Posted by bertman 11/12/2025
Looks like the packaging will be a mess?
What do you mean by it has to ?
Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer is unusable.
Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...
It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.
The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that software screen capture doesn't work.
It's always doable, it's just an option of last resort. You always just want to access the original compressed bitstream if possible.
A relatively low compression with hardware h.264 will still take up a lot less space and throughput than mpeg-2 or raw.
I suppose it's possible that they use a codec where the decryption also means decompression...
But even now, many video sites employ DRM, and only the weakest levels of DRM streams can be recorded off the screen. If they crank that up, which is perfectly possible today, the screen recordings only shows a blank rectangle, because the encryption goes from server to video card. At this stage, "hdmi recorders" are the next level - they capture the audio/video stream from the hdmi cable output for example.
Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
In the end, nobody will ever avoid people from having a camera pointed to a screen. At least till they can implant a description device in our brain, the stuff coming out of the screen can be recorded. Like in the past when people used to record movies at the cinema with cameras and upload them on emule. Sure, it would not be super high quality, but considering that is free compared to something you pay, who cares?
To me DRM is just a lost battle: while you can make it inconvenient to copy a media, people will always try to find a way. We used to pirate in the VHS era and that was not convenient, since you would have needed 2 VCR (quite expensive back then!) and it took the time of the whole movie to be copied.
DRM just raises the bar a bit for access. For example in gaming, it gives the publishers a head start over pirates. If the game is unavailable for pirates during the largest hype, a lot more people buy the product than otherwise.
Also, sometimes DRM wins. For example, right now, Denuvo is undefeated. Some hardware dongle authenticated software are also unavailable in pirated form. Of course one could argue that eventually these would be defeated as well, but, DRM still served its purpose, in defending the product from unauthorized copying in times when it was most desirable.
To me, DRM hasn't made sense when I was looking at it from a Free Software standpoint, but it now makes sense from a product management standpoint.
I was on live TV recently and wanted to keep a recording for myself, that wasn't just filming the screen with my phone. I first tried screen recording watching the show in my browser in their streaming service. Got a black video. Then I tried their phone app, got a black video. Finally, using my phone but the web page they enabled playback without DRM and I could record and store it. When more devices support DRM they will probably get rid of that fallback as well.
I bet that it Google really wanted to it could force Firefox in line, but I imagine that actually preventing screen recording would require compliance at the OS level too, and I don't think that even Google could demand changes like that to Linux. Best they could do is block Linux clients from YouTube, but user agent spoofing or emulation could probably circumvent that.
And even if Google does somehow manage to entirely block screen recording, we can always exploit the analog loophole.
The GPU would simply return all zeros for area where DRM-protected video is being played. Duh.
(I don't think they'd realistically get more paying customers, but I would appreciate it anyway.)
The version of their app that used their V2 API also allowed downloading any video (local to the app, not easily copied) or even setting it to auto-download all of your subscription feed as videos came out.