How encryption for Cinema Movies works

Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.

So basically they have this very secure scheme for getting movies to theaters, but everything else is full of holes. Makes you wonder if all the effort and cost to secure the theater distribution chain is worth it. If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying. Tightening up the one instance where the hardware and people operating it have less incentive to pirate (and more incentive to not pirate, given the risk to their theater business) seems like wasted effort.

Certainly this does make the case of a theater-only-first release nearly impossible to pirate. But there aren't quite as many of those anymore, and all this DRM must be expensive, both in the hardware/software, and in the logistics. I guess they've found it's worth it, but... oof.

But it seems that more and more releases are straight-to-streaming, and/or sometimes simultaneous with the theatrical release. High-quality pirated copies often show up within a day of a streaming release. Sure, many are still theater-only for a week or more after initial release.

I get that a big part of their business model for some titles relies on theater ticket sales within the first days or at most weeks after release, but all this DRM just feels like an exhausting, expensive, ultimately-losing game for them. Especially when we consider how theater-going has declined over time, especially recently.

A 4k movie, even from a Blu-Ray, may look very nice when watched at a normal speed, but if you look at the individual frames in order to distinguish some details during a sequence with fast movements, the quality is very bad and it may be impossible to see the details that you want to see.

At the levels of compression that are typical for movies distributed by encoding with H.264, H.265 and the like, I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.

Kaleidescape movie players[1][2] are an example of an "adversarial" environment in customers' homes but so far, their DRM is still unbroken by pirates. (10+ years of Strato players deployed out in the wild but still not defeated yet.)

The 4k 100+ GB encrypted files downloaded by Kaleidescape is considered 1 step below the DCP theater releases and are higher quality than Blu-Ray 4k UHD discs. The downloads are often 40+ GB larger than 66 GB discs and downloadable months before physical media is available so the Kaleidescape movies stored on the customers' harddrive are very desirable files to hack and reverse engineer but so far, their DRM protection hasn't been bypassed. Kaleidescape is more locked down than the simple DVD CSS 40-bit encryption.

Sure, a Kaledescape owner could point a video camera at the screen and record it (the "analog hole"[3]) -- but those types of "rips" that suffer generation losses are not considered high quality.

[1] https://www.kaleidescape.com/systems/movie-players-servers/

[2] https://www.kaleidescape.com/news/kaleidescape-taps-nexguard...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

This is not a feature that requires professional tools.

And I do not think that you have to be a pro or a nerd in order to want to see clearly many of the details of the kind "blink and you miss it".

Even consumer equipment benefits greatly from visually lossless encoded media.

Projectors aren’t maintained, or set up correctly, and audio balancing is often way off. People go to the movies to see new releases or have dedicated shared experiences

If anything, it's less and less. Studios are pulling the PVOD date further and further out for successful titles generally (Universal excepted). All the talk from Cinemacon was going back to a 60 day+ exclusive theatrical window.

You're not thinking the same way the motivated pirates think. Some pirates (especially in Eastern Europe, Asia, etc) rip new releases as fast as possible to illegally re-sell or re-stream for lower prices (or show along with ads for revenue). In this way, the pirates get the revenue instead of the legitimate movie studios.

So pirate groups in combination with illegal streaming websites can be thought of as a black market financial arbitrage. So far, the video sources they used include Blu-Ray rips and streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime Video webrips.

However, the Kaleidescope players could theoretically also be included as rip sources ... if the DRM was broken. The math for profitable arbitrage isn't that ridiculous. E.g. :

- a 4k UHD Blu-Ray is $33.49 : https://www.amazon.com/Conclave-4K-UHD-Edward-Berger/dp/B0DP...

- it would take only ~80 of those titles to recoup the cost of $1995 Kaleidescope player + the $7.95 rental fees for 80 downloads. All downloads after that break-even threshold is extra money for the pirates. Another bonus is pirating 4k UHD content that's not available on physical Blu-rays.

But the Kaleidescope DRM isn't broken. Therefore, the $7.95 rental downloads can't be used as a new vector for pirate releases. Of course, Kaleidescape doesn't want this scenario to happen so they're incentivized to continue paying for the DRM licensing protection.

And to recap the specifics I was replying to, it was this: >"If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying."

Kaleidescape is one counterexample to that. So far, they have actually restricted copying with success.

The issue is the so-called "DRM" isn't just the encryption of the harddrive files. The DRM protection also includes the watermarks in the video images that survive the HDMI capture. If pirates don't want their $2000 Kaleidescape player blacklisted and bricked, they have to figure out how to remove all forensic watermarks (the invisible low-level "noise" in the image frames) so the illegal copies can't be traced back to that specific compromised player.

It's not impossible but it raises the threshold of difficulties. E.g. using differential analysis to reverse-engineer watermarking now requires buying TWO players for $4000 instead of just one for $2000; and paying for 2 download rentals instead of just 1. And add hours of analysis work on top of that. DRM doesn't have to make piracy impossible; it just has to make the cost/effort equation not attractive. For now, the Kaleidescape DRM scheme is "good enough" for the cost/effort equation to not make sense for pirates.

I am not working with mastering as the OP. But I can see the low fidelity of streaming services. I watch my content projected to a large screen.

So I am one of those weirdos. I do not mind as I know I am a nerd. But there are more of us than you think but the penny pinchers wins as usual. "The majority do not see it". But they do. The majority went out and bought 4K TVs. They are slightly disappointed as it did not get "that much better". Most would have been just as happy with a 1080P OLED display. But only the geeks can articulate what they want.

The worst local offender is the online Blockbuster. Compression artifacts galore. But as most view content on phones the audio is stereo only. So your "sufficient" is not my "sufficient".

I get the "weird" part. No offense at all. But you are talking about optimizing for what the majority will suffer.

And it is done to save the last little penny. We could optimize for technical excellence but pride has gone out of fashion.

Pros before bros.

Nerds are just wannabes.

The mugglers may suffer as they do not know, care or can articulate it. If they do - they are clearly nerds and we can discard them as a minority.

People conflate pro with premium. The mass market should be able to sustain premium and discount. The market might be too small for pro DCP content. But I would like the market to understand that there are 3 important segments. Pro, premium and discount.

Pro - special specific needs. Premium - for the regular Joe who wants good quality. Discount - for the masses.

Premium market is underserved. Unless you are willing to pay luxury prices for Kaleidescape or the likes.

It is the race to the bottom with streaming providers testing commercials. They have already succeeded with the "junk content" as the big studios wants to keep licenses for their own services.

The quality bar is set for the lowest/cheapest common denominator.

> Projectors aren’t maintained, or set up correctly, and audio balancing is often way off.

This depends a lot on the cinema that you go to.

quality varied but was good enough in mid 00's probably better

Yes, that's the entire point. There are still tons of theater releases, that's literally the entire business of cinemas. The cost of DRM is peanuts next to their revenue, it's absolutely worth it to them. Nothing "oof" about it.

(stream rips do often does look like dog shit, though—I find sub-10GB 1080p blu-ray downscales [to get the HDR from the 4k blu ray, but lower res and storage space] usually look better than raw 4K streaming rips)

I wonder if they use watermarking so they can "burn" the player after a single rip.

The only way to prevent piracy, to actually prevent copying, is to keep content in a dark vault well away from public view.

Could an insider do a more sophisticated telecine capture with more fidelity?

Edit: it's actually mentioned in a comment not far from here (https://www.kaleidescape.com/news/kaleidescape-taps-nexguard...)

> I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.

Then don't do this? No one does this. Theaters certainly don't offer this experience.