A Look at How Movies and Shows From Netflix and Amazon Prime Video Are Pirated (torrentfreak.com) 219
News blog TorrentFreak spoke with a member of piracy group "The Scene" to understand how they obtain -- or rip -- movies and shows from sources such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The technique these people use is different from hardware capture cards or software-based 'capping' tools. From the report: "Content for WEB releases are obtained by downloading the source content. Whenever you stream a video online, you are downloading chunks of a video file to your computer. Sceners simply save that content and attempt to decrypt it for non-DRM playback later," the source said. When accessing the content, legitimate premium accounts are used, often paid for using prepaid credit cards supported by bogus identities. It takes just a few minutes to download a video file since they're served by CDNs with gigabits of bandwidth.
"Once files are downloaded from the streaming platform, however, they are encrypted in the .mp4 container. Attempting to view such video will usually result in a blank screen and nothing else -- streams from these sites are protected by DRM. The most common, and hard to crack DRM is called Widevine. The way the Scene handles WEB-releases is by using specialized tools coded by The Scene, for The Scene. These tools are extremely private, and only a handful of people in the world have access to the latest version(s)," source noted. "Without these tools, releasing Widevine content is extremely difficult, if not impossible for most. The tools work by downloading the encrypted video stream from the streaming site, and reverse engineering the encryption." Our contact says that decryption is a surprisingly quick process, taking just a few minutes. After starting with a large raw file, the finalized version ready for release is around 30% smaller, around 7GB for a 1080p file.
"Once files are downloaded from the streaming platform, however, they are encrypted in the .mp4 container. Attempting to view such video will usually result in a blank screen and nothing else -- streams from these sites are protected by DRM. The most common, and hard to crack DRM is called Widevine. The way the Scene handles WEB-releases is by using specialized tools coded by The Scene, for The Scene. These tools are extremely private, and only a handful of people in the world have access to the latest version(s)," source noted. "Without these tools, releasing Widevine content is extremely difficult, if not impossible for most. The tools work by downloading the encrypted video stream from the streaming site, and reverse engineering the encryption." Our contact says that decryption is a surprisingly quick process, taking just a few minutes. After starting with a large raw file, the finalized version ready for release is around 30% smaller, around 7GB for a 1080p file.
If the file size changes significantly (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to wonder if this is really lossless decryption (or is truly decryption at all). I remember, back in the days of Requiem, decrypted Apple mp4 files were basically the same size as the encrypted original.
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Lossless compression after decryption (Score:2, Troll)
I would expect the decrypted video to be significantly smaller IF the encryption is strong. The reason for that is that compression and strong encryption don't play well together.
You can decrypt it, then zip it, and it should be smaller.
Encryption produces what appears to be random bytes.
Compression takes advantage of redundancy, patterns in the data. With the redundancy removed, you can't very well compress data after it is encrypted.
If you compress the data before encrypting it, you've probably created
Re:Lossless compression after decryption (Score:5, Informative)
I would expect the decrypted video to be significantly smaller IF the encryption is strong. The reason for that is that compression and strong encryption don't play well together.
This is not true. Ignoring some inconsequential overhead such as headers, padding, IV, etc (likely less than a kilobyte), an encrypted compressed video (or photo, etc) file will be essentially the same size as the source. Encryption happens after compression and there's no correlation between the reduction in entropy via compression and the transformation applied via encryption. Try it yourself by encrypting compressed files like pictures, zip files, or a video.
The only thing that comes to mind about the reduction in size is that the DRM needs to support streaming and seeking which will cause increased overhead. At some level they are probably breaking the video up into many tiny chunks and encrypting them in a way that supports random access without downloading the entire file. Though a 30% increase just for this seems pretty crazy.
However 30% is about what you'd see if you base-64 encoded the content before or after encrypting it.... though I have no idea why you'd ever consider doing that for video (unless it was by accident [php.net], lolphp).
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> Encryption happens after compression
If you encrypt after compression, you're nearly guaranteed to have an oracle. That's Poodle, ROBOT, Bleichenbacher, BREACH, CRIME, etc. These are all caused by compressing before encrypting. If you compress first, you no longer have strong encryption. You have either
A. Encryption that can be cracked using readily known methods such as these listed above
B. Encryption which can probably be broken by a slight variation on the above. All the the vulnerabilities like Blei
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If you encrypt after compression, you're nearly guaranteed to have an oracle
If the quality of your encrypted file depends at all on the content of the source file, then your encryption algorithm is shit. The one and only goal of encryption is to produce a file that is indistinguishable from random noise, regardless of the source data.
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> The one and only goal of encryption is to produce a file that is indistinguishable from random noise, regardless of the source data.
Yes that is your goal. And compression takes advantage of redundancy and patterns, meaning encrypted data shouldn't compress well, right? Is that clear enough, that you can't compress AFTER encryption?
So now we consider lossless compression first. To make this easy for everyone to follow, let's use the simplest compression, RLE. Suppose our uncompressed, unencryp
Shit what do you think POODLE stands for? (Score:2)
What do you think POODLE stands for?
I'll give you a hint: the first two letters are Padding Oracle
Guess what a padding oracle is?
There are two variants of POODLE.
The original was against SSL, meaning it required a downgrade from TLS first.
Later, it was discovered that it's actually easier to POODLE TLS directly - no downgrade.
The LZW weakens it, if you care (Score:2)
> Usually with various video (temporal and motion compression) and image compression techniques (usually JPEG). Then something like LZW. Then the encryption. I do this for a living.
It's the LZW step, the lossless compression, that allows me to crack it. If you want maximum security, you skip that. Depending on what's most important you - best encryption or best compression.
If you have any DRM or other metadata included, the lossless compression probably gives me a padding oracle.
I've been doing this for
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It's probably a slightly garbled message. Maybe they can't copy the audio (has TrueHD or whatever it's called been cracked?) and have to re-compress the decoded PCM data.
Also with Netflix there are sometimes very long extended credits for all the translation work into a dozen languages. Maybe they cut those off the end.
My Kodi box (Pi 3) can't do H.265 or 4k so I haven't looked at HDR stuff, but do their releases include it? My understanding is that the video can play back normally without the HDR data for
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Scene has one rule set, which is democratically agreed upon. torrents/p2p groups have different standards and can end up with dvd quality releases looking vcd.
Re: If the file size changes significantly (Score:2)
I guess quality demands sacrifices: People are still getting nixed for torrenting, while I yet still have to see the case where people are persecuted for simple streaming...
I'm entitled to whatever entertainment I want (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I'm entitled to whatever entertainment I want (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't worth "paying for" but it was worth spending your time to seek it out, down it, and watch it... hmmm.....
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It wasn't worth "paying for" but it was worth spending your time to seek it out, down it, and watch it... hmmm.....
Hmm, if I didn't know better, I would have thought you were describing over-the-air TV broadcasts.
(Is that still a thing these days?)
Of course there is one big difference.
With torrents they say you are stealing it up front, but with TV they say you are only stealing when you get up to go pee, or get something to eat/drink in the kitchen, or answer your phone, or...
Guess it's a good thing I'm far too old to watch TV and movies at all anymore, this whole stealing concept is just too confusing for my old-perso
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Sometimes you can't pay for it. Not available in your region.
Sometimes the price is ridiculous. For GoT you would have to buy a satellite dish and sign up for a 12 month Sky subscription in the UK.
Maybe that doesn't justify piracy for you, but it's enough for a lot of people to feel relaxed about it.
Do you know what streaming services are for? (Score:2)
I wasn't going to pay for the content anyways (anything worth paying for I'll always see in a real theatre)
Please tell me where you can see Stranger Things, Mr Robot, 30 Rock, or any of the non-new-movie content in a theatre.
SMH
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It is for me. I've had a Netflix account going all the way back to the DVD only days and still download Netflix releases so I can run it via Kodi.
It's also the fact that it's the same interface I use when watching my Amazon Prime Downloads or the movies from DVD/BluRays I ripped and put on my server.
"...usually result in a blank screen..." (Score:2)
Which is why I can't even take a screen clip when I freeze frame? *grumble*
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Because if you could someone would just automate the freeze snap process, and capturing audio thru the analog hole will always be a relative trivial exercise with relatively good quality possible to achieve.
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I guess if they get decent encryption that matters, but why would anyone want to recompress 60 screenshots a second if they can just download and decrypt?
Re:"...usually result in a blank screen..." (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess if they get decent encryption that matters
You don't understand. It doesn't matter how good the encryption is because your computer has to have the decryption key to play the content. DRM is just a game of hide the key. For a purely software environment like a PC it's impossible to make unbreakable DRM. The only chance is to hide the key in a hardware device that can't be accessed without very specialised and expensive equipment.
Re: "...usually result in a blank screen..." (Score:2)
Sure, but doing the freeze snap process in an automated way (as GP was suggesting) is less than ideal.
It's lossy.
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Print screen I think usually has problems grabbing content being displayed via DirectShow/DirectDraw or whatever API the players use.
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Is the high demand? (Score:2)
Re:Is the high demand? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are simply time shifting. When Netflix yanks the content, they can still view it.
This is definitely part of it.... (Score:3)
My kids started watching the Men In Black series on Netflix. 1/2 way through the 1st movie, Netflix pulled them all. Gone.
Did I go download them?
No. I went on eBay and looked for the movies. Hmmm, surprisingly not affordable. Then I went on Amazon and bought the trilogy on DVD for $7 shipped to my door. I ripped them and put them on my media server.
Yeah, I could have gotten them faster by downloading, and for cheaper. But if there are reasonable paid options, I will use them.
(I have even downloaded m
Re:Is the high demand? (Score:4, Insightful)
The major reasons to archive content off of a streaming service would be to have it available after it leaves that service or to play it on a device or location without high speed internet access.
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However these streaming services are rather cheap, and the cost of pirating such stuff is rather high.
WTF are you talking about? The cost of pirated movies/TV shows, for me, is zero. I download them, I pay nothing. My only cost is my Internet connection but I would be paying for that anyway because I need it for other things.
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arr matey, has i not already commented you would be getting the "rum me ritey" mod!
Re:Is the high demand? (Score:5, Insightful)
I may completely off here, but is there high demand for pirated Netflix shows? At 10-15$ a month for access to Netflix there really are many people pirating these shows? If you can afford decent tech to download torrents and watch these shows in good quality the price point is probably not a barrier. So do people really feel like $15 a month is way to high?
Sure, $15 for Netflix. More $ for Prime. More for the upcoming Disney service. And it's all region locked - what we get on Netflix in Canada is not the same as the US which is not the same as any other country. So yes, there is a demand, and it will only increase as the streaming services become more and more fragmented.
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So what did you expect exactly? That you could get all the content you want for $10/month?
Piracy will always be cheaper. Fragmentation is a good thing. No fragmentation would mean Netflix, or another, would have the monopoly.
Re:Is the high demand? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fragmentation is only a good thing if it leads to meaningful competition. That is manifestly *not* the case here, the market is fragmenting into a set of markets with exclusive content.
There is no way that the consumer benefits from this kind of fragmentation.
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I disagree. The consumer would be in an even worse situation if Netflix (or any other) had all the content.
The best thing for the consumer would be a 100% fragmented market. Every TV show / movie producer would offer its content directly, unbundled. We would have thousands of different providers with exclusive content. But we would only pay for what we watch.
Of course we would need access platforms / applications able to show us what's available from different providers, but this is not a hard problem to so
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It's a nice idea, but you didn't consider the overheads - it's not practical for a customer to deal with a hundred different companies each with their own service, their own payment, their own app, their own compatibility needs. Simple convenience means there is a need for an aggregator in between. That's what the entire retail sector exists for - the convenient middle-man between wholesalers and consumers. The retailers for online media are netflix, Amazon, and iTunes - but competition is hampered by exclu
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As I said it's not a hard problem to solve. We could have an open protocol and dozens of different applications (some would be open source) would access the same directory of content. You would see the price on each show, and would purchase from your credit card when you start watching. Or they could offer the first episode for free if they want.
We don't need Netflix as a middle man. But if we do, then we must hope for as much fragmentation as possible.
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Sure, but the consumer would be vastly better off if instead of a bunch of fragmented mini-monopolies, the same content was available on multiple services. Exclusives are bad for the market.
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Having all content available on 2 services is exactly what we had with cable / satellite.
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No fragmentation was exactly what you had with the cable / satellite co. No exclusive content either. Both providers offered pretty much all the content.
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Fragmentation is bad, competition is good...
Having multiple services offering the same content would be good for competition.
Having each service offer different content is a mess.
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Let say Netflix had all the content. And Amazon too. There would be no exclusivity. What do you think the monthly price would be? You are very naive if you think it would be anything close to the current $15/month or so.
Feature, not a bug (Score:2)
what we get on Netflix in Canada is not the same as the US
I actually like this - it means that if I go on a trip to Europe or the US there is always something new I have not seen before to watch on Netflix. It is not region-locking like the old DVDs - your subscription is worldwide and lets you watch the content available in whatever country you happen to be in when you watch it. Not only that but because you can now download the content while there and watch it for the week after you get back home.
I actually did that on a recent business trip to Europe. My wi
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I actually like this - it means that if I go on a trip to Europe or the US there is always something new I have not seen before to watch on Netflix.
OK, perhaps it was originally intended as a feature for regular intercontinental travelers. But that would still be not most people.
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Re: Is the high demand? (Score:2)
It always existed. Does not matter how cheap it was. In the beginning of streaming all content providers (ABC, CBS) used to stream freely with ads all their episodes the next day after broadcasting. That's how I got hooked on Lost in season 2 after two years if not watching anything on television. TV was relatively cheap in 2006 but I still prefered free streaming.
It's the combination of realization that TV and movies are junk and paying event a cent for it is humiliating. It's the sense of over produced ma
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Isn't it easier to just turn the center channel volume up on your AV processor?
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At 10-15$ a month for access to Netflix there really are many people pirating these shows?
I'm not a torrent-guy, but I assume there is for content that is regionally restricted. For example, in the USA Star Trek Discovery is on CBS-All Access. Up here in Canada, it's on SPACE channel (and streaming in SPACE on-demand). Rest of the world it's on Netflix. So I assume there's some piracy for programming like that.
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15$ might be to much for a student. But the main problem is: Paying 15$/month only works if you live in USA.
For the rest of the world, a huge part of the content you can get on a USA Netflix account is simply not available on any kind of streaming platform.
Here are for example, my personal list of what I would like to watch, but which is neither available at HBO or Netflix.
A star is born
Margin call
Limitless
The founder
Money ball
So only solution is buying dvd's and that get expensive.
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I've also found the opposite to be true. I remember being able to watch shows overseas that weren't available in Netflix USA. Examples: Dexter (way back when), and Happy (right now.. its available on Amazon Prime for an extra cost, but on Netflix in Latin America its free).
Re:Is the high demand? (Score:4, Insightful)
The demand for pirated content increases as new streaming services are released, competing with Netflix.
When you have to pay 10-15$/month for 7+ difference services, piracy numbers skyrocket.
There is plenty of empirical data published that back this assertion. Netflix was, at a time, one of the greatest piracy deterrents. But as companies got greedy and everyone started having their own streaming service, the piracy numbers started to go up again.
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Not yet, but that will change (Score:2)
I may completely off here, but is there high demand for pirated Netflix shows?
Almost certainly not for the very reasons you quote but this is rapidly coming to an end and the streaming market is going to fragment with lots of players like Disney, CBS etc. all wanting their $10-15/month from you to see their content. When that happens I strongly suspect that all the piracy that Netflix very effectively killed is going to come roaring back because nobody is going to want to go back to the dark days of cable and spend $50-100/month to get the same content spread over multiple sites mak
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Netflix has different content in different countries...
Netflix is not available in all countries...
Some people are on metered or partially metered (ie meter during the day but free at night) connections which make streaming impractical.
Some people are on slow or unreliable connections which make streaming impractical.
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You are still going to be paying $100 for broadband anyways.
however you will also have to pay a years worth of streaming services for basic equipment to store and replay the video.
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Re:Is the high demand? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is the high demand? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It doesn't cost them much at all, because very few pirate copies are actually lost sales, pirate copies are generally free advertising to people who couldn't have purchased the content anyway for whatever reason.
Why not be good with electronics. (Score:4, Interesting)
Today's TV's are all digital. Why can't one just tap into the LCD matrix display, and the digital audio data before it is sent to the DA converter. Save the signals and save onto a separate medium.
No matter what DRM people do, it will need to be decrypted and sent as standardized signal to these devices that we get our normal output.
Re:Why not be good with electronics. (Score:4, Informative)
Today's TV's are all digital. Why can't one just tap into the LCD matrix display
I worked for a company that did exactly that. It takes some hardware expertise, though.
Re:Why not be good with electronics. (Score:4, Informative)
Same, we bought OTS TV like Samsung or LG, disassemble them, took the signal directly from their t-con, the flat ribbon, it's LVDS signal, put a FPGA with some RAM and tada, we grabbed the frame of what was displayed on the LCD matrix... as the signal is coming from HDMI to the TV controller card, everything pass HDCP, is properly decoded and all, and the raw 1920x1080 is sent to the matrix.
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HDCP 1.x is a publically busted flush as the master key has been reverse engineered and widely distributed since 2010 and thus all 1080p content is essentially unprotected.
You can get devices that just tap into the HDCP protected HDMI stream for not very much money on eBay/Amazon and write the stream out to a USB connected device why on earth would you bother disassembling a TV?
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Seems like a hell of a lot of work when you could just buy a $10 HDMI splitter that happens to also strip HDCP: https://www.tweaking4all.com/h... [tweaking4all.com]
If all you want to do is rip the raw, uncompressed video signal you can just use a basic HDMI capture card with one of those.
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Because that LCD matrix display is fed through a LVDS link running at a very high speed, if you're lucky. You can tap it in theory - but you'll need a logic analyser capable of running at such speeds, a custom circuit board, and experts in high-frequency digital signals engineering, reverse engineering and FPGA development. It's doable, yes - but it's so much trouble that cracking the encryption is likely to be easier. After all, the key must be around somewhere in order to view the content legitimately - a
Re: Why not be good with electronics. (Score:2)
For my job, I regularly do a "ram tap" with FPGA with DDR interfaces in between the ram chip and a SoC.
Not much a problem at all, and is much easier than JTAG for needs of getting things out of ram, or stopping execution during access to a specific address.
TrustZoned SoC often come with some kind of JTAG scrambling if TZ was ever ran after boot, and that itself made such adhoc tap boards much more popular.
I have no doubt that whomever that PLAYREADY group is, they didn't have to drill the SoC itself, but mu
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1920 x 1080 pixels per frame x 3 bytes per pixel x 30 frames per second / 1024 / 1024 = 178 MBytes per second of video data is being put out to the screen. For a 1.5 hour movie that's 938GB of raw data.
The audio you can record out of the speaker wires is probably "good enough" but it's going to be degraded quality vs digital.
It could probably be done, but it's not a simple task. You'd have to reverse engineer the signal that populates the screen with pixels to create a series of still images and then crea
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If you gonna recompress the picture, just use elgato and some HDCP decrypter (there are several).
What the pirates are doing here is trying to not have to recompress and give you a 1:1 copy.
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People do that, although it's generally easier to get a HDMI splitter and tap into that. The splitters work by having a receiver chip similar to what you find in a TV. It strips the encryption and other protections, then passes that to multiple HDMI encoder chips that add it back in again. You can tap the unprotected signal with a few wires.
There is a Chinese company that makes HDMI "downgrade" devices that basically just remove the encryption. Netflix buys them to assist with ripping media for their stream
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I'd consider it working given that the tools to rip the streams aren't commonly available and shared extremely carefully. Sure once decrypted it's available everywhere, but you're still dependent on a few people who have the tools to do the work. If they get tired or retire or whatever, then it takes out a significant chunk.
And hon
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Perhaps they'd visibly watermark the streams - encode the subscriber's name, address and credit card/expiry/etc into the stream and simply rely on the social aspect of it to keep people from distribution.
The crackers in TFA use pre-paid cards with bogus ID to subscribe.
Inherent Weakness of Streaming (Score:2)
Why not just rip the Blu-Ray? (Score:2)
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Most people don't care that much about Blu-ray quality for a pirated film. I only have a standard HD tv, so 1080p works well for me.
And until someone creates a spotify like movie service I am going to continue downloading everything.
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Availability. A lot of shows are out on Netflix before their blu-ray release, and in piracy there is much prestige in coming first.
Why do they do it? (Score:2)
How do they make money ripping content and hosting torrents? Is it really worth it?
Re:Why do they do it? (Score:5, Informative)
Advertising. The money is very big for a popular torrent site.
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How could that be true? In a choice between piracy and ad blockers, I would give up piracy in a heartbeat before having to deal with advertising. And yes, I realize ad blockers are technically piracy (if you tilt your head and squint enough).
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Most pirates are not in it for the money, though there are torrent sites with advertising that make some money.
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I am actually surprised (Score:2)
I assumed they were using either screencap software or HDCP-stripping HDMI passthrough devices. Direct decryption should do a better job of preserving video quality.
LOL Piracy group "The Scene" (Score:2)
P2P site gets trolled by scene.
News at 4:20!
I cant believe I actually read that shit, once again LOL.
I'm quite interested in this (Score:2)
I'm interested in how this works to be honest, and it has nothing to do with Netflix.
Odds are once I've watched a show on Netflix, it's unlikely I'll ever watch it again.
However !
I do have subscriptions to various sites that produce tutorials on how to use some very complicated software that you are not going to learn on your own. Once upon a time, these sites provided physical media ( of which I have an entire library of for previous versions of the software ) but have since switched to a streaming / subs
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All capital letters indicate an acronym. Like the old-timey LASER which became "laser" in common usage. The World Wide Web used to be called the "Web" with a capital W because it was a proper noun. So now it became an acronym recently? Is that why it is in all-caps?
Can someone explain this new TREND of people RANDOMLY capitalizing words for NO apparent reason?
An article written by a clueless dumbass journalist.
Yes I know, clueless dumbass journalist is redundant.
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Can someone explain this new TREND of people RANDOMLY capitalizing words for NO apparent reason?
Apple's new INTELLIGENT grammar wizard?
Re: What are WEB releases? (Score:2, Informative)
It's traditional. Releases are tagged with the source material, many of which are acronyms: DVD, BR, HDTV, TS, TC. WEB (and CAM) are capitalized to preserve the pattern.
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It's traditional. Releases are tagged with the source material, many of which are acronyms: DVD, BR, HDTV, TS, TC. WEB (and CAM) are capitalized to preserve the pattern.
No mod points, so quoted for truth. Capitalization of WEB, WEB-DL, etc follow the historical trend of scene releases including the source type in all-caps (since it was usually an initialism like DVD).
Re: Or even worse: Immature snobbery. (Score:2)
IPA beer is the worst beer.
Re:Wtf (Score:4, Interesting)
The pirates are using their own DRM in their attacks against other's DRM? That's next level hypocrisy.
It's even funnier than that.
There's a program that is sold for ripping (breaking the encryption) on Blu-Ray disks. The program contains its own DRM to prevent people from distributing it.
So the pirates cracked it and now you can download the cracked version from various warez sites.
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It's always been like this, ever since the days when the Scene were running on BBSs over cutting-edge 9600bps modems - the top tier are fiercely protective of their releases, and try to prevent mere mortals from laying hand upon them. I never understood why myself. It makes sense to keep a ripping tool secret like that, because if it ever reached the DRM developer they could come up with a countermeasure, but there's no need for secrecy with the finished product.
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It's also not really encryption, it's obfuscation...
Encryption relies on your enemies not having the key, but in the case of DRM you have handed your enemies the key in an obfuscated form and are hoping they don't work out how to extract it.
Meanwhile all you've really done is made a system that's more complex, more expensive and more prone to failure.