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Comment by laurentdc | Hacker News Reader

Hm, odd. I'm watching Netflix right now on a oldish HP monitor at 1920x1080, connected via VGA.

So it only cares about protections if it's going through HDMI? Seems useless, I could just run the VGA into any capture device and rip the whole thing.

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Yes. HDMI is digital, VGA is analog. You could rip the video from VGA, but it would not be a perfect copy. If you do an HDMI capture, you'll get a bit-perfect recording.

Or you can just copy the media directly from the stream.

I've been trying to work out for a while how the Netflix webrips that are floating around the scene are done. They're not screencaps like the Amazon webrips are, but I didn't think you could copy the stream directly like that.

I bet it's done using something like this

https://www.amazon.com/HDMI-Cloner-need-Capture-streaming-vi...

or, in a world where such devices are outlawed, you could take the outputs of the LCD matrix controller and convert the signals meant for the physical pixels to a video stream :)

It's useful for gaining a foothold over the potential customers who would be scared off at the need to upgrade all their equipment in order to watch the films they can already watch. Give it time.

I'm assuming some contract with some specific company required it so it might only be for certain content. Also, it looks like this might be through a native app and not a browser.

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