Comment by presbyterian
2 months ago
Even with DRM, if you can see it, it's decoded somewhere along the line. There will always be a way to get the raw video out of it if you're committed enough.
2 months ago
Even with DRM, if you can see it, it's decoded somewhere along the line. There will always be a way to get the raw video out of it if you're committed enough.
That's actually an important distinction. You can recapture the DRM protected (and then decoded) video pretty much always indeed, but then you degrade the quality by having to encode it again.
Well, not important to some, but for enthusiasts and people looking to actually archive things, it is very important.
Case in point, hilariously, the last time I used YouTube's video download feature bundled with their Premium offering, I got a way worse quality output than with yt-dlp, which actually ripped the original stream without reencoding it.
I think I saw an idempotent h264 encoder at some point, where you wouldn't suffer generational loss if you matched the encoder settings exactly from run to run. But then you might need the people mastering the content (in this case YouTube) to adopt that same encoder, which they're not going to be "interested" in.
Even with DRM video you can fetch it losslessly. At some point, some part of your system requires access to the raw, decrypted video stream.
As long as that's the case, you can get bit-perfect netflix rips.
The problem is that if you have the raw data, you’ve lost the original compression information, so you can’t get it back to a sensible size without double compressing. e.g. Think about what you get when you save a jpeg as a bitmap.
5 replies →
circumventing the DRM is what will land you in legal hot water. storing the DRM encrypted media isn't the same offense