• 3 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 25th, 2023

help-circle



  • Torrents are pretty much perfect, but are held back by peoples slow internet connections. If ISPs provided symmetrical connections (e.g. 100MBit/s down and up) P2P file sharing would be everywhere.

    Sadly most providers in Germany heavily favor download speed. E.g. a friend of mine has fiber optics 250MBit/s down and 50MBit/s up. That’s a 5:1 ratio!

    PS: Symmetrical connections would also be great for other use cases. E.g. simple, e2e encrypted P2P video conferences.

    Currently in video calls with more than a few people, a device sends it’s video stream to a server which then sends it to all other participants. This increases cost for Zoom/Teams which then get passed to it’s users.

    The better solution would be for each device to send it’s video stream to all other participants directly (p2p). This would result in video stream bandwidth times the amount of participants (e.g. 5mbit x 10 participants = 50mbit/s up).









  • A regular capture card will adhere to the HDMI DRM HDCP, which means it’ll only record a black screen. As you guessed, there’re capture cards which either don’t implement HDCP (unlikely for major brands), or which have been hacked and can be flashed with custom firmware.

    I’ve read OBS on Windows also only records a black screen, at least with hardware encoding enabled (NVENC, AMF, Quicksync also implement DRM as part of the driver). Software encoding might work.

    As always with content: If it’s on your device, it can be copied.

    PS: Now I remember Crunchyroll also uses Widevine, but I’ve seen it streamed over Discord. So either Widevine L3 doesn’t prevent recording, or it doesn’t work in Firefox, or Discord doesn’t use hardware encoding on Windows (unlikely), or something in my comment is wrong information -> Disclaimer, I’m just repeating from memory what I’ve read.



  • On Windows Microsoft/Nvidia/AMD sign their graphics drivers, which guarantees the DRM that the content isn’t recorded on the system.

    Disclaimer: The following is my understanding from reading things here and there. I’m a layman on this topic, so please don’t quote me.

    On Linux drivers aren’t designed to prevent users from recording on their system, so the DRM doesn’t play high quality content. Also, because drivers aren’t directly provided and signed by MS/NV/AMD, there’d be no way to prevent users from patching the graphics drivers to allow recording again.

    That is, if DRM support was implemented in the driver, which it won’t, because there’s no interest and the current distribution model makes it near impossible.

    tl;dr

    DRM is (always?) closed-source, else it could be easily circumvented. The Linux driver/desktop stack isn’t designed to prevent users from accessing content played on their own device, so rightsholders disallow playing high quality content on Linux.

    PS: I’ve noticed on Amazon or Netflix some shows are higher quality than others on Linux. I guess this might be due to rightsholders requiring different Widevine levels for the same quality.


  • Using Linux means DRM protected content either plays in terrible quality or in RakutenTV’s case not at all. Netflix is limited to 720p with low bitrate and Amazon limits to ~540p.

    Changing user agent doesn’t work because it’s the DRM who decides whether the OS is supported.

    Linux users have to decide between low quality legal streaming services, or piracy with high quality. It’s not a difficult decision for me and my giant HDD.

    Edit: I forgot the third option: streaming sticks (Roku, FireTV).