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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

>Well, yeah. Streaming services wouldn't exist without DRM. The existence of infinite accessible libraries of content for flat-fee monthly-subscription prices, is built upon IP licenses which were granted conditional to the consumer's inability to leverage that access into piracy. If we deleted DRM, streaming services would cease to exist overnight — all their license grants being revoked, leaving them with nothing to serve — and we'd go back to just relying upon the iTunes Music Store / Netflix DVD rental model. (Which, to be clear, has still also existed alongside streaming this whole time.)

Then why there is a ton of Netflix and Amazon Prime owned content on the torrents? It seems the content is very pirateable, DRM or not.

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Technically, they're not pirating the content itself; the original, full-fidelity content remains DRMed. Instead, what these torrents are, are re-encodings of the decoded video stream produced by playing the content. (I.e., they're what comes down the HDMI cable out of the streaming box, minus the HDCP.)

This process loses a lot — for example, this signal is very likely post-HDR-color-processing, and so the result won't look very good on any other screen than the one it was originally told it was going to be played on.

Most people won't care, and will just watch the torrent anyway; but the fact that there's this very slight loss of fidelity, makes the IP rights-holders feel warm and happy inside that they still have this "perfect fidelity master copy" that they can show in theatres that nobody else has access to.

Take that away from them, and they really do withdraw their licenses. (See also: Apple being able to license effectively-perfect-fidelity 256kbit AAC versions of songs from certain parties, but being unable to convince those same parties to license Apple Lossless encodings of those songs.)

As the others have answered... I don't have a TV but I've got a projector with a gigantic diagonal. I posted here several times that I don't understand why streaming from Netflix gives a worse picture than playing a torrent. The DRM itself may be the reason apparently (maybe the computer I use to stream from Netflix ain't powerful enough? No clue).

I'll just say this: sailing the high seas (well, kinda: I only pirate the movie which I have access to anyway and I'm subscribed to Netflix/Disney+/Amazon Prime Video/etc. + 140 channels as part of my Internet subscription) gives a better picture than streaming.

People underestimate the quality of streaming movies locally and playing FLAC files locally vs streaming.

If you're not using a setup that plays nicely with Widevine, Netflix will cap your quality at 720p [0], precisely because your free-as-in-freedom stack doesn't lack the capability to record the stream, if you so choose.

I don't know anything about the other services firsthand because I jus-- uh, actually, never mind

[0] https://www.vdocipher.com/blog/widevine-drm-hollywood-video/...

> I don't understand why streaming from Netflix gives a worse picture than playing a torrent

Because Netflix is conserving bandwidth by sending you a lower-bitrate stream, while the pirated copy is — for movies at least — very likely a pirated copy of some offline release, e.g. BluRay, which comes with higher bitrate.

This does not match my experience, I have never encountered such a rip. I downloaded a few when Prime and Netflix would be fussy, and the quality is consistently higher than the 1080p (?) low-bitrate I get on auto in firefox.

> This process loses a lot — for example, this signal is very likely post-HDR-color-processing, and so the result won't look very good on any other screen than the one it was originally told it was going to be played on.

Is this really true? I would expect the post-processing to happen in the TV.

Netflix is so bloatet that it consistently has streaming issues on my likely underpowered 4k TV. Rips that use a more standard caching play well in whatever quality.

For me personally quality outside of Netflix is usually always better. Likely because of DRM

Insiders working at studios and media companies who provide the content directly to warez groups.

Blessed be those saints.

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