Pay NZ$20/mo for Netflix in UHD, or fuck around on pirate sites to make sure none of the people making the series and films I'm enjoying, while hoping that no-one has dropped an entertaining payload in the site ads or the files I'm downloading is "piracy is more convenient"?

The downvotes are for a shit take disconnected from the reality of people who aren't determined not to pay for something.

> piracy is more convenient

It sure is when I can load an entire show on a Plex instance and can sync it on my mobile device without any arbitrary limitation (like how many episodes I can sync, or synced copies that expires after a while which I experienced abroad on Netflix).

Step 1. Pay NZ$20/mo for Netflix in UHD.

Step 2. The content you want is not there or available on any other legal platform for your country.

Step 3. ????

This has nothing with a determination not to pay or to have studios go out of business. This has everything to do with artificially restricting me from being able to watch the content I pay for in a manner which is convenient to me. I have no interest in buying into a proprietary ecosystem of shitty software just to watch a TV series.

Whenever a service provides content in a way which I can access DRM free, I make sure to reward them for it by voting with my wallet. I sometimes also tell them to make sure they understand that one of the factors in my decision to give them money was the fact that they offered the content DRM free. But not because I wanted to re-upload it for free via bittorrent or show it in a cinema to all my friends, but precisely because I wanted to watch it on my computer without having to install crazy whitebox crypto nonsense.

I don't think normalising having to run someone else's crazy whitebox crypto nonsense on your computer is a good idea. Even if most people don't know or care.

For now, at least. It is possible they fix all issues.

Except that people who exploit L1 just never reveal how they do it, good luck with that.

That's the beauty of the asymmetry against DRM, only a single decoded file (which will always happen) is enough for seeding to everybody.

This seems to be confirmed by the fact that most torrent sites have 4K copies of brand new streaming only content while no publicly known exploits exist.

Since you are running the exploit locally without affecting other peoples machines, I imagine it would be close to impossible to work out what exploit they are using.

Are those actual decrypted copies of the original stream, though? Or did they just re-record the output? For the latter you'd only need to break HDCP, right?

If the end user can't tell then it doesn't matter.

Well but there's likely to be at least a small quality difference, and a considerable a quality per file size difference, because the video would need to be re-encoded.

Yeah. They're WEB-DLs, not WebRips.

Not really, since that would entail breaking playback on current devices/firmwares.

They can only try again next time (for 8K?).

Broken TZ does not mean the algorithms are broken, only that exploits exist to bypass TZ. Fixing the exploits doesn't break anything about the algorithms for decode / decrypt.

I'm not sure what in my comment you were disagreeing to. Fixing the exploits would entail requiring a software update/breaking unupdatable devices.

Yep. I remember when Blu-ray "required" Windows Vista because it had better DRM APIs then a few months later the studios gave in and allowed playback on XP... which was immediately cracked. Ultimately you have to meet customers where they are which is old devices.

Until current broken devices fall out of use. Eventually, all devices might be secure.