[Mindwipe]

> - Forces software video decoding, which is slow

No it doesn't. Heck, forcing software decoding is actually one of the ways to force Widevine down to lower protection levels on general purpose hardware.

> - Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective

It's not fullproof but it would certainly make tools to bypass it clearly illegal in most of the world.

There are efficacy reasons for not doing it on a backend level, but Google has required anything that wants YouTube to support Widevine for a very, very long time now.

[speedgoose]

It may not be illegal in France:

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...

[izacus]

Read up on meaning of word "most" when you feel the need to snipe contrarianism without adding to debate.

[speedgoose]

Things such as libdvdcss or libaacs are maintained by VideoLan in France. It’s not a random country in this context.

https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html

https://www.videolan.org/developers/libaacs.html

[realusername]

That's not contrarianism, most of the EU is in this situation. Basically everywhere where you have taxes on private copies, you must still be able to make the copies somehow, otherwise the tax would be repealed.

[dns_snek]

> No it doesn't.

If you're using a PC with a Nvidia GPU, run `nvidia-smi dmon -s u` and start playing a random Youtube video in Chrome. You'll notice how dec% moves from 0% to at least 2%. Pause, and start playing Widevine protected video and notice how dec% stays at 0% because decoding is happening on the CPU.

> It's not fullproof but it would certainly make tools to bypass it clearly illegal in most of the world.

Good luck, copyright infringement is already illegal and yet that hasn't stopped it from being widespread. Tools and techniques to bypass Widevine L3* are widely known and available (yes, even on GitHub).

I was being generous in my previous comment. In reality, deployment of Widevine L3* should be shunned at least as much as Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. It's completely ineffective in protecting content, it burns unnecessary CPU cycles multiplied by (potentially) billions of users, and significantly degrades user experience.

Even Widevine L1* is ineffective in practice. Techniques to bypass it aren't available to the average Joe, but of course there are groups that will download, decrypt, and re-upload the newest 4K streaming releases to torrent trackers within an hour of them appearing on streaming services.

*edit: Mixed up L3 and L1

[lossolo]

> If you're using a PC with a Nvidia GPU, run `nvidia-smi dmon -s u` and start playing a random Youtube video in Chrome. You'll notice how dec% moves from 0% to at least 2%. Pause, and start playing Widevine protected video and notice how dec% stays at 0% because decoding is happening on the CPU.

It's because Widevine have embedded decoder into its lib and its using CPU instructions but from user perspective it's not a huge change on modern CPUs as most have specialized instructions to handle decoding of H264 etc.

> Widevine L1* is ineffective in practice. Techniques to bypass it aren't available to the average Joe, but of course there are groups that will download, decrypt, and re-upload the newest 4K streaming releases to torrent trackers within an hour of them appearing on streaming services.

There are no "Techniques to bypass it", the only way currently to get L1 streams is to use legit hardware keys from some devices, on which you can exploit secure enclave/extract HW keys.

[dns_snek]

> but from user perspective it's not a huge change on modern CPUs as most have specialized instructions to handle decoding of H264

There are no "instructions to decode H264", there is dedicated hardware acceleration like Intel QSV and AMD VCN, but these gets bypassed just like Nvidia's decoding acceleration from my previous example. All of this is trivially observable, playing back DRM-protected video wastes an obscene amount of resources, relatively speaking.

From user perspective you'll notice stuttering, unusually high CPU usage, dropped frames and more, especially once you try to play multiple videos at once.

> There are no "Techniques to bypass it", the only way currently to get L1 streams is to use legit hardware keys from some devices

That's exactly what I meant. Being pedantic over my choice of words isn't very productive.

[lossolo]

> There are no "instructions to decode H264", there is dedicated hardware acceleration like Intel QSV and AMD VCN, but these gets bypassed just like Nvidia's decoding acceleration from my previous example. All of this is trivially observable, playing back DRM-protected video wastes an obscene amount of resources, relatively speaking.

For L3 you are just using SIMD/vector instructions compiled for specific platform, so they are specialized CPU instructions (not general use) that help with decoding. And L3 is mostly now 720p and 1080p low bitrate on majority of streaming services that people use, you would need to have VERY old hardware to not be able to use it. I've been watching 720p/1080p h264 videos 15 years ago with only CPU decoding without ANY issues, most of the world did. So that's just not an issue. If we are talking about L1 then you have hardware acceleration so your point is invalid in that case.

> From user perspective you'll notice stuttering, unusually high CPU usage, dropped frames and more, especially once you try to play multiple videos at once.

Yeah because 99% of people are playing multiple widevine videos at once on their 20 years old hardware... come on.

> That's exactly what I meant. Being pedantic over my choice of words isn't very productive.

Im not being pedantic, you are not bypassing a lock in a door with a key, don't you? "Hey honey lets bypass our neighbour door lock using his key so we can enter his house" No one says things like that. If you meant what I meant then you just used wrong words to describe that. Your choice of words have different meaning which isn't very productive.