> I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do
This is incorrect. The DRM on Windows varies based on the browser. Trying playing Netflix in Edge vs Chrome and take screenshots. The video will be black on Edge but visible on Chrome. If you use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D on Edge or Chrome to bring up the stats or view their test videos at https://www.netflix.com/watch/80164785, you can see that Edge plays 4k HDR but Chrome only plays 1080p SDR. Netflix allows 1080p with weak DRM but requires strong DRM for 4k.
There are similar restrictions for mobile devices, VR headsets, etc. where the resolution is limited on certain devices and browsers because of their DRM configuration.
Coincidentally, this kind of thing is why you'll get 4K streaming on some browser/platform combinations but not the others. For example, Netflix will only give you 4K on Windows if you're using Edge or their own app.
Unfortunately, the corporations that own the copyright thinks the price is zero for piracy, when it in actual fact, isn't "truly" zero. The fact of the matter is, these copyright owning entities want to extract the maximum amount of profit, rather than provide the lowest price, maximum service for the least cost.
I'm glad there's piracy as a floor to how bad streaming can get.
We have Netflix. The quality is unusable. There is no price at which I think the service is worth the money. As with so many things by 2025, capitalism has eaten itself and utterly failed. I only have it for a sense of moral rectitude - of which it provides almost none as well. Let me give money to these unbelievably greedy jerks because that's the right thing to do???
We use Linux in my house. My problem is with the quality of the video they send to my device. It is not worth a penny because it is actively disagreeable to watch. There is some good content there, not more than a small percentage, but I understand their fight with other companies greatly impacts availability.
Building a movie library with 1 to 4 movies a month you actually want to watch on Apple TV seems to be the better mid-term investment if you want to stay digital for the same price of an UHD enabled Netflix subscription.
I own a bunch of UHD-Blurays, but the friction to get up from the couch there is also quite large and you can't just decide to watch them on vacation.
Also Netflix bitrate for UHD is abysimal and rarely has any third party stuff.
Amazon bitrates are also good, but I lost a lot of trust in their mid/long term commitment to user needs.
I would be in the metric as well, while detesting the service. However, I'm not the only person in my home and it's not always easy to transition the family onto my local solutions. It's why I have YouTube premium as well, while letting the family know it's easy to grab all of that content and self host. It's like the chance of seeing something to watch you didn't already know about outweighs the cost and quality of service.
The problem is not what you can watch on Netflix. The two main problems I have are that Netflix is not a one stop shop and that Netflix turns my device into my adversary. The latter means I won't ever use the anything Netflix had made.
Is it really the capitalism, or is it the monopolism of exclusively owning the copyright and making the money out of it? Who'd fund the widely expensive shows, the CCP? Guess what the quality of the TV shows was during Socialism (and the level of creative freedom they had)?
The capitalism gave the pirates the way to cheaply reap, host and distribute by providing the means to do so for a fraction of the price. If you don't like the service, you don't pay, netflix shares go down and they end up like Blockbuster. If they succeed that means there are enough people who pay gladly.
Copyright system is flawed, but it's not because of capitalism per se (private ownership of the means of production), but because of the over regulation coerced from the government by the copyright owners. But that's bad governance, not the capitalism itself.
If the best that market capitalism can give us is an endless flood of superhero franchises with Grade 6-level dialogue (to serve the largest possible audience), deadline-damaged CGI and $300m budgets, I have a hard time seeing how socialist cinema could do worse.
The market gives what people want. If the majority of people want (and can be influenced to want) shitty franchises and cold popcorn, it will produce this. That's why Italian food is better than German, not because it's capitalism's fault. You cant' find a decent tomato in a German supermarket, but easily find one in even the biggest supermarket in Rome.
Since Netflix never (edit: rarely) releases Blu-Rays for their original content, there's no source to produce high-quality versions of their 4K content right? Could be wrong but I thought webrips that screen capture are relatively low quality because they're reencoding a video that's already being compressed for streaming.
Don't know if I notice these things much personally but if someone already cares about 1080p vs 4K they probably would.
Yep, it's super annoying to pull up a movie on your machine and want to cast it over to the TV to watch and only getting a black screen because you didn't do the DRM dance correctly.
This Netflix support page shows that 4K streaming is only available in the Edge web browser on Windows devices and in the Safari web browser on Mac devices.
If you use Chrome or Firefox you get locked in to a lower resolution when using Netflix even if you are paying for 4K streaming.
In this case they're probably using browser-specific APIs to implement the DRM rather than naively detecting the UA and providing a higher quality stream.
I have a feeling it's eventually going to be possible to work around this by setting up live AI upscaling to 4k - should be a year or two before that starts to work in real-time on higher-end gamer GPU.
(Of course I suspect DRM will then get extended deeper into the GPU.)
HDCP already encrypts everything starting from video decoding to the signals being sent to the monitor. It really can't get "deeper" than that, other than maybe fixing whatever current vulnerabilities pirates are using to bypass it.
Then it'll get re-extended to 1080p again? Point being, I can see live 1080p to 4k upscale via generative AI becoming a feasible alternative to watching the original 4k stream where DRM prevents you from accessing the latter.
This wouldn't be possible, since Edge supports both Microsoft PlayReady and Google Widevine DRM schemes and as far as I know, Widevine's ChromeCDM is less secure in browsers (L3/software DRM) while PlayReady is more secure as it uses some hardware components.
Netflix probably uses PlayReady for 1080p+ content, but I don't have a Netflix account to test so I can't confirm
L1 in Chrome is now available if your hardware supports Playready SL3000, but if it is officially supported at this point rather than being a beta that nobody guarantees from build to build seems surprisingly undocumented.
The streaming provider doesn’t have a choice. They must implement and prove they have a working DRM solution or publishers won’t hand over the streamable media
Exactly, and they still have it from day one every time. It's not an effective method against piracy, it's just an annoyance to paying users.
They just never learn this lesson. Remember the meme joking about all the unskippable bullshit people had to watch on a DVD, when they could just download a pirated copy and press play :)
Scene pirates complain quite a lot that they frequently do not have access to day one Netflix UHD releases and they have to burn hardware keys to do it every few months.
Because you don't own the device, and the real device owner (Apple) is not working in your best interests. If you resent this kind of thing, put a penny in a jar every time software that you've paid for makes your life worse; when the jar is full, find a copy of Linux and install it. Spend the jar on whatever you want - it's free :)
Your suggestion for not being able to screenshot movies is to install linux, which doesn't support DRM (or does, but only at the lowest qualities)? Sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me.
I would suggest that giving up control of your entire computer to get a few more pixels on some crappy (paid!) streaming service is the Pyrrhic victory. If everyone refused this Faustian bargain, then the services would be forced to adapt. In the meantime, your jar gets another penny every time you watch a movie. When it's full, find yourself a torrent client and spend the jar on whatever you want - they're free :)
>I would suggest that giving up control of your entire computer to get a few more pixels on some crappy (paid!) streaming service is the Pyrrhic victory.
This is going to inevitably turn into a mac/windows vs linux flamewar, so I'm going to acknowledge this but refuse to continue the discussion.
>If everyone refused this Faustian bargain, then the services would be forced to adapt.
Like getting people to use dedicated set-top boxes, like with cable TV? Amazon's fire stick is basically that. Moreover I think you're overestimating how much people care about "freedom to tinker" or whatever. They just want their shit to work.
>When the jar fills up, find yourself a torrent client and spend the jar on whatever you want - it's free :)
> It's only "free" if you value your time at $0/hr.
With FOSS I don't have to spend time trying to figure out how to remove the latest unwanted crap from my start menu or taskbar. I don't have to spend time figuring out how to remove the telemetry crap. I don't have to set my default browser back to Firefox after every major update. I don't have to click through popups about new features they want to promote or telling me how I can waste even more money by subscribing to their cloud services. I don't have to lose work because it decided I didn't update often enough and just forces a reboot without my approval. No, I can just work on it and it will just do what I want, not what Microsoft wants. That saves me a lot of time.
>how to remove the latest unwanted crap from my start menu or taskbar
=> 5 min.
>I don't have to spend time figuring out how to remove the telemetry crap.
=> Use Rufus writing Win Iso., choose no telemetry option, 0,5 min.
>I don't have to set my default browser back to Firefox after every major update
=> Just not true, 0 min.
>I don't have to click through popups about new features they want to promote or telling me how I can waste even more money by subscribing to their cloud services.
=> Use Windows Pro Version, no Popups, 0 min.
>So you pay for the product and then need to download some unofficial shady East European software to remove unwanted features? Ridiculous.
Get your facts straight. A quick check of wikipedia will reveal it's open source and written by Pete Batard from Ireland, not "some unofficial shady East European software".
Meanwhile "linux" incorporates software from overworked volunteers that willingly handed over control to some shady threat actor that successfully backdoored it.
Well it has happened to me that it put Edge back, at least twice that I remember. Once was a longer time ago though, when they moved from "old" edge to "new" edge (which is just a chromium knockoff).
But yeah to each their own. I don't like windows very much either because I can't really customise how it works. While on Linux I can change everything. I can choose a radically different window manager/desktop environment for example. Like i3/sway.
And Linux and BSD (I don't use much Linux, I use BSD on my desktop) are very natural to me because I've been working with Unixes for decades. Like Minix and HP-UX in the 90s before Linux even existed. This is really where preference comes into play.
I still use windows too, on my gaming desktop mostly. And I have Windows 10 LTSC on a little NUC I use for video recording. LTSC is not as bad (even though it still has telemetry :( ). But they should really make it available to everyone.
That is about as ridiculous as saying it takes 3 years to truly know how the iPhone works. You're talking out of your ass because you don't have any rational refutations to reach for.
> It's only "free" if you value your time at $0/hr.
Checking the OS version, browser version, HDMI cable reference and screen reference to pray that the DRM works isn't really easy nor instantaneous either.
I was actually generous by picking a computer, with the amount of cheap and non updatable smart TVs, I doubt that more than 20% work with the strongest DRM.
And then if that's the case, it's either piracy or buying a new TV if you want the best quality.
>I was actually generous by picking a computer, with the amount of cheap and non updatable smart TVs, I doubt that more than 20% work with the strongest DRM.
DRM doesn't care that you're on the latest patch level with all CVEs patched, only that your system is vaguely "secure" (ie. has a TEE, even if it's full of holes). The netflix app works on phones with Android 5 from over a decade ago, so similarly old smart TVs are probably fine as well. Failing that, they can buy an up-to-date roku/fire stick for $25.
I can confirm that screenshots are totally fine on Apple TV+ on Firefox + Pop OS. I don't know what the quality is, but it looks at least 1080p and as great as I would ever want to my eyes.
They didn’t lock it down. It’s a bit unfair to say you don’t own your mac hardware. (vs. iPhone, iOS, or even Android, where even the things with unlocked bootloaders can’t run non-android-derived operating systems).
More accurate statement would be that you don't own the content that streaming services provide. Apple (or for that matter any platform company) will have to implement DRM if they want their users to be able to watch such content. If you are against DRM then don't buy the subscriptions of such streaming services.
You can’t extrapolate your needs to everyone’s needs. I’ve never needed to use a wheelchair for mobility, most people haven’t. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider the use case.
What if you need to use a screen reader or magnifier for the text at the beginning of star wars. You would be pretty pissed if it was blocked by DRM. Hopefully pissed enough to sue under the ADA.
This is kind of a silly argument. You’re not going to stop your movie to take a screenshot so you can magnify the text or run some TTS on it.
If you want movies to be “accessible”, you should argue for that. Being able to screenshot a movie doesn’t help make them accessible in the first place.
I stop my movies all the time to read letters or text that passed by too quick to be see. I don’t know why someone vision disabled would not do that. They don’t have to be taking a screenshot, just using software that uses a screenshot api, like a screen magnifier or reader for example. The thing about accessibility is that you frequently don’t know or can’t anticipate how the built environment (including software) will be used by the disabled.
Again, do not extrapolate your use case or experience to all users.
Maybe I’m a college student that wants to take a screen grab for purposes covered under fair use.
Maybe I’m a customer that needs to show a picture defect to customer support.
Maybe there’s a use case that I haven’t thought of yet.
The point is that disallowing screen shots prevents a lot of behaviors that are good for this world.
The way to make it accessible is to allow users to do what the want with the content on their computer.
Accessible isn't binary, it is a spectrum of options. The point of many accessibility features in the real world and the digital is to increase possibilities and modalities of use. DRM that blocks screenshots is the opposite of that.
I encourage you to learn more about the disabled and their needs before you keep firing off these quips. It isn't adding to the conversation, and the faults in your reasoning have already been explained thoroughly.
The accessibility was just one of many arguments put forth for perfectly valid reasons you might want to take a screenshot of a video player. You said: "The reality is nobody cares. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to take a screenshot of a movie and I’m sure most people haven’t either."
I'm just pointing out that there are people that DO care, and that there are compelling practical, moral, and legal reasons to care even if those reasons don't affect you right now. There are plenty of things that exist in this world that matter a great deal to people, that will never matter to you.
Sorry, but you don’t need to be able to take a screenshot of a movie to make it accessible. Build the accessibility features into the player if people need them.
And you may care about being able to take a screenshot for other reasons, but my entire point was that 98% of people don’t, it hasn’t even crossed their minds.
If you really need that screenshot, you can take a picture with your phone.
I was asking the other commenter (what) why he felt free to dismiss your definition on accessibility as a revision, while at the same time asking us to abide by his arbitrarily decided definition as the one true definition.
I fully think that accessibility is impossible without freedom to use all possible functionality.
I do this semi-frequently. I'll seed a funny screenshot or short clip to friends. It's free marketing for the show. They should really build short-clip sharing into their apps.
I guess I’m the weirdo based on the downvotes, but I’ve never even considered taking a screenshot of a movie and I don’t think I could because I watch them on a TV.
You're getting downvoted because people are trying to explain why they need to do something you are insistent nobody needs to do. But it's moot anyway, because you don't have a good explanation for why someone can't use their own computer in a way that they want, despite being in control of everything happening on the device.
It's coming off a little desperate and like you have an agenda to push, if you're curious.
No one has actually explained why they need to take a screenshot of a movie. This argument about using your computer how you want doesn’t make any sense.
And you making an account to say this comes off as even more desperate and agenda pushy.
Have you ever been on social media? Where do you think all those Netflix GIFs on Giphy come from? User generated content is what powers those networks and a huge chunk of that are TV show memes and discussion, all of which need screenshots.
For instance, perhaps you remember some amusing detail in the background of a scene and want to show everybody. Perhaps they don't believe you, and the screenshot lets you say "I told you so". Perhaps you want to illustrate a post, like this one which uses screenshots from TV show Psych and the titles of Pi:
Yup, case closed. If enough people cared about this then they wouldn't buy iPhones anymore. The market is speaking, and Apple is listening with rapt attention.
Has the DOJ mandated that I'm wrong yet? Because if not, then no, Apple has every imperative to do as they please because the iPhone is evidently not a monopoly.
We had a loooooong time to bury this argument in the ground. I think the iPhone is a monopoly, but until the DOJ agrees it's all a bunch of hot air. Truly, their stance is that you should buy a different phone if you disagree. FOMO proprietors like Apple delight in that answer, Hacker News acts like it's pulling teeth.
> imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.
Legally, public screenshots accompanied by text/audio/video commentary are fair use. When shared on social media, reviews, or fan sites with influencer commentary, they are unpaid marketing for video creators.
Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders. Is this checkbox compliance theatre, e.g. does everyone in the distribution chain mindlessly click a DRM button? Can Apple differentiate between DRM screen recording and DRM screenshots? Can Apple differentiate between 30-second promotional clips and longer recordings, or rate limit N captures per M wallclock time? Can rightsholders add metadata to enable screenshots on a per-title basis?
If one studio can demonstrate marketing success with authorized screen excerpts, other studios may follow.
>Can Apple differentiate between DRM screen recording and DRM screenshots? Can Apple differentiate between 30-second promotional clips and longer recordings, or rate limit N captures per M wallclock time? Can rightsholders add metadata to enable screenshots on a per-title basis?
DRM implementers can barely scrape together a DRM implementation that works as intended, as evidenced by all the 4K rips that are available on torrent sites. What makes you think they're competent enough to implement all the stuff you're suggesting, for marginal gains? As much as people like to dream up hypotheticals why screenshots provide "free PR" or whatever, I seriously doubt whether it's something studios care about.
>See Nvidia GPU licensing and market segmentation of features, enforced by GPU firmware, which yields them 50% operating margins.
Disabling features, possibly at the hardware level with e-fuses is far more straightforward than trying to allow one sort framebuffer capture (screenshots) but not another (video recording).
>See the enterprise browser market (e.g. Talon, Island), which has granular policy and security controls for web content.
How secure are they though? It's one thing to make a chromium fork with "if is_porn_site(url): block()", it's whole different thing to implement a cryptographic system that can withstand physical attacks.
Good question. That depends on whether enterprise insiders have more or less economic incentives than media pirates. One of the enterprise browser vendors exited for ~600M USD to Palo Alto, so perhaps the security bar is only at the level of corporate firewall rather than gaming console.
> Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders
This was literally the first time I saw this "feature". I was watching something on Netflix and wanted to share a screenshot with someone. I realized that it didn't work. Ok, I guess you don't get my top-quality word-of-mouth marketing and to allow paying subscribers to enhance their enjoyment by chatting about the show. It is just a lose-lose scenario.
It's not really that I disagree with your argument, but rightsholders do not have an obligation to maximize revenue or customer goodwill from their works.
I can write a book and publish it. Then, one day, for no reason, I can take that book off the market and tell everyone, sorry, it's not for sale anymore. I enjoyed making my money but I am done now.
There is no legal requirement to do the logical right thing.
This actually reminds me of Flappy Bird. The creator took it down despite being a viral hit that could have made him massively wealthy.
> Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders.
Is it though? In the old days they needed people to recommend you see a movie or listen to a song or whatever today it's hyper-personalized algorithms and if that's not enough almost every major tech company sells targeted advertising to show your <thing> ahead of the rest.
Personal recs from trusted people outweigh paid ads. Studios get free promotion that outperforms algorithmic placement.
Facebook and Google may want more advertising, but that's not Apple's core business. TikTok has BookTok, FilmTok and MovieTok communities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookTok
> #BookTok had been viewed over 200 billion times on TikTok with about 60 billion videos.. There are many articles that discuss how BookTok has changed reading for younger people and impacted the publishing landscape.. Another popular aspect of the community culture in BookTok is the open discussion and the idea that users are reading the books together
These views come from an algorithm shoveling it down everyone's throat based on ByteDance' preference, according to some very convincing accusations on that subject.
And the most common way to "skip" the algorithm is paying TikTok to advertise your video and Meta and Twitter to promote your link.
There's even a whole ecosystem of paid pitches to people who curate large public Spotify playlists. And the people who listen to those playlists are the trendsetters that the algorithmic fluff picks up on later.
This irony already existed in the good old DVD age. If you bought one legally you had to sit through several unskippable videos, usually also one about piracy, before the movie starts. If you had pirated that same movie would play immediately, so the user experience was better.
They don't even need to deal with screen recording which this DRM is trying to protect against either. Just find a device that supports the highest playback resolution and steal the data right off the bus.
The way the groups typically achieve rips from streaming services is by using compromised Widevine L1 capable devices, and straight up extracting out the keys. This ends up in a dance of getting new devices when they eventually get blacklisted.
I believe these piracy groups arent hijacking the HDMI signal. They're cracking the Widevine DRM chain to grab the audio and video data from the stream and repackage it into an mkv file.
In 2010, an HDCP master key was leaked, allowing anyone to generate an infinite number of valid new HDCP devices. This has made HDCP useless for stopping piracy for the past 15 years. All it's done since then is add another point of failure between people's electronics and their displays.
Wonder how many people lost the ability to play ~~their content~~ the content they were licensing when they released that update, and had to buy new hardware because it was no longer supported.
not even hours later in most cases. these anti-theft measures will block the random individual who wants to make a clip out of a movie but won't stop anyone actively pirating.
It's wild to me that these guys still try this hard with DRM given that obvious reality. Like, I get that streaming services aren't just shipping an MP4 file that you can right-click and hit Save As. But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?
>But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?
Even if making 3M screenshots to extract the video isn't a viable ripping strategy, it's still less work to block all capture APIs than it is to figure out which methods you want to block, and make sure that implementation is airtight.
That's why I pirate everything. Originally I tried purchasing music files (iTunes) with the hope of it supporting musicians I liked. When it was a lesser, hindered experience, I switched back to pirating everything, still do, and always will.
> I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do (which, when you think about it, would be a weird thing not to care about, given Windows’s market share), but because Windows uses a less sophisticated imaging pipeline.
That anti-screenshot mechanism does also exist on Windows, but it's only enforced by stronger forms of DRM like Widevine L1. Typically streaming services mandate L1 or equivalent to watch HD/4K streams, so you can't easily screenshot those, only the lower resolution versions with weaker protection. Workarounds like disabling hardware acceleration are really just disabling strong DRM support so you get served a weakly protected low res stream instead.
I guess Apple applies the same restrictions to all DRM protected content, even if the service only demands a weak form of DRM.
It's simple to enable on Windows, any surface with DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_FLAG_DISPLAY_ONLY set will get excluded from screen capture APIs. No DRM is required.
DRM isn't always the reason for video not being capturable, though. Efficiency optimizations can also get in the way, such as hardware video overlays. Back when overlays were first introduced, attempting to capture the screen would often omit the video because it would only capture the chroma key in the primary surface. Even today, the DWM has to undo multi-plane optimizations and specifically composite the screen when screen capture is requested.
I wrote about some of this earlier this year: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70954.html?thread=2203178 - the short version is that it has nothing to do with screenshotting, screenshotting is just a victim of it. If you have decoded video content in video RAM a separate app can just read it back out and reencode it, stripping DRM for minimal loss in quality.
(In theory the hardware could provide a rate limited interface to allow copying it, letting you take one screenshot every few seconds or something, but that would create additional "risk")
> No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound.
I'm not defending Apple here, but -- yes they definitely would? And then they'd get sound on a second pass at regular speed.
If pirates couldn't access the underlying Netflix etc. bitstream like they've figured out, they'd absolutely be reading the desktop video buffer, which is all a screenshot is.
I look at the raw amount of information as a form of deterrent in some cases.
Getting a Blu-ray rip to a point where the average Pirate Bay user would be willing to wait for the download takes quite a bit of transcoding work. Not many are interested in maintaining 1:1 50 gigabyte source copies of every film out there.
If your connection counts as "broadband" then you can download 50 gigabytes in an hour. Or in other words, you can buffer for less than a minute and start playing. And seeding long enough to not be rude is probably somewhere between a day and a month, so that's a pretty small storage burden.
One qualifier is that even if a connection counts as "broadband" many national ISP like Comcast (Xfinity) put data transfer limits and 50 GB is 5% of my monthly limit. And if I go over I have to pay $10/50GB in chunks.
Not that this matters in the 'downloading' versus 'download then deleting' (streaming) debate. There the amount of data is the same and not having to re-download obviously makes not-streaming the winner.
Tangential: when I signed up in 2013 I actually had unlimited data transfer and paid $78/mo. Now in 2025 for the same plan and speeds I pay $113/mo and I have a data cap with fees. Comcast just decided on a whim they would not provide what I signed up for but since they're a megacorp they can. I have filed 2 FCC complaints about this but the FCC doesn't care. I'd switch but Comcast has been given a monopoly on local pole infrastructure and there are literally no other wired options (telco says 3 blocks from the switching center downtown is too far for dsl).
Few people need Blu-ray quality, though. The quality offered by streaming services would usually fit on a DVD. Shorter TV show episodes would fit even on a dual layer CD.
We can look at game recording tools to try to understand what a world without DRM might have looked like. Those are able to easily record and encode video at 1080p or 4K on consumer hardware. Uploading that to YouTube or sharing that with friends isn't an issue either.
> The quality offered by streaming services would usually fit on a DVD
Absolutely not. Have you watched modern streaming services lately?
I recall when hdtvtest (Vincent) on YouTube tested Apple's 4K quality against 4K Ultra Blu-Rays via Apple TV (formerly iTunes Movies). IIRC the bitrate was about half (~25 Mbps vs 50Mbps) and the difference in visual quality was very difficult to see. Esssentially, he concluded that a high-quality streaming service or online digital movie purchase is pretty much just as good as a 4K Blu-ray.
There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
It's also important to note that the average US broadband speed is now quite a lot more respectable than it was back when we were all begging for US home Internet infrastructure to improve. I believe the average home connection is something like 100 Mbps if not better, and streaming services really have no trouble delivering Blu-ray quality 4K video to the average US consumer.
Now, obviously, you don't need that level of quality to enjoy the movie, but if that's what piracy is up against you will definitely need a lot of storage to compete with those streaming services that cost a couple of Starbucks coffees per month.
I think this is actually a bigger barrier than a lot of people assume. I have personally considered the idea of my own media server but keep getting put off by the fact that I really will need a very large NAS-grade HDD for it. The total hardware cost to get going is roughly equivalent to a multiple years of streaming service fees.
> There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
Well first off, what percentage of viewing hours are in 4K?
Second, a DVD could store a 54 minute episode at 20Mbps. That's close. And if I found the hdtvtest video you're talking about the bitrate was "between 15 and 25" so it would likely fit as-is. Also, that comparison was seven years ago with Apple using h.265, and today they could use AV1 to get the same quality with 20% fewer bits. Maybe h.266 to be even smaller or better.
(If you're interpreting their comment as "with actual DVD encoding", I think you're misreading them. I don't think they're suggesting streaming services are on par with low-noise 480p. And it doesn't fit with the CD comment.)
> Absolutely not. Have you watched modern streaming services lately?
Of course I have - a typical Netflix movie is between 3-6GB.
Apple TV is the only one offering higher bitrates (which is why I use it, even though we're an Android/Linux only household, with iTunes running in a VM to buy movies from Apple TV).
> There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
Severance episodes, in 2160p with Dolby Vision and DD+/Atmos audio, are 8.3GB-8.7GB each. While you're technically correct, the point remains.
> I believe the average home connection is something like 100 Mbps if not better, and streaming services really have no trouble delivering Blu-ray quality 4K video to the average US consumer.
A typical 4K UHD bluray has a bandwidth of 95Mbps-120Mbps. A far cry even from the 25Mbps offered by Apple TV, let alone the 6-10Mbps offered by Netflix.
> I think this is actually a bigger barrier than a lot of people assume. I have personally considered the idea of my own media server but keep getting put off by the fact that I really will need a very large NAS-grade HDD for it.
I have a blu-ray collection, I do not have a blu-ray player. I watch my movies by ripping them to my NAS and playing them from my NVIDIA Shield TV.
If you don't do any transcoding on the NAS, you can use an old ThinkCentre or HP Microserver (about $60-$100).
If you just rip your own movies from blu-ray, you don't need any redundancy, so you can buy a single 12TB drive for $200.
That's about $250-$300 for enough storage for 450 1080p blu-rays or 160 4K UHD blu-rays.
The only remaining cost is the content, but usually you don't just watch new releases. Used blu-rays are available at e.g. worldofbooks or rebuy for $5-$15 each.
Look, I understand the value proposition of self-hosting media.
But you still are talking about $300 up-front investment plus untold amount of unpaid time spent learning how to set up and operate such a thing. Plus cost of content.
This is competing with streaming services that, like it or not, are competing with Blu-ray quality at least close enough.
> Netflix's bitrates [...] max out at above 17500kbps as of 2023
That's great, but I haven't ever seen anything close to that in real-world measurements. Not even with shows like Altered Carbon.
That said, even at 17.5Mbps, that'd still fit on a DVD and would be a far cry from the 90-120Mbps seen on blu-rays.
> But you still are talking about $300 up-front investment plus untold amount of unpaid time spent learning how to set up and operate such a thing. Plus cost of content.
Oh I absolutely agree that it's expensive and annoying today. I was arguing that in a world without DRM, recording your own media would be popular and affordable.
I was only referring to current-day technology to show that the tech exists. In a world without DRM, with an actual market for it, recording your own media would likely be as common, affordable and popular as VHS had been.
Dual layer CDs are not a thing but yes you can put a 'half hour' episode on a CD at 3.5-4Mbps and it will look pretty good, better than the average streamed video.
I will note the existence of that, but I feel comfortable saying that's not actually a CD. Especially since only one drive could ever use it. More importantly, it's still single layer.
And compared to the not-fully-compatible 99 minute CD-Rs, they only get an extra 50% space. Not a very impressive format there when burnable DVDs were already out and would obviously drop in price over time. Plus you could get another 14% by using mode 2 with reduced error correction...
> If pirates couldn't access the underlying Netflix etc. bitstream like they've figured out, they'd absolutely be reading the desktop video buffer,
This cracks me up. This is like saying “If our enemy didn’t have missiles, as we are well aware they do, well, they definitely would be buying forks at Walmart and using them to poke us, or at least wave them menacingly. We must therefore place heavy restrictions on the sale of cutlery.”
HDMI capture is super easy. Pirates would not bother with a million screenshots. It's a tiny barrier that only really causes annoyance and makes the computer not work for the user.
The truth is that HDCP too only annoys the consumer.
Pirates can bypass it easily, and even event venues and universities keep cheap chinese HDMI splitters on hand to avoid issues during lectures or presentations. These $10 devices just rip the HDCP off the incoming video stream.
This is most useful because Mac OS keeps applications around even without a window, and as long as e.g. Spotify is still there, it'll force HDCP on the HDMI out.
Yes, and then someone in China successfully extracted a key and built a "HDCP stripper" that double negatives the italic. They appeared to have taken the keys from few of something expensive enough so that it politically can't be revoked.
Capturing HDMI also used to be costly, China solved that too few years ago. Compressed 2K capture dongles are $9 apiece.
I wouldn't describe those as "tiny" barriers, though, it just wasn't up to faceless Chinese silicon gurus circa 2010.
That makes sense, it's just that we've noticed over the years how it still degrades thread quality. I think it's a medium-is-the-message thing to some extent. It's no big deal (and can be quite fun) to call $whoever a $whatever in small conversations, e.g. over a drink with friends, but on a large public internet form the dynamics change a lot.
I get that DRM is important for content providers but it really sucks to not be able to grab individual frames for things like running them through google translate or google image search. There have been a few times I've wished to grab a frame for something like a meme, but mostly it's accessibility things being blocked for no real reason. They don't stop piracy, they just prevent people from doing things like translation.
Apparently the same DRM is also enforced in the Apple Vision Pro as MrWhoseTheBoss discovered in his review. Except in that case, Apple's DRM pipeline extends all the way up to your eyeballs instead of your HDMI TV. That realization about what our dystopian future might hold for us seemed to hit him pretty hard :
It's also blacked out when screen sharing, but there is no way for other apps (eg. bank apps) to ask for the section of the app that contains the user's credit and debit card numbers to be blacked out when screen sharing.
This is one of the more boneheaded moves of DRM IMHO.
They are shooting themselves in the foot for no gain I can see and huge amount of downside. People are screenshotting (or even recording a 5sec clip) to _share your content_. These methods clearly have zero effect on piracy so all they do is make legitimate user’s lives more difficult.
It _might_ make sense if every streaming platform had built-in tools to share a clip or a screenshot, but they don’t. It completely baffles me.
I need to dust off my plans for a simple Plex gif-maker tool. A web-based tool I can load and is queued up to wherever I am in the show I’m watching with grabbers on a video timeline to select the start/end of the clip. Then export to mp4/gif, maybe simple subtitle support or text overlays.
Apple’s GIF search feature in Messages (#images, like Giphy) is almost entirely content from TV shows and movies. It seems hypocritical for Apple to promote this as a way to express yourself, while prohibiting users from making such content themselves on Apple devices.
Hear, hear. I was also pleasantly surprised how fast a pirated movie appears on a gigabit connection. Last time I had used BitTorrent it was on like 200Mbps.
There's nothing stopping hardware accelerated decode being in the same framebuffer as everything else, the only reason for this is DRM - you get just the same acceleration with VLC, but can still screenshot.
The XP era is when we depended on fixed-function hardware overlays to scale video and handle yuv translation, and yes in that case you'd just get a magenta or blue background instead of the video. That era sucked, and hardware got better since then.
Those never went away, they're just called multiplane overlay (MPO) now and are better integrated into the system. The Windows 10/11 DWM automatically migrates swap chains in and out of independently flipped overlays to save power, and can recomposite them when screen capture is requested.
A friend of mine who was taking a few Udemy courses last year ran into this issue when he needed to take screenshots for important things he was learning in the course. Ended up working around it by disabling GPU acceleration in chrome.
I'll do the devil's advocate:
(not because I'm on Apple side, just to see all points of view).
The florist in the article can still grab her phone and take a photo.
I think the problem with not allowing single screenshots is that once you allow access to the video stream a software on the machine can sinply capture ALL frames and recreate a video out of it.
Anyway, until there will be one not protected distribution channel the torrents source file will be collected there.
You said yourself, you can trivially bypass the protection using 3rd party hardware like "recording on a cell phone." This doesn't seem like it does anything to reduce actual piracy, while severely harming the Fair Use right to take a quick screenshot for personal reference.
Earlier this year I bought a bunch of moon-shaped LED lamps that are controlled with an IR remote, and made an ambilight app for my computer that constantly screenshots the screen, finds the predominant color and sends a signal to change the color in all of them. Only to find that watching a TV show would just leave all black...
>These DRM blackouts happen at such a low level that no high-level software — any sort of utility you might install — can route around them.
Well, since physically you still own your device you can send direct assembly instructions to your processing units, or even just take HDMI signal, intercept and record it fully. Technically if one bothers to reverse engineer the instructions browsers send, they can be studied and reversed. There are tools for that, as well as high-level languages which make it possible to execute low-level assembly code.
There's little difference between enabling a single screen shot and allowing screen recording. The rights owners require blocking of screen recording, so all screen capture gets blocked as a result.
Doesn't macOS also use this for power savings, rather than only DRM? This is something that Linux is also starting to pick up, and is probably one of the biggest reasons for Apple Silicon Macs having superior battery life.
The GPU is the thing decoding the video stream and putting it directly on the display (via hardware planes). It doesn't need to send it back (aka copy) to the main CPU. Screenshots can't see what's there because the CPU has no knowledge of whats there.
Rather than the GPU decoding the video, sending it back to the CPU which then will send the frame back to the GPU as part of composition, and wasting power.
Video RAM is accessible to the OS, if you render into it it can be read back. In this case it's deliberately rendered into a separate protected area of RAM the OS can't read, and composited at scanout time.
Compositing is done by the OS though (WindowServer in case of mac). Ever since OSX stopped allowing direct framebuffer access I think the only way to read (e.g. for screenshots) windows of other processes' is by asking WindowServer to do it for you, so I'm guessing that's how this protection is implemented.
WindowServer ultimately still needs to get access to the framebuffer somehow though, so there must be some private API somewhere to bridge kernel and userspace part. I suspect if you could bypass SIP or just write a kext to access video memory directly then it'd be possible to defeat this protection.
Compositing into the framebuffer is done by the OS, the compositing of the DRMed video stream into the output is done in hardware. The OS literally has no visibility into the decoded content. You suspect incorrectly.
Recently ran into issues caused by Apple's DRM protection as well.
I wanted to stream Crunchyroll on my TV from my iPad 9 via the Lightning to HDMI dongle. Apparently an iOS update 2 years ago broke that functionality for DRM content [1].
Preventing screenshots takes resources. You need engineering,l time, the solution itself consumes system memory, needs additional code at run time and ultimately consumes more power on the devices. All of these apple doesn’t want to spend; so I would guess may be there were attempts to reconstruct movies using screenshots or may be it was asked of them?
Not supporting any party in this case, but this argument is weak.
This is like saying "putting padlocks cost money. We have to make sure we research about locks, buy the right one, give right people the keys. It is easier to just .. keep the door unlocked"
Every solution has its costs. The question is whether those costs outweight the benefits it seemingly brings. In this particular case, Apple has decided the DRM implementation costs outweight the benefits.
It’s probably due to some licensing verbiage because these DRM implementations do just about nothing good. Pirates still rip videos from these platforms somehow, but the usual customer can’t watch the 4K they paid for on most browsers. So, it must be an idiosyncrasy at some management/licensing level, not something that serves a functional purpose.
And frankly, the “buy 4K, but we will serve you 1080p in most cases” sounds like a class action lawsuit in the making anyway. So, if anything, this DRM scheme will cost them more than just wasted engineer time.
From what I remember of the windows video apis there is a system for decoding DRM content where you need to use special types of buffers which can’t be mapped to the CPU. There’s special interfaces in MediaFoundation (decoding) DXGI (buffer/device interop) and Direct Composition.
Maybe there are holes or the browsers aren’t doing it properly or it only applies to the MS proprietary DRM.
I noticed that I can no longer that a screenshot on my Samsung phone of Netflix. I used it to advertise a show to my friends. "You gotta watch this..." It’s just them shooting themselves in the foot.
> What I don’t understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video
To claim that they did. That’s the quality of work you get when you’re forced to comply to get a certificate or pass a check or something of that nature.
Ran into this the other day trying to screenshot something in the background of a music video playing through Spotify's desktop app. I opened youtube, took the screenshot from the video there, and wondered why the protection was necessary.
It is annoying but not that tragic. Browser built-in screenshotting works fine (I use firefox) as does OBS. Only the builtin macos screenshotting tool gives black frames, which again is annoying and should not be the case, but there are alternatives that are ok at least.
i created a tool to get around this. (called "valet vision".) of course, it involves using a raspberry pi and a camera pointed at the phone's screen. as they say, life (and automation engineers) finds a way...
> This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.
Yeah what's the point?
If anything it's yet another reason to just download pirated content. You can screenshot that just fine. You can save it where you want without expiring, play it on every device you want, you're not bothered by trailers or ads or have to use a specific player app or a device with a particular wildvine level or whatever. It doesn't constantly monitor what you watch and when.
It's just so much better, and many of these restrictions are only for the benefit of the publisher. Doing that makes sense if users have nowhere else to go but now they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Especially with the latest 'pay more or watch ads' fad with the streaming services, do they really expect piracy not to massively increase?
> I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do
This is incorrect. The DRM on Windows varies based on the browser. Trying playing Netflix in Edge vs Chrome and take screenshots. The video will be black on Edge but visible on Chrome. If you use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D on Edge or Chrome to bring up the stats or view their test videos at https://www.netflix.com/watch/80164785, you can see that Edge plays 4k HDR but Chrome only plays 1080p SDR. Netflix allows 1080p with weak DRM but requires strong DRM for 4k.
There are similar restrictions for mobile devices, VR headsets, etc. where the resolution is limited on certain devices and browsers because of their DRM configuration.
> Netflix allows 1080p with weak DRM but requires strong DRM for 4k.
Well that's an improvement from when some browsers on Windows got 720p. Apparently that changed about six months ago.
But it's still 720p for most browsers on Linux. Huh.
It works fine in Linux, the limit is artificial. Multiple extensions fix it like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflux/
Coincidentally, this kind of thing is why you'll get 4K streaming on some browser/platform combinations but not the others. For example, Netflix will only give you 4K on Windows if you're using Edge or their own app.
If you torrent, you always get 4K, and VLC never has any issue with screenshots, either.
Yes. Apparently Gabe Newell [1] was right:
> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...
It's a pricing to service ratio problem.
Unfortunately, the corporations that own the copyright thinks the price is zero for piracy, when it in actual fact, isn't "truly" zero. The fact of the matter is, these copyright owning entities want to extract the maximum amount of profit, rather than provide the lowest price, maximum service for the least cost.
I'm glad there's piracy as a floor to how bad streaming can get.
We have Netflix. The quality is unusable. There is no price at which I think the service is worth the money. As with so many things by 2025, capitalism has eaten itself and utterly failed. I only have it for a sense of moral rectitude - of which it provides almost none as well. Let me give money to these unbelievably greedy jerks because that's the right thing to do???
> There is no price at which I think the service is worth the money.
It’s fine if you don’t think there’s anything worth watching on Netflix. Worth knowing that more than 300 million people around the world disagree: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/netflix-subscribers-300-mil...
We use Linux in my house. My problem is with the quality of the video they send to my device. It is not worth a penny because it is actively disagreeable to watch. There is some good content there, not more than a small percentage, but I understand their fight with other companies greatly impacts availability.
Building a movie library with 1 to 4 movies a month you actually want to watch on Apple TV seems to be the better mid-term investment if you want to stay digital for the same price of an UHD enabled Netflix subscription.
I own a bunch of UHD-Blurays, but the friction to get up from the couch there is also quite large and you can't just decide to watch them on vacation.
Also Netflix bitrate for UHD is abysimal and rarely has any third party stuff.
Amazon bitrates are also good, but I lost a lot of trust in their mid/long term commitment to user needs.
I would be in the metric as well, while detesting the service. However, I'm not the only person in my home and it's not always easy to transition the family onto my local solutions. It's why I have YouTube premium as well, while letting the family know it's easy to grab all of that content and self host. It's like the chance of seeing something to watch you didn't already know about outweighs the cost and quality of service.
The problem is not what you can watch on Netflix. The two main problems I have are that Netflix is not a one stop shop and that Netflix turns my device into my adversary. The latter means I won't ever use the anything Netflix had made.
> It’s fine if you don’t think there’s anything worth watching on Netflix. Worth knowing that more than 300 million people around the world disagree
Meh. You could practically say the same about junk food. Just because it's convenient doesn't mean it's the best thing available.
> capitalism has eaten itself and utterly failed
Is it really the capitalism, or is it the monopolism of exclusively owning the copyright and making the money out of it? Who'd fund the widely expensive shows, the CCP? Guess what the quality of the TV shows was during Socialism (and the level of creative freedom they had)?
The capitalism gave the pirates the way to cheaply reap, host and distribute by providing the means to do so for a fraction of the price. If you don't like the service, you don't pay, netflix shares go down and they end up like Blockbuster. If they succeed that means there are enough people who pay gladly.
Copyright system is flawed, but it's not because of capitalism per se (private ownership of the means of production), but because of the over regulation coerced from the government by the copyright owners. But that's bad governance, not the capitalism itself.
If the best that market capitalism can give us is an endless flood of superhero franchises with Grade 6-level dialogue (to serve the largest possible audience), deadline-damaged CGI and $300m budgets, I have a hard time seeing how socialist cinema could do worse.
The market gives what people want. If the majority of people want (and can be influenced to want) shitty franchises and cold popcorn, it will produce this. That's why Italian food is better than German, not because it's capitalism's fault. You cant' find a decent tomato in a German supermarket, but easily find one in even the biggest supermarket in Rome.
You'll also get an ad-free, offline first, non-tracked experience.
Fly that black flag high!
Why I still torrent even while paying for Netflix, prime video, YouTube premium, Spotify and audible.
You also get that warm feeling from sharing with others, which is more than 4k and hdr combined. All we need is connection.
VLC even lets you save a full-res snapshot of whatever you're seeing, regardless of the window size!
Since Netflix never (edit: rarely) releases Blu-Rays for their original content, there's no source to produce high-quality versions of their 4K content right? Could be wrong but I thought webrips that screen capture are relatively low quality because they're reencoding a video that's already being compressed for streaming.
Don't know if I notice these things much personally but if someone already cares about 1080p vs 4K they probably would.
The scene has ways of getting the data without reencoding. Look for web dl.
This is still far less bitrate than the equivalent BluRay. Netflix dropped their 4k bitrate during COVID and never looked back.
This is the difference between “rip” and “DL”. You can certainly pull content from Netflix without re-encoding.
This even extends to screensharing on Teams. If I recall correctly, DRM protected content is completely black even when using Chrome.
Yep, it's super annoying to pull up a movie on your machine and want to cast it over to the TV to watch and only getting a black screen because you didn't do the DRM dance correctly.
Teams is just several Edge webviews in a trenchcoat.
this is just the standard way the video overlay works
In the compositing world we probably shouldn't be using overlays anyway.
Pssst disable hardware acceleration.
Which, reasonably, significantly reduces your resolution.
Yeah not many people know about this.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081
This Netflix support page shows that 4K streaming is only available in the Edge web browser on Windows devices and in the Safari web browser on Mac devices.
If you use Chrome or Firefox you get locked in to a lower resolution when using Netflix even if you are paying for 4K streaming.
Can you trick it with a different user agent? Most of the times websites put arbitrary restrictions like this, it works by changing user agent for me.
In this case they're probably using browser-specific APIs to implement the DRM rather than naively detecting the UA and providing a higher quality stream.
I have a feeling it's eventually going to be possible to work around this by setting up live AI upscaling to 4k - should be a year or two before that starts to work in real-time on higher-end gamer GPU.
(Of course I suspect DRM will then get extended deeper into the GPU.)
HDCP already encrypts everything starting from video decoding to the signals being sent to the monitor. It really can't get "deeper" than that, other than maybe fixing whatever current vulnerabilities pirates are using to bypass it.
Then it'll get re-extended to 1080p again? Point being, I can see live 1080p to 4k upscale via generative AI becoming a feasible alternative to watching the original 4k stream where DRM prevents you from accessing the latter.
This wouldn't be possible, since Edge supports both Microsoft PlayReady and Google Widevine DRM schemes and as far as I know, Widevine's ChromeCDM is less secure in browsers (L3/software DRM) while PlayReady is more secure as it uses some hardware components.
Netflix probably uses PlayReady for 1080p+ content, but I don't have a Netflix account to test so I can't confirm
L1 in Chrome is now available if your hardware supports Playready SL3000, but if it is officially supported at this point rather than being a beta that nobody guarantees from build to build seems surprisingly undocumented.
I've never been able to get Edge to streak Netflix in high def. Same with the official Windows app.
Your monitor, GPU, HDMI cable, etc. need to be HDCP compatible, to get a higher resolution.
True, but the streaming provider had a CHOICE to enforce that requirement, and the user experience has suffered as a result of their choice.
The streaming provider doesn’t have a choice. They must implement and prove they have a working DRM solution or publishers won’t hand over the streamable media
I don't know why the publishers care. The scene has it all already.
Exactly, and they still have it from day one every time. It's not an effective method against piracy, it's just an annoyance to paying users.
They just never learn this lesson. Remember the meme joking about all the unskippable bullshit people had to watch on a DVD, when they could just download a pirated copy and press play :)
It's about control
Scene pirates complain quite a lot that they frequently do not have access to day one Netflix UHD releases and they have to burn hardware keys to do it every few months.
It always felt like a lottery, if all stars are aligned you can watch it in high resolution
Can you watch netflix on edge in a VM? I'd guess you can't as VMs likely don't have HDCP for their virtual devices.
Only in SD.
Though in some cases a VM can enforce HDCP.
Because you don't own the device, and the real device owner (Apple) is not working in your best interests. If you resent this kind of thing, put a penny in a jar every time software that you've paid for makes your life worse; when the jar is full, find a copy of Linux and install it. Spend the jar on whatever you want - it's free :)
Your suggestion for not being able to screenshot movies is to install linux, which doesn't support DRM (or does, but only at the lowest qualities)? Sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me.
I would suggest that giving up control of your entire computer to get a few more pixels on some crappy (paid!) streaming service is the Pyrrhic victory. If everyone refused this Faustian bargain, then the services would be forced to adapt. In the meantime, your jar gets another penny every time you watch a movie. When it's full, find yourself a torrent client and spend the jar on whatever you want - they're free :)
>I would suggest that giving up control of your entire computer to get a few more pixels on some crappy (paid!) streaming service is the Pyrrhic victory.
This is going to inevitably turn into a mac/windows vs linux flamewar, so I'm going to acknowledge this but refuse to continue the discussion.
>If everyone refused this Faustian bargain, then the services would be forced to adapt.
Like getting people to use dedicated set-top boxes, like with cable TV? Amazon's fire stick is basically that. Moreover I think you're overestimating how much people care about "freedom to tinker" or whatever. They just want their shit to work.
>When the jar fills up, find yourself a torrent client and spend the jar on whatever you want - it's free :)
It's only "free" if you value your time at $0/hr.
> It's only "free" if you value your time at $0/hr.
With FOSS I don't have to spend time trying to figure out how to remove the latest unwanted crap from my start menu or taskbar. I don't have to spend time figuring out how to remove the telemetry crap. I don't have to set my default browser back to Firefox after every major update. I don't have to click through popups about new features they want to promote or telling me how I can waste even more money by subscribing to their cloud services. I don't have to lose work because it decided I didn't update often enough and just forces a reboot without my approval. No, I can just work on it and it will just do what I want, not what Microsoft wants. That saves me a lot of time.
>how to remove the latest unwanted crap from my start menu or taskbar => 5 min.
>I don't have to spend time figuring out how to remove the telemetry crap. => Use Rufus writing Win Iso., choose no telemetry option, 0,5 min.
>I don't have to set my default browser back to Firefox after every major update => Just not true, 0 min.
>I don't have to click through popups about new features they want to promote or telling me how I can waste even more money by subscribing to their cloud services. => Use Windows Pro Version, no Popups, 0 min.
In total: 5,5 min.
Learn using Linux: > 3yrs.
> Use Rufus writing Win Iso., choose no telemetry option,
So you pay for the product and then need to download some unofficial shady East European software to remove unwanted features? Ridiculous.
Also I did some experimenting with firewalling telemetry and I doubt thatshady software blocks all of it. I don't believe it.
>So you pay for the product and then need to download some unofficial shady East European software to remove unwanted features? Ridiculous.
Get your facts straight. A quick check of wikipedia will reveal it's open source and written by Pete Batard from Ireland, not "some unofficial shady East European software".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_(software)
https://akeo.ie/
Meanwhile "linux" incorporates software from overworked volunteers that willingly handed over control to some shady threat actor that successfully backdoored it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
True, even Microsoft once recommended Rufus in instructions for some of their msdn ISOs. Not sure if they still do though.
It doesn't. It just chooses the minimal data collection option for you during the install.
Actually turning it all off requires very deep modification of the OS.
> Learn using Linux: > 3yrs.
That's quite dishonest in the context of general usage scenario.
Well it has happened to me that it put Edge back, at least twice that I remember. Once was a longer time ago though, when they moved from "old" edge to "new" edge (which is just a chromium knockoff).
But yeah to each their own. I don't like windows very much either because I can't really customise how it works. While on Linux I can change everything. I can choose a radically different window manager/desktop environment for example. Like i3/sway.
And Linux and BSD (I don't use much Linux, I use BSD on my desktop) are very natural to me because I've been working with Unixes for decades. Like Minix and HP-UX in the 90s before Linux even existed. This is really where preference comes into play.
I still use windows too, on my gaming desktop mostly. And I have Windows 10 LTSC on a little NUC I use for video recording. LTSC is not as bad (even though it still has telemetry :( ). But they should really make it available to everyone.
That is about as ridiculous as saying it takes 3 years to truly know how the iPhone works. You're talking out of your ass because you don't have any rational refutations to reach for.
> It's only "free" if you value your time at $0/hr.
Checking the OS version, browser version, HDMI cable reference and screen reference to pray that the DRM works isn't really easy nor instantaneous either.
I'd say it's even more annoying than torrenting
Most of the time these days I can’t actually find a search engine to give me links, so they have mostly won.
If you're accessing via a personal computer at all you're already in a fairly small percentage of users.
The smart TV and set top box ecosystem work fine, and that's where the users are.
I was actually generous by picking a computer, with the amount of cheap and non updatable smart TVs, I doubt that more than 20% work with the strongest DRM.
And then if that's the case, it's either piracy or buying a new TV if you want the best quality.
>I was actually generous by picking a computer, with the amount of cheap and non updatable smart TVs, I doubt that more than 20% work with the strongest DRM.
DRM doesn't care that you're on the latest patch level with all CVEs patched, only that your system is vaguely "secure" (ie. has a TEE, even if it's full of holes). The netflix app works on phones with Android 5 from over a decade ago, so similarly old smart TVs are probably fine as well. Failing that, they can buy an up-to-date roku/fire stick for $25.
Pretty much any brand name smart TV supports the "strongest" DRM and has full UHD Netflix et al support, and has done since about 2016/2017.
Also I doubt the jar ever fills up, not many people in this thread seemed to be aware of this limitation until reading this post.
> They just want their shit to work.
Which might include streaming at appropriate qualities and being able to take a simple bloody screenshot of what you paid to watch.
I think you underestimate people.
This kind of myopic "pragmatism" is what got us in this mess.
I would assume Linux wouldn't implement this but has this been verified somewhere?
It's my understanding this limits the quality of content streamers permit to run on Linux:
https://linuxcommunity.io/t/drm-the-final-barrier-to-linux-d...
I can confirm that screenshots are totally fine on Apple TV+ on Firefox + Pop OS. I don't know what the quality is, but it looks at least 1080p and as great as I would ever want to my eyes.
Is it Wayland with capture enabled? That sounds like a fortuitous bug.
Apple TV is limited to 720p on Linux.
I’ve had decent luck installing linux in a vm on a mac, then screen sharing the video the vm is playing.
In fairness to apple, linux apparently runs fine on arm macbooks.
In fairness to Apple? Did they port it? I think you mean "in fairness to the maintainers"
They didn’t lock it down. It’s a bit unfair to say you don’t own your mac hardware. (vs. iPhone, iOS, or even Android, where even the things with unlocked bootloaders can’t run non-android-derived operating systems).
More accurate statement would be that you don't own the content that streaming services provide. Apple (or for that matter any platform company) will have to implement DRM if they want their users to be able to watch such content. If you are against DRM then don't buy the subscriptions of such streaming services.
Good look convincing the employees of these companies, who seem to be a majority of the commenters on this post.
The reality is nobody cares. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to take a screenshot of a movie and I’m sure most people haven’t either.
You can’t extrapolate your needs to everyone’s needs. I’ve never needed to use a wheelchair for mobility, most people haven’t. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider the use case.
What if you need to use a screen reader or magnifier for the text at the beginning of star wars. You would be pretty pissed if it was blocked by DRM. Hopefully pissed enough to sue under the ADA.
This is kind of a silly argument. You’re not going to stop your movie to take a screenshot so you can magnify the text or run some TTS on it.
If you want movies to be “accessible”, you should argue for that. Being able to screenshot a movie doesn’t help make them accessible in the first place.
I stop my movies all the time to read letters or text that passed by too quick to be see. I don’t know why someone vision disabled would not do that. They don’t have to be taking a screenshot, just using software that uses a screenshot api, like a screen magnifier or reader for example. The thing about accessibility is that you frequently don’t know or can’t anticipate how the built environment (including software) will be used by the disabled.
Again, do not extrapolate your use case or experience to all users.
Maybe I’m a college student that wants to take a screen grab for purposes covered under fair use.
Maybe I’m a customer that needs to show a picture defect to customer support.
Maybe there’s a use case that I haven’t thought of yet.
The point is that disallowing screen shots prevents a lot of behaviors that are good for this world.
Make the video player accessible then.
That's my whole point.
The way to make it accessible is to allow users to do what the want with the content on their computer.
Accessible isn't binary, it is a spectrum of options. The point of many accessibility features in the real world and the digital is to increase possibilities and modalities of use. DRM that blocks screenshots is the opposite of that.
I encourage you to learn more about the disabled and their needs before you keep firing off these quips. It isn't adding to the conversation, and the faults in your reasoning have already been explained thoroughly.
The accessibility was just one of many arguments put forth for perfectly valid reasons you might want to take a screenshot of a video player. You said: "The reality is nobody cares. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to take a screenshot of a movie and I’m sure most people haven’t either."
I'm just pointing out that there are people that DO care, and that there are compelling practical, moral, and legal reasons to care even if those reasons don't affect you right now. There are plenty of things that exist in this world that matter a great deal to people, that will never matter to you.
Sorry, but you don’t need to be able to take a screenshot of a movie to make it accessible. Build the accessibility features into the player if people need them.
And you may care about being able to take a screenshot for other reasons, but my entire point was that 98% of people don’t, it hasn’t even crossed their minds.
If you really need that screenshot, you can take a picture with your phone.
That's a different point. Taking screenshots is probably uncommon, I could believe that. And therefore ..?
Wanna bet? I do that regularly. Sometimes just use my phone too.
"Accessible" to me means I get to use the media how I want to use it.
And when that is actually the deal I am happy to pay.
When it isn't? Let's just say I am not happy to pay.
A frame capture to see a detail, or discuss it with a friend is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. Same goes for audio.
People like to use media in many ways.
And these people have general purpose computing devices that do all sorts of things as they were designed to do.
What if people want to talk production? WHY does it look or sound like it does?
I believe what you meant to say was YOU think it is silly because YOU would NEVER stop your movie.
And that is OK! My wife would strongly agree with you.
You don’t get to redefine accessibility.
Why do we have to go by your chosen definition?
You don't.
My point simply is far more people than you may currently expect consider actually using something as a meaningful part of access.
It is kind of silly to separate the two in this context.
However ill advised I may consider it to be, you get to do that.
Access to media without use does not make much sense. "Here, hold this DVD for me."
Thanks?
I’m in agreement with you.
I was asking the other commenter (what) why he felt free to dismiss your definition on accessibility as a revision, while at the same time asking us to abide by his arbitrarily decided definition as the one true definition.
I fully think that accessibility is impossible without freedom to use all possible functionality.
Ahh. Indeed, thank you.
I noted that, but did not ask as you did.
I didn't. Cheers.
All the time to Google translate various Japanese signs.
I do this semi-frequently. I'll seed a funny screenshot or short clip to friends. It's free marketing for the show. They should really build short-clip sharing into their apps.
I guess I’m the weirdo based on the downvotes, but I’ve never even considered taking a screenshot of a movie and I don’t think I could because I watch them on a TV.
You're getting downvoted because people are trying to explain why they need to do something you are insistent nobody needs to do. But it's moot anyway, because you don't have a good explanation for why someone can't use their own computer in a way that they want, despite being in control of everything happening on the device.
It's coming off a little desperate and like you have an agenda to push, if you're curious.
No one has actually explained why they need to take a screenshot of a movie. This argument about using your computer how you want doesn’t make any sense.
And you making an account to say this comes off as even more desperate and agenda pushy.
>No one has actually explained why they need to take a screenshot of a movie.
They do it because they feel like it. Why should they need a better reason than that?
Have you ever been on social media? Where do you think all those Netflix GIFs on Giphy come from? User generated content is what powers those networks and a huge chunk of that are TV show memes and discussion, all of which need screenshots.
There are as many reasons as there are screenshots on reddit ...
* sharing glaring continuity errors ...
* finding real world shoot location via crowd sourcing and comparing screen and original to identifiy CGI addins.
* reasonable use screenshot for a fan wiki.
* send to a relative showing your face in crowd scene as an extra.
* ...
Why shouldn't people be able to take screenshots?
For instance, perhaps you remember some amusing detail in the background of a scene and want to show everybody. Perhaps they don't believe you, and the screenshot lets you say "I told you so". Perhaps you want to illustrate a post, like this one which uses screenshots from TV show Psych and the titles of Pi:
https://thevirtuosi.blogspot.com/2012/03/moving-pi-ctures.ht...
There's even a case where high resolution shots would be useful, to properly see little numbers written on a wall in the background.
> This argument about using your computer how you want doesn’t make any sense.
Ohhhh, you're trolling :D
Old school, I can respect that.
Yeah, I too cannot imagine why anyone would want the freedom to decide how they use their computer, rather than yielding that to a corporation ;)
You've never used a movie screenshot to make a joke image or to discuss part of a movie?
Memes often rely on screenshots of movies.
Yup, case closed. If enough people cared about this then they wouldn't buy iPhones anymore. The market is speaking, and Apple is listening with rapt attention.
Are we at the point where we see this nakedly bad-faith argument for what it really is yet?
Has the DOJ mandated that I'm wrong yet? Because if not, then no, Apple has every imperative to do as they please because the iPhone is evidently not a monopoly.
We had a loooooong time to bury this argument in the ground. I think the iPhone is a monopoly, but until the DOJ agrees it's all a bunch of hot air. Truly, their stance is that you should buy a different phone if you disagree. FOMO proprietors like Apple delight in that answer, Hacker News acts like it's pulling teeth.
Apple devices will happily play non-DRM content.
> imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.
Legally, public screenshots accompanied by text/audio/video commentary are fair use. When shared on social media, reviews, or fan sites with influencer commentary, they are unpaid marketing for video creators.
Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders. Is this checkbox compliance theatre, e.g. does everyone in the distribution chain mindlessly click a DRM button? Can Apple differentiate between DRM screen recording and DRM screenshots? Can Apple differentiate between 30-second promotional clips and longer recordings, or rate limit N captures per M wallclock time? Can rightsholders add metadata to enable screenshots on a per-title basis?
If one studio can demonstrate marketing success with authorized screen excerpts, other studios may follow.
>Can Apple differentiate between DRM screen recording and DRM screenshots? Can Apple differentiate between 30-second promotional clips and longer recordings, or rate limit N captures per M wallclock time? Can rightsholders add metadata to enable screenshots on a per-title basis?
DRM implementers can barely scrape together a DRM implementation that works as intended, as evidenced by all the 4K rips that are available on torrent sites. What makes you think they're competent enough to implement all the stuff you're suggesting, for marginal gains? As much as people like to dream up hypotheticals why screenshots provide "free PR" or whatever, I seriously doubt whether it's something studios care about.
> What makes you think they're competent enough to implement all the stuff you're suggesting
See Nvidia GPU licensing and market segmentation of features, enforced by GPU firmware, which yields them 50% operating margins.
See the enterprise browser market (e.g. Talon, Island), which has granular policy and security controls for web content.
DRM is typically rooted in some kind of secure enclave, designed for granular policy enforcement.
>See Nvidia GPU licensing and market segmentation of features, enforced by GPU firmware, which yields them 50% operating margins.
Disabling features, possibly at the hardware level with e-fuses is far more straightforward than trying to allow one sort framebuffer capture (screenshots) but not another (video recording).
>See the enterprise browser market (e.g. Talon, Island), which has granular policy and security controls for web content.
How secure are they though? It's one thing to make a chromium fork with "if is_porn_site(url): block()", it's whole different thing to implement a cryptographic system that can withstand physical attacks.
> Disabling features, possibly at the hardware level with e-fuses
They have a common hardware architecture configured by software (Ada), https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/riscvsummit2024/fe/Key...
> How secure are they though
Good question. That depends on whether enterprise insiders have more or less economic incentives than media pirates. One of the enterprise browser vendors exited for ~600M USD to Palo Alto, so perhaps the security bar is only at the level of corporate firewall rather than gaming console.
> Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders
This was literally the first time I saw this "feature". I was watching something on Netflix and wanted to share a screenshot with someone. I realized that it didn't work. Ok, I guess you don't get my top-quality word-of-mouth marketing and to allow paying subscribers to enhance their enjoyment by chatting about the show. It is just a lose-lose scenario.
It's not really that I disagree with your argument, but rightsholders do not have an obligation to maximize revenue or customer goodwill from their works.
I can write a book and publish it. Then, one day, for no reason, I can take that book off the market and tell everyone, sorry, it's not for sale anymore. I enjoyed making my money but I am done now.
There is no legal requirement to do the logical right thing.
This actually reminds me of Flappy Bird. The creator took it down despite being a viral hit that could have made him massively wealthy.
> Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders.
Is it though? In the old days they needed people to recommend you see a movie or listen to a song or whatever today it's hyper-personalized algorithms and if that's not enough almost every major tech company sells targeted advertising to show your <thing> ahead of the rest.
Personal recs from trusted people outweigh paid ads. Studios get free promotion that outperforms algorithmic placement.
Facebook and Google may want more advertising, but that's not Apple's core business. TikTok has BookTok, FilmTok and MovieTok communities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookTok
> #BookTok had been viewed over 200 billion times on TikTok with about 60 billion videos.. There are many articles that discuss how BookTok has changed reading for younger people and impacted the publishing landscape.. Another popular aspect of the community culture in BookTok is the open discussion and the idea that users are reading the books together
These views come from an algorithm shoveling it down everyone's throat based on ByteDance' preference, according to some very convincing accusations on that subject.
And the most common way to "skip" the algorithm is paying TikTok to advertise your video and Meta and Twitter to promote your link.
There's even a whole ecosystem of paid pitches to people who curate large public Spotify playlists. And the people who listen to those playlists are the trendsetters that the algorithmic fluff picks up on later.
The irony here is that despite all these DRM efforts, piracy groups upload 4K HDR (or Dolby Vision) atmos mkv files within hours anyway.
Meanwhile watching these shows the legal way on unsupported DRM chain gives you 720p SDR with worse audio.
This irony already existed in the good old DVD age. If you bought one legally you had to sit through several unskippable videos, usually also one about piracy, before the movie starts. If you had pirated that same movie would play immediately, so the user experience was better.
Back in the day you could use AnyDVD to skip all the pre-movie cruft.
Also, most DVD players allowed you to hit stop-stop-play to skip directly to the movie.
assuming you were playing on a computer.
They don't even need to deal with screen recording which this DRM is trying to protect against either. Just find a device that supports the highest playback resolution and steal the data right off the bus.
The way the groups typically achieve rips from streaming services is by using compromised Widevine L1 capable devices, and straight up extracting out the keys. This ends up in a dance of getting new devices when they eventually get blacklisted.
They thought of that. HDCP is supposed to prevent this by encrypting the video signal all the way to the playback device.
Yeah, but the HDCP keys were cracked over 10 years ago, and there are plenty of Chinese-made devices that defeat it.
I believe these piracy groups arent hijacking the HDMI signal. They're cracking the Widevine DRM chain to grab the audio and video data from the stream and repackage it into an mkv file.
They were cracked several times, but HDCP has a revocation/rotation mechanism so it doesn't really change anything.
In 2010, an HDCP master key was leaked, allowing anyone to generate an infinite number of valid new HDCP devices. This has made HDCP useless for stopping piracy for the past 15 years. All it's done since then is add another point of failure between people's electronics and their displays.
According to wikipedia, they released a non-backwards compatible update in 2013, which presumably fixes this.
Wonder how many people lost the ability to play ~~their content~~ the content they were licensing when they released that update, and had to buy new hardware because it was no longer supported.
not even hours later in most cases. these anti-theft measures will block the random individual who wants to make a clip out of a movie but won't stop anyone actively pirating.
It's wild to me that these guys still try this hard with DRM given that obvious reality. Like, I get that streaming services aren't just shipping an MP4 file that you can right-click and hit Save As. But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?
>But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?
Even if making 3M screenshots to extract the video isn't a viable ripping strategy, it's still less work to block all capture APIs than it is to figure out which methods you want to block, and make sure that implementation is airtight.
That's why I pirate everything. Originally I tried purchasing music files (iTunes) with the hope of it supporting musicians I liked. When it was a lesser, hindered experience, I switched back to pirating everything, still do, and always will.
> I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do (which, when you think about it, would be a weird thing not to care about, given Windows’s market share), but because Windows uses a less sophisticated imaging pipeline.
That anti-screenshot mechanism does also exist on Windows, but it's only enforced by stronger forms of DRM like Widevine L1. Typically streaming services mandate L1 or equivalent to watch HD/4K streams, so you can't easily screenshot those, only the lower resolution versions with weaker protection. Workarounds like disabling hardware acceleration are really just disabling strong DRM support so you get served a weakly protected low res stream instead.
I guess Apple applies the same restrictions to all DRM protected content, even if the service only demands a weak form of DRM.
It's simple to enable on Windows, any surface with DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_FLAG_DISPLAY_ONLY set will get excluded from screen capture APIs. No DRM is required.
DRM isn't always the reason for video not being capturable, though. Efficiency optimizations can also get in the way, such as hardware video overlays. Back when overlays were first introduced, attempting to capture the screen would often omit the video because it would only capture the chroma key in the primary surface. Even today, the DWM has to undo multi-plane optimizations and specifically composite the screen when screen capture is requested.
I wrote about some of this earlier this year: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70954.html?thread=2203178 - the short version is that it has nothing to do with screenshotting, screenshotting is just a victim of it. If you have decoded video content in video RAM a separate app can just read it back out and reencode it, stripping DRM for minimal loss in quality.
(In theory the hardware could provide a rate limited interface to allow copying it, letting you take one screenshot every few seconds or something, but that would create additional "risk")
Making the world worse one DRM at a time.
> No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound.
I'm not defending Apple here, but -- yes they definitely would? And then they'd get sound on a second pass at regular speed.
If pirates couldn't access the underlying Netflix etc. bitstream like they've figured out, they'd absolutely be reading the desktop video buffer, which is all a screenshot is.
DRM isn't about release groups, and it never was. Actual pirates have a million different methods to capture video.
DRM is a panic reaction to VHS, designed to making copying so inconvenient that casual users won't bother anymore.
I look at the raw amount of information as a form of deterrent in some cases.
Getting a Blu-ray rip to a point where the average Pirate Bay user would be willing to wait for the download takes quite a bit of transcoding work. Not many are interested in maintaining 1:1 50 gigabyte source copies of every film out there.
If your connection counts as "broadband" then you can download 50 gigabytes in an hour. Or in other words, you can buffer for less than a minute and start playing. And seeding long enough to not be rude is probably somewhere between a day and a month, so that's a pretty small storage burden.
One qualifier is that even if a connection counts as "broadband" many national ISP like Comcast (Xfinity) put data transfer limits and 50 GB is 5% of my monthly limit. And if I go over I have to pay $10/50GB in chunks.
Not that this matters in the 'downloading' versus 'download then deleting' (streaming) debate. There the amount of data is the same and not having to re-download obviously makes not-streaming the winner.
Tangential: when I signed up in 2013 I actually had unlimited data transfer and paid $78/mo. Now in 2025 for the same plan and speeds I pay $113/mo and I have a data cap with fees. Comcast just decided on a whim they would not provide what I signed up for but since they're a megacorp they can. I have filed 2 FCC complaints about this but the FCC doesn't care. I'd switch but Comcast has been given a monopoly on local pole infrastructure and there are literally no other wired options (telco says 3 blocks from the switching center downtown is too far for dsl).
You can download sequentially too.
Few people need Blu-ray quality, though. The quality offered by streaming services would usually fit on a DVD. Shorter TV show episodes would fit even on a dual layer CD.
We can look at game recording tools to try to understand what a world without DRM might have looked like. Those are able to easily record and encode video at 1080p or 4K on consumer hardware. Uploading that to YouTube or sharing that with friends isn't an issue either.
> The quality offered by streaming services would usually fit on a DVD
Absolutely not. Have you watched modern streaming services lately?
I recall when hdtvtest (Vincent) on YouTube tested Apple's 4K quality against 4K Ultra Blu-Rays via Apple TV (formerly iTunes Movies). IIRC the bitrate was about half (~25 Mbps vs 50Mbps) and the difference in visual quality was very difficult to see. Esssentially, he concluded that a high-quality streaming service or online digital movie purchase is pretty much just as good as a 4K Blu-ray.
There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
It's also important to note that the average US broadband speed is now quite a lot more respectable than it was back when we were all begging for US home Internet infrastructure to improve. I believe the average home connection is something like 100 Mbps if not better, and streaming services really have no trouble delivering Blu-ray quality 4K video to the average US consumer.
Now, obviously, you don't need that level of quality to enjoy the movie, but if that's what piracy is up against you will definitely need a lot of storage to compete with those streaming services that cost a couple of Starbucks coffees per month.
I think this is actually a bigger barrier than a lot of people assume. I have personally considered the idea of my own media server but keep getting put off by the fact that I really will need a very large NAS-grade HDD for it. The total hardware cost to get going is roughly equivalent to a multiple years of streaming service fees.
> There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
Well first off, what percentage of viewing hours are in 4K?
Second, a DVD could store a 54 minute episode at 20Mbps. That's close. And if I found the hdtvtest video you're talking about the bitrate was "between 15 and 25" so it would likely fit as-is. Also, that comparison was seven years ago with Apple using h.265, and today they could use AV1 to get the same quality with 20% fewer bits. Maybe h.266 to be even smaller or better.
(If you're interpreting their comment as "with actual DVD encoding", I think you're misreading them. I don't think they're suggesting streaming services are on par with low-noise 480p. And it doesn't fit with the CD comment.)
> Absolutely not. Have you watched modern streaming services lately?
Of course I have - a typical Netflix movie is between 3-6GB.
Apple TV is the only one offering higher bitrates (which is why I use it, even though we're an Android/Linux only household, with iTunes running in a VM to buy movies from Apple TV).
> There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
Severance episodes, in 2160p with Dolby Vision and DD+/Atmos audio, are 8.3GB-8.7GB each. While you're technically correct, the point remains.
> I believe the average home connection is something like 100 Mbps if not better, and streaming services really have no trouble delivering Blu-ray quality 4K video to the average US consumer.
A typical 4K UHD bluray has a bandwidth of 95Mbps-120Mbps. A far cry even from the 25Mbps offered by Apple TV, let alone the 6-10Mbps offered by Netflix.
> I think this is actually a bigger barrier than a lot of people assume. I have personally considered the idea of my own media server but keep getting put off by the fact that I really will need a very large NAS-grade HDD for it.
I have a blu-ray collection, I do not have a blu-ray player. I watch my movies by ripping them to my NAS and playing them from my NVIDIA Shield TV.
If you don't do any transcoding on the NAS, you can use an old ThinkCentre or HP Microserver (about $60-$100). If you just rip your own movies from blu-ray, you don't need any redundancy, so you can buy a single 12TB drive for $200.
That's about $250-$300 for enough storage for 450 1080p blu-rays or 160 4K UHD blu-rays.
The only remaining cost is the content, but usually you don't just watch new releases. Used blu-rays are available at e.g. worldofbooks or rebuy for $5-$15 each.
Look, I understand the value proposition of self-hosting media.
But you still are talking about $300 up-front investment plus untold amount of unpaid time spent learning how to set up and operate such a thing. Plus cost of content.
This is competing with streaming services that, like it or not, are competing with Blu-ray quality at least close enough.
You are also not correct about Netflix's bitrates, they max out at above 17500kbps as of 2023, almost double your claim: https://netflixtechblog.com/all-of-netflixs-hdr-video-stream...
> Netflix's bitrates [...] max out at above 17500kbps as of 2023
That's great, but I haven't ever seen anything close to that in real-world measurements. Not even with shows like Altered Carbon.
That said, even at 17.5Mbps, that'd still fit on a DVD and would be a far cry from the 90-120Mbps seen on blu-rays.
> But you still are talking about $300 up-front investment plus untold amount of unpaid time spent learning how to set up and operate such a thing. Plus cost of content.
Oh I absolutely agree that it's expensive and annoying today. I was arguing that in a world without DRM, recording your own media would be popular and affordable.
I was only referring to current-day technology to show that the tech exists. In a world without DRM, with an actual market for it, recording your own media would likely be as common, affordable and popular as VHS had been.
Dual layer CDs are not a thing but yes you can put a 'half hour' episode on a CD at 3.5-4Mbps and it will look pretty good, better than the average streamed video.
Double Density 1.3 GB CD-RW from Sony: https://www.dpreview.com/articles/5586166218/sonyddcddrive
I will note the existence of that, but I feel comfortable saying that's not actually a CD. Especially since only one drive could ever use it. More importantly, it's still single layer.
And compared to the not-fully-compatible 99 minute CD-Rs, they only get an extra 50% space. Not a very impressive format there when burnable DVDs were already out and would obviously drop in price over time. Plus you could get another 14% by using mode 2 with reduced error correction...
> If pirates couldn't access the underlying Netflix etc. bitstream like they've figured out, they'd absolutely be reading the desktop video buffer,
This cracks me up. This is like saying “If our enemy didn’t have missiles, as we are well aware they do, well, they definitely would be buying forks at Walmart and using them to poke us, or at least wave them menacingly. We must therefore place heavy restrictions on the sale of cutlery.”
HDMI capture is super easy. Pirates would not bother with a million screenshots. It's a tiny barrier that only really causes annoyance and makes the computer not work for the user.
Isn't the point that the video isn't sent to external non-DRM'ed HDMI, that it shows up as black the same way it does in a screenshot?
The truth is that HDCP too only annoys the consumer.
Pirates can bypass it easily, and even event venues and universities keep cheap chinese HDMI splitters on hand to avoid issues during lectures or presentations. These $10 devices just rip the HDCP off the incoming video stream.
This is most useful because Mac OS keeps applications around even without a window, and as long as e.g. Spotify is still there, it'll force HDCP on the HDMI out.
Yes, and then someone in China successfully extracted a key and built a "HDCP stripper" that double negatives the italic. They appeared to have taken the keys from few of something expensive enough so that it politically can't be revoked.
Capturing HDMI also used to be costly, China solved that too few years ago. Compressed 2K capture dongles are $9 apiece.
I wouldn't describe those as "tiny" barriers, though, it just wasn't up to faceless Chinese silicon gurus circa 2010.
So yes that's the point of HDCP, but HDCP is broken. And lots of HDMI splitters remove it entirely.
[flagged]
No personal attacks please, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My apologies, I assumed that applied just to participants on HN discussions.
That makes sense, it's just that we've noticed over the years how it still degrades thread quality. I think it's a medium-is-the-message thing to some extent. It's no big deal (and can be quite fun) to call $whoever a $whatever in small conversations, e.g. over a drink with friends, but on a large public internet form the dynamics change a lot.
Sure, that makes sense. Sorry again and I'll skip the epithets in the future.
That's not an argument. There is no law that prevents me from taking screenshots therefore I should be able to do it
Did you see where I started with "I'm not defending Apple here"?
I'm just pointing out that one of Gruber's points doesn't really hold water.
I get that DRM is important for content providers but it really sucks to not be able to grab individual frames for things like running them through google translate or google image search. There have been a few times I've wished to grab a frame for something like a meme, but mostly it's accessibility things being blocked for no real reason. They don't stop piracy, they just prevent people from doing things like translation.
Apparently the same DRM is also enforced in the Apple Vision Pro as MrWhoseTheBoss discovered in his review. Except in that case, Apple's DRM pipeline extends all the way up to your eyeballs instead of your HDMI TV. That realization about what our dystopian future might hold for us seemed to hit him pretty hard :
https://youtu.be/5MhRZp2uunc?feature=shared&t=861
This same issue prevents AirPlay from showing DRM video content on TVs. It's incredibly frustrating since Samsung TVs don't support Chromecasting.
It's so much fun when AirPlay doesn't work so I have to go dig out my Chromebook and an HDMI cable to connect directly to my TV.
That's a feature. You paid to get the video on the small screen, so you will watch it there.
Netflix has a mobile-only plan in emerging markets that is cheaper than the "SD" plan.
That's DRM for ya
It's also blacked out when screen sharing, but there is no way for other apps (eg. bank apps) to ask for the section of the app that contains the user's credit and debit card numbers to be blacked out when screen sharing.
This is one of the more boneheaded moves of DRM IMHO.
They are shooting themselves in the foot for no gain I can see and huge amount of downside. People are screenshotting (or even recording a 5sec clip) to _share your content_. These methods clearly have zero effect on piracy so all they do is make legitimate user’s lives more difficult.
It _might_ make sense if every streaming platform had built-in tools to share a clip or a screenshot, but they don’t. It completely baffles me.
I need to dust off my plans for a simple Plex gif-maker tool. A web-based tool I can load and is queued up to wherever I am in the show I’m watching with grabbers on a video timeline to select the start/end of the clip. Then export to mp4/gif, maybe simple subtitle support or text overlays.
Apple’s GIF search feature in Messages (#images, like Giphy) is almost entirely content from TV shows and movies. It seems hypocritical for Apple to promote this as a way to express yourself, while prohibiting users from making such content themselves on Apple devices.
At this point I just torrent again, it's not worth the hassle trying to pay for content
Hear, hear. I was also pleasantly surprised how fast a pirated movie appears on a gigabit connection. Last time I had used BitTorrent it was on like 200Mbps.
I couldn’t screenshot non-DRM videos on Windows XP either.
It’s because the video is being rendered on a different framebuffer for performance reasons.
Helpful for DRM too.
There's nothing stopping hardware accelerated decode being in the same framebuffer as everything else, the only reason for this is DRM - you get just the same acceleration with VLC, but can still screenshot.
The XP era is when we depended on fixed-function hardware overlays to scale video and handle yuv translation, and yes in that case you'd just get a magenta or blue background instead of the video. That era sucked, and hardware got better since then.
Those never went away, they're just called multiplane overlay (MPO) now and are better integrated into the system. The Windows 10/11 DWM automatically migrates swap chains in and out of independently flipped overlays to save power, and can recomposite them when screen capture is requested.
A friend of mine who was taking a few Udemy courses last year ran into this issue when he needed to take screenshots for important things he was learning in the course. Ended up working around it by disabling GPU acceleration in chrome.
I'll do the devil's advocate: (not because I'm on Apple side, just to see all points of view).
The florist in the article can still grab her phone and take a photo.
I think the problem with not allowing single screenshots is that once you allow access to the video stream a software on the machine can sinply capture ALL frames and recreate a video out of it. Anyway, until there will be one not protected distribution channel the torrents source file will be collected there.
Does this actually do anything to stop torrents?
You said yourself, you can trivially bypass the protection using 3rd party hardware like "recording on a cell phone." This doesn't seem like it does anything to reduce actual piracy, while severely harming the Fair Use right to take a quick screenshot for personal reference.
On Android, taking screenshots of things like Amazon Prime Video used to be possible, even on the same device, but at some point it became impossible.
Earlier this year I bought a bunch of moon-shaped LED lamps that are controlled with an IR remote, and made an ambilight app for my computer that constantly screenshots the screen, finds the predominant color and sends a signal to change the color in all of them. Only to find that watching a TV show would just leave all black...
>These DRM blackouts happen at such a low level that no high-level software — any sort of utility you might install — can route around them.
Well, since physically you still own your device you can send direct assembly instructions to your processing units, or even just take HDMI signal, intercept and record it fully. Technically if one bothers to reverse engineer the instructions browsers send, they can be studied and reversed. There are tools for that, as well as high-level languages which make it possible to execute low-level assembly code.
There's little difference between enabling a single screen shot and allowing screen recording. The rights owners require blocking of screen recording, so all screen capture gets blocked as a result.
Doesn't macOS also use this for power savings, rather than only DRM? This is something that Linux is also starting to pick up, and is probably one of the biggest reasons for Apple Silicon Macs having superior battery life.
The GPU is the thing decoding the video stream and putting it directly on the display (via hardware planes). It doesn't need to send it back (aka copy) to the main CPU. Screenshots can't see what's there because the CPU has no knowledge of whats there.
Rather than the GPU decoding the video, sending it back to the CPU which then will send the frame back to the GPU as part of composition, and wasting power.
If the user requests a screenshot, the CPU can request a frame from the GPU.
Digital Rights Management != Direct Rendering Manager
Video RAM is accessible to the OS, if you render into it it can be read back. In this case it's deliberately rendered into a separate protected area of RAM the OS can't read, and composited at scanout time.
Compositing is done by the OS though (WindowServer in case of mac). Ever since OSX stopped allowing direct framebuffer access I think the only way to read (e.g. for screenshots) windows of other processes' is by asking WindowServer to do it for you, so I'm guessing that's how this protection is implemented.
WindowServer ultimately still needs to get access to the framebuffer somehow though, so there must be some private API somewhere to bridge kernel and userspace part. I suspect if you could bypass SIP or just write a kext to access video memory directly then it'd be possible to defeat this protection.
Compositing into the framebuffer is done by the OS, the compositing of the DRMed video stream into the output is done in hardware. The OS literally has no visibility into the decoded content. You suspect incorrectly.
Recently ran into issues caused by Apple's DRM protection as well.
I wanted to stream Crunchyroll on my TV from my iPad 9 via the Lightning to HDMI dongle. Apparently an iOS update 2 years ago broke that functionality for DRM content [1].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/04/ios-16-break-drm-content-hdmi...
Preventing screenshots takes resources. You need engineering,l time, the solution itself consumes system memory, needs additional code at run time and ultimately consumes more power on the devices. All of these apple doesn’t want to spend; so I would guess may be there were attempts to reconstruct movies using screenshots or may be it was asked of them?
Not supporting any party in this case, but this argument is weak.
This is like saying "putting padlocks cost money. We have to make sure we research about locks, buy the right one, give right people the keys. It is easier to just .. keep the door unlocked"
Every solution has its costs. The question is whether those costs outweight the benefits it seemingly brings. In this particular case, Apple has decided the DRM implementation costs outweight the benefits.
It’s probably due to some licensing verbiage because these DRM implementations do just about nothing good. Pirates still rip videos from these platforms somehow, but the usual customer can’t watch the 4K they paid for on most browsers. So, it must be an idiosyncrasy at some management/licensing level, not something that serves a functional purpose.
And frankly, the “buy 4K, but we will serve you 1080p in most cases” sounds like a class action lawsuit in the making anyway. So, if anything, this DRM scheme will cost them more than just wasted engineer time.
From what I remember of the windows video apis there is a system for decoding DRM content where you need to use special types of buffers which can’t be mapped to the CPU. There’s special interfaces in MediaFoundation (decoding) DXGI (buffer/device interop) and Direct Composition.
Maybe there are holes or the browsers aren’t doing it properly or it only applies to the MS proprietary DRM.
I noticed that I can no longer that a screenshot on my Samsung phone of Netflix. I used it to advertise a show to my friends. "You gotta watch this..." It’s just them shooting themselves in the foot.
> What I don’t understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video
To claim that they did. That’s the quality of work you get when you’re forced to comply to get a certificate or pass a check or something of that nature.
Ran into this the other day trying to screenshot something in the background of a music video playing through Spotify's desktop app. I opened youtube, took the screenshot from the video there, and wondered why the protection was necessary.
It is annoying but not that tragic. Browser built-in screenshotting works fine (I use firefox) as does OBS. Only the builtin macos screenshotting tool gives black frames, which again is annoying and should not be the case, but there are alternatives that are ok at least.
i created a tool to get around this. (called "valet vision".) of course, it involves using a raspberry pi and a camera pointed at the phone's screen. as they say, life (and automation engineers) finds a way...
Then I think, you should still give a warning to users
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...
If I were Apple, I'd leverage this in content licensing negotiations.
I'm curious how you imagine this came to be. What a strange coincidence! Oh well maybe we can use it to get better deals. What luck!
> This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.
Yeah what's the point?
If anything it's yet another reason to just download pirated content. You can screenshot that just fine. You can save it where you want without expiring, play it on every device you want, you're not bothered by trailers or ads or have to use a specific player app or a device with a particular wildvine level or whatever. It doesn't constantly monitor what you watch and when.
It's just so much better, and many of these restrictions are only for the benefit of the publisher. Doing that makes sense if users have nowhere else to go but now they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Especially with the latest 'pay more or watch ads' fad with the streaming services, do they really expect piracy not to massively increase?
It's nice to see Gruber writing about these things, because he has credibility amongst the Apple copium huffers.
I feel like this is the kind of gripe that would be waved away as no big deal or "well actually…" if someone outside the Apple fandom made it.