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

Can’t you just record the screen or is there something preventing it?

That's what Widevine prevents: It ensures the decrypted video is only available to proprietary devices and software which agree not to help you rip the video.

Yes, HDCP is supposed to prevent though it is easily bypassed.

The DRM (tries to) prevent it.

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!

At the end of the day you can always record the video buffer in some way or another (hdmi capture device, etc). The problem is that screen recording isn't what you want: it's lossy because you'll re-encode the output of a lossy encoding (at comparable level). You always want an ultra high quality source for encoding (in comparison with your target quality), else you'll amplify artifacts. To not deteriorate the perceptual quality you'll have to do little lossy compression (ie big file size, much bigger than the original encode).

Screen recording introduces generation loss.

This method grabs the untouched video stream.

> At the end of the day you can always record the video buffer in some way or another (hdmi capture device, etc).

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.

And this is why I do not pay any company engaging in DRM.

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

They are trivially easy to buy online though

> 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.

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 remember seeing an article showing that many (not all) of the HDMI splitters on AliExpress just disable the HDCP with no hacking required.

> Though I'd imagine the difference is quite negligible. More effort though!

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

Every now and then, my AppleTV will display a message stating that it can't play my home videos of my cat to my TV because the TV doesn't respect copy protection.

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.

Your own hardware could in theory, watermark the output from the secure element. By ripping the original stream you get superior quality and no watermark. As long as it's not economically viable to serve every user a unique version of the stream of course.