most of the protections were just not that severe (and thus interesting), and after 2015 Steam, Netflix and Spotify severely stemmed the influx of people being exposed to piracy and thus potentially going deeper into the culture.

Tangentially related but I think that’s also why in a strange way the advent of the smartphone and other ‘curated technological experiences’ has lowered computer literacy for the average person born after ~1995.

That "almost all you need," is exactly why I'd rather just plug in an Apple TV. I'm not technically incompetent, I just have better things to do with my time.

And why run MakeMKV then run the MKV in HandBrake if I'm going to transcode it to x265 anyway. At this point I'll do both at once.

I haven't bought new movies lately, but I've been able to rip all the blu-rays I currently own with my old Blu-Ray drive.

That's because there is too much supply of music. Attention is the scarce thing today.

There is a lot of illegal activity being organized on Facebook too. Especially in non-English. In the short term and at scale, that is as good as encryption.

This is the part that you're wildly underselling, and missing the whole point by doing so. Netflix is just a better UX for anyone that doesn't make a hobby out of tinkering with tech

it is possible to re engineer digital electronics with a little ribbon cable, an exacto knife, and a fine soldering hand.

the decrypted bitstream doesnt have to go to a display buffer it could go to memory instead.

that is where i see DRM failing to stop 100% of the leak, and is powerless to do so, as long as people can still understand, and manipulate lowlevel hardware and firmware

You start with listing requirements (what a program/a class/a function is expected to do or not to do) and then write tests that verify that it is indeed so.

The easiest thing is writing unit tests. Pick a function, define requiremens and write a test for every requirement. If your code is not very modular and it is difficult to isolate a class or a function in order to test it, then maybe you should refactor the code first.

The only place where I could see it reduce competition is manufacturers sure, but why would media producers want to reduce competition there?

I think it's media producers refusing to accept they can't stop pirating and manufacturers making use of that to sell them stuff. In the end it's only the manufacturers who make money from DRM.

As you pointed out, "sticking to one platform" isn't an option because the platform most likely won't have the content you're actually looking for. So step 1 is figuring out which platform that is. Step 2 is probably logging in if you don't keep persistent cookies, and that assumes you're subscribed. By this time your movie is already playing if you take the "alternative" approach.

Even if you didn't mind shelling out 50 EUR/month + whatever extra per-movie surcharges Disney+ charges, the balkanization would still cause significant friction.

> But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is.

I believe that's why the restriction exists.

Even in the Bourne films with ostensibly better story lines, I’m struggling to understand how you’d be interested in watching those movies if you’re actually not interested in watching the chase scenes fully. I often just watch the chase scenes on YouTube to give where I’m coming from. I rented Bullit and Ronin and watched then just for the chase. So I suppose I’m the opposite.

It's a lock on a door. 99% people can get past the lock if they really wanted to, but it takes time, effort, there are consequences.

If there is no lock, then 99% of people would just 'walk right through' the door.

Without DRM systems (including the legal framework) then the instant 'Spiderman' was released, it would be on S3 for the world to share for free. (Which some would like, others not so much, but there definitely wouldn't be another Spiderman).

So if you really want to try, take some risks, ask around, you can get it for free, but most people won't bother so they just pay.

" streaming services still haven't matched this experience. "

I don't know what you mean: people can flick on their TV's and stream whatever Disney or Netflix and that's that. I can't even recall the last time Netflix didn't work for me.

If you mean to say you can 'torrent anything you want' - well - yes, but that's another issue.

Remove competition among distributors because media producers can refuse giving permission to distribute their media without agreeing to whatever terms they impose.

Remove competition among media distributors by creating silos of content where you can't find one or another title. Today, if you want to have reasonable access to media, you'll have to sign more than one stream service; compare this to how you could go to a rental store 15 years ago and choose media from many different producers.

From the instructions "Note: Ensure you are signed in before following these steps." You are just able to download the video/ You'll at that point likely watch it once and then not watch it again.

But sometimes when your traveling and you don't have internet and you want to watch something, this is useful. I mean if you got the video files through someother DRM free site, you wouldn't have these restrictions at all and you wouldn't be paying at all. Then you could argue you are consuming without compensating the creators, which I think wouldn't be right.

Hulu and a number of other streaming services have a download feature for exactly this situation.

However when it comes to something like this, it pretty much works or it doesn't and it'll be obvious one way or another when you run it. Writing unit tests for that is probably of limited value.

- Downloaded something in country A and want to watch while in country B? Sorry, the content is not available in your region. Want to watch it via VPN? Sorry, we detected that you are connected via a VPN (had exactly those two issues with Amazon Prime Video).

- Even if content is available in another region, some language options are not available anymore (you are in Russia? Now you can only choose English an Russian).

- Some titles are not available for download and can only be streamed

- Downloads require you to use the app. Not all devices have the app. E.g. you can't download movies on a Macbook because there is no Mac Netflix App. However you can do it on Android, Windows and iOS. I am forced to watch content on my Android phone instead of the bigger Macbook screen when traveling.

And what are media producers gaining from less competition among manufacturers?

>Remove competition among distributors because media producers can refuse giving permission to distribute their media without agreeing to whatever terms they impose.

They don't need DRM for that, copyright is enough. Those who want to distribute legally do follow the terms with or without DRM. Those who don't do distribute illegally with or without DRM.

>Remove competition among media distributors by creating silos of content where you can't find one or another title. Today, if you want to have reasonable access to media, you'll have to sign more than one stream service; compare this to how you could go to a rental store 15 years ago and choose media from many different producers.

15 years ago DRM was already a thing (albeit badly implemented) and it's really not DRM that killed rental stores. The internet did. Exclusive contracts is what's killing competition among media distributors.

>And what are media producers gaining from less competition among manufacturers?

It becomes much easier to impose restriction on costumers. These restrictions end up forcing the costumer to pay more or more than once for content.

>>Remove competition among distributors because media producers can refuse giving permission to distribute their media without agreeing to whatever terms they impose.

>They don't need DRM for that, copyright is enough.

Right, but copyright law doesn't prevents me from owning backup copies of content I bought, copyright law doesn't force me to pay periodically to have the right to listen to something, copyright law doesn't force me to watch a content using certified devices only, copyright law doesn't prevent me from legally creating and selling a player for a content... DRM does.

>>Remove competition among media distributors by creating silos of content where you can't find one or another title. Today, if you want to have reasonable access to media, you'll have to sign more than one stream service; compare this to how you could go to a rental store 15 years ago and choose media from many different producers.

>15 years ago DRM was already a thing (albeit badly implemented) and it's really not DRM that killed rental stores. The internet did. Exclusive contracts is what's killing competition among media distributors.

DRM makes it much easier for silos to thrive. For example, I can not re-sell, I can not rent, I can not watch on a non-certified device, I can not use it on a device which has all required anti-features to be allowed to play an specific content.

Toyota sells the right to be the exclusive Toyota dealer for my area (city in this case, sometimes smaller or larger areas depending on population) to Joe the Car Dealer. I'm sure Toyota would love if I couldn't get a used Toyota from elsewhere and bring it to my city, as it increases the value of what they're selling to Joe the Car Dealer.

But legally Toyota (and Joe the Car Dealer) can suck it, they can't make it a term of buying a car that I don't bring it cross region, or even that I don't import it from another country entirely (where they may set prices lower as an attempt to maximise marginal revenue from people of different incomes).

I feel media should work more like cars here. Indeed it did, in the past. Disney couldn't stop me buying DVDs from eastern europe, nor could they shut someone down for selling region free DVD players - the most they could do is have the DVD forum not provide DVD standard documentation and licensing stickers to the manufacturers.

With bits and bytes on the internet there's no effort involved.

I hate the state of media consumption, but it makes sense from a sellers perspective more than a consumer perspective indeed.

If only this were limited to downloads! I know a native Dutch speaker living in Germany who had to resort back to piracy to get Dutch subtitles.

Not that I agree with the practice.

P.S. To lighten the mood a little, I have a different question for you. Why "from"? It's a great name; I'm just super curious if there's any meaning. Also surprised that a Python reserved word was available on HN in 2019 -- most of those were snatched up in 2008.

Using MPC-HC with LAV splitters/decoders is flawless, even with low-end hardware.

And Smooth Video Project is an excellent alternative to $1000+ "smart" TV frame interpolation.

And even with a gigabit symmetric connection, every streaming service's CDN struggles and gives me a low bitrate every few minutes.

Any links to examples? Are you sure you're thinking 2.2 and not 1.4?

People typically ship .pyc files when they want to hide what they are doing, for a wide variety of reasons.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14808336/297570

Besides I can't work out a way that the restriction makes sense. The app knows that I'm streaming this film not playing it from download, so restricting what I can do based on the fact that I could have downloaded it but didn't would be really weird.

There was a forum where a guy had some sort HDMI analyzer on both ends and confirmed it.

There is learning with the above... docker to start and NZB/Torrenting... server management...

If you know those things already? or are close? great learning experience (my case).

is it worth ~$14/month for Netflix? Prime? Disney+? HBO Max? etc? maybe... but at a certain point the 'nickel and dime' gets to a point to where learning how to do the above becomes more worth it.

You don't need an expensive computer/server to do all this... just time and a desire to learn. once done? you control your own library and no need to worry about losing your content if you stop the monthly payments.

but...

Getting that content has the "provider" problem. As you say, whack'a'mole to get the movie you want.

People always bitched that "Cable is horrible! Why do I have to pay for 400 channels to get the 3 I watch!". And here we are... able to pay for "Ala'Carte" and it's exactly what everyone wanted - and expected: Paying more for each bucket. Instead of $100 (or whatever a full cable plan is)... you're paying $75 for internet, $15 for netflix, $10 for prime (or whatever it amoritizes yearly), disney+, hbo max, Discovery+, etc, etc, etc.

Finding the EXACT movie you want is a hassle... and that hassle is what drives me to Plex. Radarr/Sonarr/NZB/etc all roll together to make a massively good platform that, learning aside, hands all the power back. I do have to pay for some stuff (NZB, Plex, internet, time learning, etc) but it's my time and worth it.