The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

This seems to be starting with the assumption that it's possible to prevent people from downloading the videos. That is a false assumption. You can, after all, just play the video and record it. Even if the entire machine playing the content is flawlessly locked down, you can just record the output.

The efforts at DRM done by companies like Netflix is done because the companies that licensed the content demand it. That doesn't mean the DRM works. You can find torrents of all those shows.

Yeah, you can capture HDMI stream with a cheap card so basically everything is ultimately copyable, however that brings in some friction. Some people prefer the easiest option, even if that showers them in advertisments and distupts their attention.

> That doesn't mean the DRM works. You can find torrents of all those shows.

Causation does not mean correlation. The vast majority of content available via torrents did not come from breaking a streamer's DRM.

I didn't say anything about breaking the DRM. I suggested there's no reason to.

It didn't? Then how are they getting the streamed bits directly? Since there's generally a torrent available that is the direct source, no re-encoding.

Or do you mean they read the source from hacking into a memory buffer after the player does decryption but before decoding, instead of doing the decryption themselves?

It only takes one guy to copy it and upload it to bittorrent or something. All these trusted computing schemes are dependent on the weakest link never breaking, where the weakest link is a piece of hardware that the attacker always has access to.

Why 4k shows are still quite rare on torrents?

AFAIK HDMI protects from direct ripping so how do they actually do it?

Not if you want the highest quality, and they could absolutely stop even that if desired. The only reason why those methods work is due to legacy support. If they only supported the latest versions of HDMI and DRM, it would be very hard to get decent quality video/audio. As it is, even with things currently as they are, we still don't have the high quality feeds that are sent to TVs and dedicated hardware.

DRM isn't perfect of course, but it largely works.

Unlike with Youtube videos, you can't just freely pull something off GitHub and crack Widevine level 1 DRM. The tools and extracted secret keys that release groups use to pirate 4K content are protected and not generally available.

This doesn't matter if you want to find something popular enough for a release group to drop in a torrent, but if you have personal access to some bespoke or very obscure content the DRM largely prevents you from downloading it. (especially at level 1, used for 4K, which requires that only a separate hardware video decoder can access the keys)

tl;dr; DRM works in the sense it changes it from 1/100 people can download something (YouTube) to ~1/100000.

Downloading a Netflix show is not as easy as downloading a YouTube video is not like you go Netflix downloader put a link and download the video easily. Actually as it's was expensive for the piraters to get the show they only offer it with ads. Maybe you can find it with torrents but series are less common to find than movies

Hard to speak for everyone but I'd not be interested in them because it's a lot of storage space and my device can display only "1k" (1080p) anyway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content... You mean this? Doesn't sound that hard to bypass

I wonder if it would be possible to use e.g. an FPGA to intercept the "last-leg" MIPI signals going between a TV/monitor's control board and the physical display panel itself. Surely there can't be any DRM at that level, because there is not much more "compute" down the line?

Granted, you would have to deal with whatever your display does to the raw video signal - preferable to pointing a camcorder at the display but a little worse than the original file.

I’m saying they are getting the original from different sources than a streaming platform

Eh sort of sometimes maybe. Lots of hardware/cables out there that don’t care what you’re doing. I can use an ATEM mini to grab basically anything I want so long as I’m down to capture in real time.

I don't see how that would work with videos that don't have differeny original sources. For example, Netflix-original shows/movies. While a small fraction are released on DVD/Blu-ray, the vast majority are only accessible through Netflix, nowhere else.

1080p is 2K. The value of the "K" coefficient is determined by the x axis, not the y axis. That's why 4K is 3840x2160.

16K = 15360x8640 8K = 7680x4320 4K = 3840x2160 2K = 1920x1080 1K = 960x540

(Every value is a doubling of the tier below it, or in the case of "1K" a halving.)

They aren’t on decent trackers, everything popular is available in 4K HDR.

I assume HDCP is the reason a lot of ripped content is not in 4K (or because needs a more expensive Netflix subscription). It sounds like people just bypass it by using an HDMI splitter however.

Yes actually you can. But you don't even need to go that far, there are HDCP converters that do it for you and convert to HDCP 1 (whose master keys have been made available) or just plain HDMI. See HDFury etc.

Very easy to remove it with an HDCP remover like HDFury, or even an HDCP downconverter and then using the known master keys to decrypt that.

>That doesn't mean the DRM works. You can find torrents of all those shows.

You know how any semi-motivated teen can open any masterlock with a piece of plastic, but we still use em? Keeps honest people honest - that's all.

Looks like old version. 1080p max perhaps?

Go to literally any private tracker and you’ll find that the vast, vast majority of pirates just do it for free, mostly because they like doing it. And I guarantee you’ll be able to find basically everything, including TV shows, and if you can’t it’s usually a request away.

Mostly the only expense the pirates have is the cost of the media itself, so subscription for the streaming service or the cost of Blu-rays or movie rental.

This is completely bullshit. If you find a proper download, you’ll usually see something like “NFLX.WEB-DL” on the file name. That means it got ripped and downloaded from Netflix.

The DRM decryption isn’t the hard bit - it’s actually mostly a standard thing, and there are plenty of tools on GitHub that will decrypt it from you if you have a key, e.g. Devine.

The issue is mostly around getting a key, but those are easy enough to get if you know where to look (e.g. TV firmware dumps).

Once you have this though, and any piracy group will have this, it’s so much easier to do this than to screen record, and will give you the original quality as well.

Ripping the HDMI stream (which is usually still breaking DRM!) is going to force you to reencode the video which will inevitably lose quality. You might also end up with UI elements on the screen and won’t be able to get subtitles out.

No, it really is not that complicated at all.

You can just go online and grab software to bypass any and all DRM.

It's called OBS.

All DRM content must be rendered into meatspace at some point and there is literally no possible way to prevent this. Record your screen, record your system audio. It's pretty trivial