edinbruh, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Which is bullshit because DRM doesn’t effectively prevent ripping (source: you can find pirated hd content). So it’s literally only harmful to the customer.

I’ll give you a quick demo of how DRM is literally useless at protecting content:

• You need:
  • a machine with any Nvidia GPU series 600 or newer running Windows, a browser with DRM support (e.g. chrome), and optionally sunshine. This is not an uncommon setup
  • any other machine that can run moonlight (even a phone).\
• Services often use widevine as DRM provider, so using the Nvidia machine visit this test page and make sure DRM is working
• Normally the DRM api ensure that the decrypted content of that video can never in any form get out of a special GPU buffer, not even the browser can access it
• enable sunshine on the machine
• Connect from the second machine to the using moonlight and notice that the video is not being shared. DRM seems to be working correctly.
• Now disable sunshine and enable Nvidia gamestream from GeForce experience, and set it up to share the whole desktop
• connect from the second machine to the first using moonlight
• now the video is being shared to the second machine, and DRM is circumvented. There is literally nothing preventing you from recording the screen on the second machine

Now, this is a terrible way of ripping content, it causes at least one reencoding, which reduces quality (a lot of people won’t even notice it), but it is a stupidly simple working demo of DRM circumvention.

Btw, that procedure is not the result of some study, reverse engineering, or any clever stuff. I was literally playing a game in streaming and I went “hmm, I wonder what would happen if I streamed widevine” and it just worked.