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

Can we just stop the shitshow with DRM? I have NEVER encountered a TV show/movie that I could't rip using a torrent either on public p2p sites or a private tracker.

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.

It's such a chain - even if a distributer didn't want to use DRM, the buck will stop with a lawyer for the content owners who's job it is to do everything in their power to make sure their clients get paid for the content. Why would one of those make it easier to pirate?

Corporate drone logic man.

Yeah, I don't know in what world DRM is supposed to stop people ripping stuff, it only seems to hurt paying users, ultimately if it comes out of a screen you can always capture the output, no amount of DRM will ever prevent this so why bother <insert conspiracy vs Hanlon's razor theories here> .

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.

Because they can sell more views if paying customers are happy.

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.

Case in point: I can't listen to spotify on my laptop if I've got my external monitors plugged in via USB-C. Not a problem with MP3s of course.

You're mixing up things. DRM goal is not to prevent copies, its goal is to give media producers control over the distributors.

Care to elaborate? What are they gaining from that?

I've never had this issue. Spotify (on Mac) uses the computer's sound output setting (laptop speakers or monitor), unless you choose another destination with the Spotify 'device' option.

I'm assuming the commenter you replied to is talking about the fact legitimate distributors usually follow the law. They're going to pay the large sums of money instead of breaking the DRM.

Giant media conglomerate says to Big distributor:

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

Big distributor says to manufacturer:

  - 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.

And here we are.

But they would be paying the same money without the DRM too; they're paying to be legitimate, regardless of whether the DRM is there.

Yep, like the unskippable ads on legitimate DVDs, where you couldn't be certified if you made a DVD player that let you skip those video files like all the others on the disc, and you couldn't legally make an uncertified player because of the DRM.

The "paying users" is exactly the group that DRM is designed to hurt (control). There is a large class of users that won't mess with torrents or whatever for a number of reasons. Ones that apply to me are 1) I don't want my internet service cut if the ISP gets a complaint, 2) Yes, I know I can use a VPN service to get around (1), but then I'd have to find a trusted VPN and there have been ones in the past that were outed as honey pots. 3) You have to be part of the "scene" to work around (1) and (2). 4) I have some disposable income, so at this point in my life I don't feel a "sting" by paying 5 - 7 bucks a month for a streaming service. I'm sure that for other people, lack of familiarity with how to get content through unauthorized means.

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).

I'm all against DRMs but the friction nowadays is, if you stick to one platform, almost zero, way less than your average pirated experience. Now, if we talk about platforms balkanization and how you have to shell out 50€-$/month if you want to enjoy just the best content from major platforms, that's another topic.

> torrenting today is as good as the experience of buying music on a physical medium in the 90s

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.

Exactly. Like consuming content from another region, having a personal backup copy of content we legally bought, like re-selling content we legally own, like recording and replaying transmission from "terrestrial"/"over the air" TV, like making our own devices capable of playing that content...

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.

> 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.

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".

Plus, it's free.

You're mixing terms up, you don't rip using a torrent or any other p2p protocol. You download things.

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.

But what are they gaining from that?

Presumably there's something incompatible with how the Spotify client plays audio and how his system handles audio playback. His point still stands though - with MP3s he can use an alternative player, with Spotify he can't.

Among other things, they remove competition.

Or, you get a small server and download a package... with a little finangaling, you have a service that will catalog shows and movies you want to watch, download them, sort them and push them to your own private "netflix" server ala Plex.

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.

I use an ncurses Spotify client (I forget what) or a web browser to listen on my computer (normally I do it on the phone and airplay to the required speakers). Never had an issue.

I agree it’s really cheap. I know people spending three times that for some cable tv service which comes with adverts in the middle of programs!

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

This is not a good experience. I cannot order a box like an Apple TV and just hook it up to my new TV and go. It’s never as easy as anyone says it is, there’s always more steps involved than logging into iTunes and/or subscribing to some service with my credit card. Plus there’s always the chance of a lawsuit hanging over my head.

> 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.

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

Recently tried to play a streaming service film on a second screen from my phone, but it wasn't allowed. This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client. But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is. When I travel, I'm often not allowed to view shows that I watch in my home country on the streaming service, even though I'm using my own account on the same machine.

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.

For a tech illeterare person maybe. using `docker-compose up` to start a preconfigured sonarr, radarr, transmission with VPN , Plex or jellyfin is almost all you need. the only addition is getting a VPN service such as mullvad... If that's too involved for a software developer I'd call that person pretty incompetent, honestly.

> no amount of DRM will ever prevent this so why bother

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".

> ultimately if it comes out of a screen you can always capture the output, no amount of DRM will ever prevent this

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.

i think you have something here.

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

Jellyfin's Syncplay and Roku app work as well, making group video watching easy

Oh sorry, English is not my native language and I had to rephrase a few times, totally missed that.

>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.

A practical problem DRM will always have is that the full DRM chain that tries to include everything in the path down to the cables, that involves too many actors not to break. Keys will inevitably leak left and right, and you'll always be able to find some sort of cable and capture card setup that ignores DRM.

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.

How do you carry it around?

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!

Sell them some easily defeatable “solution”. Use lots of buzz words. They’ll buy it!

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

All good on the English mate, just had to make sure.

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.

BlueRay sucks for portability their quiet fragile needing a case of some sort, you p need a player, and you quickly get to the point of having multiple CD cases worth of disks. Compared to the disks USB drives win, if your talking a player you might as well just take a tablet or laptop with multiple movies, and external drives hold as many movies as those CD cases while being far more convenient.

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

I have an Android TV and streaming subscriptions. If I want to stream something I have to find out what service carries it, open the right app, and attempt to type the title with the arrow keys on the remote. For me, it's much easier to torrent.

> D+ supports group watch.

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.

>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!

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.

Does group watch work across plex servers?

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

> 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.

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.

Nope, but it's not a problem since a friend can use his account to log in to yours server.

My experience is with jellyfin, but without the complexities of cross region licensing + DRM, there's nothing forcing people in different areas to not use the same server

I mean I figured this would be the answer. But do you think It'd be that easy for someone that really want's to make this work? There are lawyers all over the place with or without DRM. The people who make the content don't want it to be spread across regions the "deliverer" didn't pay for, and then implementing this niche feature isn't worth it for the shows that exist cross region.

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.

It's astonishing how bad Netflix subtitles can be. Random example: the music during the intro of the show Suits is Ima Robot - Greenback Boogie. The English Netflix subtitles show the lyrics for the song, but they are obviously incorrect. Weirder is that they are incorrect in a different way every single season. Seemingly the subtitles were created by a different person every season, each of them starting from scratch, each of them having trouble understanding perfectly clear sentences, and nobody bothered to check anyone's work.

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

They could achieve the same chilling effect on the "I'll just download it by using a chrome extension" crowd by having simple convoluted scheme in the way they retrieve the data. It isn't unseen, downloading them in chunks even is sufficient to throw these people off. Simple xor with a dynamic key with the decoding work done in WASM for more obscurity to throw the common downloader and reverser off would have the same effect without the intrusion into my computing device.

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

My problem with Spotify isn't the DRM, since I use it mostly to play either background music or find different things to listen to--like I used to use satellite radio. The problem with Spotify is that the artists (for the most part) get so little while providing the content.

You got downvoted but once setup it really is easy. We have a little VM with deluge and a VPN. Couple little IPTables rules ensure it can’t even route traffic except over the VPN interface or the one VPN endpoint, making sure no traffic leaks. I’m more worried I’ll stub my toe and it will hurt than my traffic leaks. I showed my wife how to use it, no problem. Sketchy browsing happens with Guacamole and a browser in a (separate) VM that wipes itself every few days.

> using `docker-compose up` to start a preconfigured sonarr, radarr, transmission with VPN , Plex or jellyfin is almost all you need.

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.

> The problem with Spotify is that the artists (for the most part) get so little while providing the content.

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

>with a little finangaling

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

once the bits are in your bus, you own them, as in physically have them, it becomes a matter of time and effort for you to access them in a humanly enjoyable manner.

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

This is exactly my point. I can do all these things. They’re the last thing I would ever want to do in my living room. This is analogous to the PC gamer master race thing. I have gaming PCs. I have consoles. The consoles are by far the better experience. They always will be. It’s the difference between “it just works” and “just have to”. You just have to do this, then that, and that… and then it’s just as good … oh until this or that update breaks the entire stack, or some weird quirk of the hardware or it’s OS kicks in and you’re in jank city when you really just wanted an elegant solution.

Where and how? Removing competition among distributors? media producers? manufacturers?

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.

The pirated sites are often streaming sites similar to Netflix. Search for a movie, click play. Quality of service does vary, but the catalogue tends to be much bigger.

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.

For capturing, HDCP is also a DRM (but now broken). Even Cinavia exists for recording by camera.

I can't wait to implement WideVine DRM chip on my brain

> This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client.

> 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.

DRM is doing what it is supposed to, and that is to stop common theft.

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 manufacturers because nobody can legally build and sell a compatible player without the key's owner permission.

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.

Some of it was discussed a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751110

Might be because I use the web client? To be honest I haven't put any time trying to get it to work as I've got a simmering resentment about having to waste my time on things like this! On the plus side I've built up a good playlist on SoundCloud.

>Remove competition among manufacturers because nobody can legally build and sell a compatible player without the key's owner permission.

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.

>>Remove competition among manufacturers because nobody can legally build and sell a compatible player without the key's owner permission.

>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.

Any of a number of apps can serve your music/TV/Movie collection off your home network to the internet and stream it to your phone or other devices in real time. Plex. SubSonic. MediaPortal. Kodi. Etc.

If we take cars as an example however:

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.

I disagree with the comparison, with physical goods there's effort involved in doing all these things, meaning most people won't do it and you still have to purchase the new unit from Toyota (unless someone manufactures a "perfect" replica).

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.

You can use the web client which uses the browsers audio interfacing.

It's not a question of competence, it's just a drag...like the construction expert who procrastinates minor home repairs. I'll stay up all night teasing secrets out of locked boxes but when it comes to entertainment I lose interest after about 30 seconds so I just don't bother to pirate stuff unless I find a torrent in the first 30 seconds. I could just be reading a book instead.

signed video cameras are coming to counteract the incoming tidalwave of AI generated misinformation. The 2024 US election will have swaths of AI generated videos. It will be a mess and I will continue to be longing for the simple days. I.e. dumb cameras/dumb game consoles/dumb tvs/dumb appliances etc.

Whatever the reason it results in a bad disjointed experience for the user.

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.

If the app supports offline playing, you can download on multiple devices and set offline, then you can play videos in multiple devices than service/content provider want to allow (though offline playback would expire within dozens of days). So they want to enforce max devices limit only for app. Whether the limitation meaningful for abuse is different story.

Plex is pretty damn good. If netflix is "better", it's marginally so.

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.

Streaming used to be pretty good, when Netflix was basically the only one (with most content), but it's so fragmented now, that you need so many subscriptions that it's not cheap, and pretty annoying flipping between apps to find the show/movie you want to watch, then to find it expired last week, and you have to find out who still streams it.

I mean, don't get me wrong... streaming is still pretty good. Fragmentation of content aside, there's more good content than there's ever been. So I'm not a 100% doom and gloomer...

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.