Yep, but YouTube doesn't require full DRM support.

Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me.

What's the point? Even with theoretically perfect protocol level DRM, the consumer eventually has to be able to see/hear the protected content. If the frames of the video are displayed on screen, and the audio played through the speakers, the output can be recorded and preserved, period.

Do the people in charge of making these decisions not realize that whatever convoluted DRM technologies they pay to be developed and implemented will always be defeated by a $30 camcorder from the 90s?

After working in the broadcasting industry for a few years... the answer is that the management of companies in the chain simply doesn't care. DRM absolves them of any kind of piracy blame and they happily pile blame around on people who push back on DRM. That's about it to the story - actual results never come into the reasoning.

I had always considered this the most likely explanation.

The tendency for humans to implement elaborate but ineffective security theaters in an attempt to convince people they're protected from fundamentally unprotectable threats is as old as society itself.

As a consequence, chrome can't watch netflix videos at full quality, anybody who flys in the US has to remove their shoes, and my child has to wear a clear backpack to school. I wish we'd stop playing these silly games of pretend which degrade the quality of life of everyone.

> Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me.

> What's the point?

It's the same reason you put a lock on the door to your house. You know the lock is easily bypassed by tools. The windows are easily broken. The door can probably be easily forced open. But you still lock the door when you leave in the morning.

Locks are about keeping casual theives as honest people. DRM is about keeping casual pirates as honest customers. It's about making it just difficult enough to copy that most people will consider it not worth the bother. It's about saying, "You must be this determined to break the law."

> making it just difficult enough to copy that most people will consider it not worth the bother

I don't think that the analogy holds up. The deterrence only applies to uploaders and not consumers, because the processes for removing DRM and distributing videos are independent. It just takes one person to make a video available to the entire world. It does seem like torrents are available for most of the Netflix catalogue, so I'm skeptical that DRM is useful for popular shows.

The analogy is good, but the reasoning is a bit off. Let me fix it - You still lock your door in the morning because you know that your insurance company will not pay out your theft insurance if anything gets stolen. DRM is mandated all the way up the chain (and noone really cares if it works).

They realize, of course. It's not the true reason for DRM, which is squashing competition[1]

[1] https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/antifeatures-for-all.html

Here's the real rub: the videos have already been pirated at full quality, and are available online for free. They're doing a poor job of defending something that has already been breached.

That all said, camcorders don't get you anywhere: the goal isn't ripping the video, it's ripping the high quality video. DRM can theoretically defend against that, but you'd need to control the whole stack, incl. hardware, incl. the monitor and speakers.

>but you'd need to control the whole stack, incl. hardware, incl. the monitor

Even then, you could tear monitor apart and grab LVDS signals to panel.

DRM works on multiple fronts, causal piracy is one. The other is the control over player production, what features it will have, who can and who cannot make it, etc. Those who can make good deals, will get an advantage.

Someone above linked a help page that says, that for 4K Netflix you need Edge and Intel Kaby Lake or newer. Do you think that it was free for Microsoft or Intel, or some good deal sweetened that?

> causal piracy

Not sure if you mean causal or casual. Casual is going to piratebay and downloading.

I would agree that DRM and other anti-consumer things (unskippable things on dvds, adverts accusing you of pirating the dvd you've actually bought, etc) does cause piracy though

Recording the analog output has a lower quality than the original stream for 3 main reasons:

1. Marketing and psychology: Viewers want to believe they are viewing the original, not a degraded copy.

2. Unfaithful copy: Analog output and analog input introduce errors. LCDs use a variety of tricks to improve resolution such as spacial and temporal dithering. Also you can't use a normal camera to record a monitor because of aliasing (of pixels and non-genlocked frame rates).

3. Encoding noise. The encoding of the original is based on the higher quality original, and carefully optimised for the least visual artifacts. Any re-encoding also has to deal with noise introduced by the copying process, and with the noise introduced by the original encoding. This noise noticeably reduces the quality of a copy.

If anyone is wondering, this whole concept referred to as the analog hole. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

There are many answers to your question but for starters:

- There is no perfect security. There is a notion of raising the expense of piracy to a level that it effectively does not matter.

- IIRC, for instance, rooted Android loses support for... Widevine? So you can't really use Netflix on a rooted device where you could easily steal frames from the video buffer. Yeah, you can rig up a nice camera system and record analog off the display. Nothing they can do about that. They also may insert watermarks to let them know who recorded it.

I bought an HDMI cloner box the same day Netflix announced they were adding this DRM.

I actually haven't even taken it out of the box yet. But it just feels good to know their DRM is pointless.

They don't care because once the signal hits analog the quality will be much lower.

But why should I, as a viewer, care about that?

Because content providers are making you care about that. They _demand_ that you're prevented from seeing high quality TV if your platform doesn't fully lock you out.

Do netflix limit their own shows?

Yes, they apply full DRM to their own content as well.

The answer is probably "because your content is locked on that provider", but that's a less and less valuable point.

Obviously, BitTorrent was the big reason in the past, but now the reality is that there is a lot of competition in the video space - you aren't just competing with films and tv shows, but youtube videos, twitch streams, etc...

It most likely does for paid offerings. I doubt you'll be able to watch a paid 4K movie on youtube/google movies unless you satisfy their highest widevine requirements. I think youtube's 1080p requirements may be more relaxed than netflix though. Regular yt has no DRM of course.

You can actually watch 8k video off of youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn24cQLqAE4

Wow! Even at my monitor's 1024x768, the 8k video looks amazing! So much better than 1080p!

Something something nyquist something

I'm not 100% sure if you tried to be ironic or if you really reported that the video was better in 8k than FHD.

Because actually, it can be.

Although 8k is overkill, 4k will be enough, and 1440p nearly ok on your old 1024x768 monitor. Typically video encoding does some subsampling on some color components. If you play 4k content on a FHD screen, the quality can be better because you will have no subsampling on your FHD screen, compared to mere FHD encoding (in most cases).

It was a stab at irony.

True, but the video is already subsampled. That's how it was able to be uploaded at 1080p at all, since the source video is 8k. So 8k vs 1080p shouldn't make any difference on monitors less than M-by-1080 resolution.

The video is typically subsampled at encoding at capture resolution, but it is also subsampled at other encoding resolutions. Because the whole point of subsampling is to be taken into account during encoding, and encoding itself needs not to vary depending on whether the source was downscaled or not.

So video codecs most of the time work with some subsampled chroma components. So your encoded 1080p might be able to render after decoding only e.g. 540 lines of those components, while with the 4k stream it might be: 2160/2 => back to 1080.

Edit: but to be clear, I'm not advocating for people to choose 2x stream and start watching 4k on FHD screens in general, that would be insane. Chroma subsampling is used because the eye is less sensitive to those colors.

I would be interested in a double blind experiment confirming that their specific implementation of chroma subsampling is even detectable. The eye is much less sensitive to colors than intensity, as you point out. If it were perceptible, I think the codec designers wouldn't feel it was an acceptable tradeoff.

So your encoded 1080p might be able to render after decoding only e.g. 540 lines of those components, while with the 4k stream it might be: 2160/2 => back to 1080.

I'm not sure that's accurate -- whatever downscaling process was used to convert from 8k to 1080p on Google's servers is probably the same process to convert from 8k to 1080p in the youtube player, isn't it? At least perceptually.

I would agree that if they convert from 8k (compressed) to 4k (compressed), then 4k to 1080p (compressed), then that would introduce perceptible differences. But in general reencoding video multiple times is fail, so that would be a bug in the encoding process server side. They should be going from the source material directly to 1080p, which would give the encoder a chance to employ precisely the situation you mention.

Either way, you should totes email me or shoot me a keybase message. It's not every day that I find someone to debate human perceptual differences caused by esoteric encoding minutiae.

It's not just that the eye is less sensitive to chroma.

Although your 4:2:0 subsampled 1080p video only has 540x960 pixels with chroma information, the decoder should be doing chroma upsampling, and unless its a super simple algorithm it should be doing basic edge detecting and fixing the blurry edges chroma subsampling is known to cause. I posit that even with training, without getting very very close to your screen you wouldn't be able to tell if the source material was subsampled 4:2:0, 4:2:2, or 4:4:4.

The truth is that generally people DO subjectively prefer high resolution source material that has been downscaled. Downscaling can clean up aliasing and soften over-sharp edges.

People who watch anime sometimes upscale video beyond their screen size with a neuron-based algorithm, and then downscale to their screen size, in order to achieve subjectively better image quality. This is even considering that almost all 1080p anime is produced in 720p and then upscaled in post-processing!

It will make different if the encoding compression is different. Not all 1080p streams are equal. A 1080p FHD blueray is around 30mbps. I've read 20mbps h264 being almost indistinguishable from 30mbps blueray. In my own personal test using some Starwards bluerays, a 10mbps looks pretty good compared to the blueray. On YouTube I've seen anywhere from 2-4mbps being used for 1080p and 7+ used for 4k.

A 4k or 8k stream is coming into your computer at 10+mbps and being downsampled to 1080p can very contain more information than a lower quality 1080p stream coming into your computer at 4mbps even after downsampling.

Even ignoring chroma, video compressed at streaming bitrates is nowhere near the nyquist limit for a given resolution.

In addition, YouTube generally encodes 4k at like 5-6x the bitrate of their 1080p encodes (codec for codec), rather than merely 3-4x higher which would be closer to the same quality per pixel.

So yeah, YouTube's 4k is better on a 1080p screen than their 1080p stream.

There is already an 8k display on the market.

SMPTE recommend a viewing angle of 30 degrees, which matches THX (26-36).

Assuming you have 20/20 vision, You won't be able to tell the distance between 4K and higher unless your screen fills more than about 40 degrees, in which case you are losing detail at the edges.

An 8K monitor on your desk may make sense -- if you're say 3' away from it and it's say 60", you'll start noticing a difference between 4k and 8k, however you will be focused on one area of the screen, rather than the entire screen.

Even with 4K, for most people watching television/films the main (only) benefits are HDR and increased temporal resolution (60p vs 60i/30p)

All the 8K stuff I've seen comes with 22.2 sound to help direct your vision to the area of the screen wanted. It certainly has applications in room sized screens where there are multiple events going on, and you can choose what to focus on (sport for example).

If you were to buy a 32" 8K screen - say the UP3218K, about 28" wide, to get the benefit of going above 4K you would need to be sat within about 30 inches. At 30" you would have the screen filling about 50 degrees of vision. Even an immersive film should only be 40 degrees.