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For Netflix specifically; it’s because the groups that rip 4K content from Netflix burn a device (i.e. a Widevine L1 key). This is why they typically release 4K Netflix shows in batches.

Here is a good thread on the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/17ez7mi/how_come_it...

karim79 144 days ago

What I've noticed about Netflix's supposedly 4k content is that it looks like crap compared to the same show downloaded through illicit means (and viewed on Plex or something else).

What's the deal with Netflix's not-very-good 4k streams? Colour quantization or something? It's not just a one-off, why do 4k netflix shows look like rubbish compared to a moderately encoded whatever from bittorrent?

It depends. The most common reason is bitrate - the non-Netflix could have been ripped from another source (BD), or even from another service that has rights to the show in a different market (with higher bitrate).

The other trick some groups use is so-called hybrid releases. This involves combining video and audio from multiple sources to achieve the best possible quality. These are usually explicitly tagged as HYBRID, and afaik mostly applies to 4K remuxes.

yencabulator 143 days ago

Semi-informed guess: Even when the rip comes from the same source (and not e.g. Blu-ray), they have a blazing fast internet pipe and/or a custom client that locks into the maximum bitrate -- while your residential connection and/or the local PoP's available capacity make your stream use a lower bitrate.

All video encoders have bit–rate — target number of encoded bits per second — as a tunable knob. Lossiness is compensated to match the target bit–rate. When a video is encoded with a lower bit–rate, it produces a smaller file that looks worse. Resolution almost doesn't matter, if your bit–rate is so low that the encoder doesn't have a chance of encoding pixel–level detail.

Bittorrent pirates may source shows from Netflix but they may also source them from other places with higher bit–rate encodings.

Saris 144 days ago

Probably extreme compression, their 4K streams are very low bandwidth.

moepstar 144 days ago

Must be that way - watching "an evening" (yes, i just made up a time unit) of Netflix consumes 1/4 to 1/3 of the bandwidth "an evening" of consuming content on AppleTV+.

So, about 10GB or less on Netflix to 30GB or more on AppleTV+, dissected by DPI on my TP-Link Omada Gateway.

And indeed, i think it shows - i can't notice any banding or moire effect on pretty much any AppleTV+ content, while it is as clear as night and day that Netflix compresses the hell out of their content.

bigwheels 144 days ago

Thank you for sharing the breadcrumb~

How does Netflix detect "suspicious" activity? Does $NFLX allow 4k streaming over GrapheneOS? If so, could you pin a different certificate and do some HTTP proxy traffic manipulation to obfuscate the device (presumably an Android phone) identity or otherwise work around the DRM?

I want to understand more about this but unfortunately the reddit thread is bits and pieces scattered amongst clueless commentary, making it challenging to wade through.

<https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/streaming...>

coppsilgold 144 days ago

They can trace a torrented 4K piece of content to the device (or private key) that ripped it using A/B watermarking.

See AWS offering: (and probably what they use for Prime Video, Netflix has their own)

  For large-scale per-viewer, implement a content identification strategy that allows you to trace back to specific clients, such as per-user session-based watermarking. With this approach, media is conditioned during transcoding and the origin serves a uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to the end user. A session to a user-mapping service receives encrypted user ID information in the header or cookies of the request context and uses this information to determine the uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to serve to the viewer. This approach requires multiple distinctly watermarked copies of content to be transcoded, with a minimum of two sets of content for A/B watermarking. Forensic watermarking also requires YUV decompression, so encoding time for 4K feature length content can take upwards of 20 hours. DRM service providers in the AWS Partner Network (APN) are available to aid in the deployment of per-viewer content forensics.

They also use a traitor tracing scheme (Tardos codes) such that if multiple pirates get together to try and remove the watermark they will fail, you would need an unreasonably large number of pirates to succeed for some length of time.

JCattheATM 144 days ago

To what extent does this watermarking survive transcoding? Would not transcoding multiple times possibly affect it?

> They also use a traitor tracing scheme (Tardos codes) such that if multiple pirates get together to try and remove the watermark they will fail, you would need an unreasonably large number of pirates to succeed for some length of time.

Why?

coppsilgold 144 days ago

> To what extent does this watermarking survive transcoding? Would not transcoding multiple times possibly affect it?

They are designed to survive being recorded by a phone at an angle. The embedding is only 1-bit per segment which can be multiple megabytes.

> Why?

Tardos codes scale as the square of the number of traitors times a constant. For example, a movie would typically have 2000 segments -> 2000 bits of encoding. By my calculation, at around 7 traitors some start to skate by detection. And there are ways to make detection additive across leaked content, so with another 2000 all 7 will get caught. This is because while they may not score highly enough to be reliably accused, they will be under suspicion, and that suspicion can later be enhanced.

To be clear, what the traitors are doing is pooling all the segment versions they have available to them, and adversarially choose a segment at random. This is the best strategy they have, a close second is to choose the segment that the majority have.

Trying to remove the actual 1-bit watermark from the segment isn't typically feasible. Every segment will have a unique adjustment to encode it. The embedding algorithm will take a secret key.

sparklysoup 144 days ago

> They are designed to survive being recorded by a phone at an angle.

Any idea what this looks like? I assume it's not visible to the human eye, but being able to survive this level of degradation is quite impressive.

JCattheATM 144 days ago

That's fascinating, thank you.

The main character holds an apple in her hand. The apple is either pink or bright red depending on the LSB of your user ID. Without comparing several rips, you can't tell this is happening.

Netflix does not encode content per-user, it's all static content on CDNs

coppsilgold 144 days ago

A/B watermarking is about static content on CDNs...

For every segment in a video there will be two versions. Every user will get a unique sequence of segments served to them.

Wait, that’s a brilliant way of encoding a watermark without having to embed it within a stream per user.

If a single video has say 100 segments, you get more than enough unique combinations to guarantee uniqueness. There would of course have to be a mapping between user/device ID and segment order.

Netflix puts flat MP4s on the CDN, the segments all reference different offsets within the MP4.

Isn't it trivial to know all the segments if they are static?

A DRM system is, abstractly, a black box that contains some initial static key material, which is used to identify+authenticate the device and load in more keys at runtime, typically over some network protocol. The DRM uses those dynamically provisioned keys to decrypt the content.

For hardware DRM schemes, the initial key material is typically provisioned during manufacturing.

Since the server-side is able to identify the client device, they can in theory fingerprint the content if they want to. That way if someone cracks and shares the content, they can look at the fingerprint and figure out which device (and which account) leaked it - and then ban them.

I've never seen direct evidence that Netflix fingerprints their 4K content (although I've never properly looked), so I suspect the device-burning thing might be a bit of an urban legend. But it is technically plausible.

If it wasn't real, Netflix would leak 4Ks more frequently. We're inferring by a third-order effect.

Netflix does not allow 4k streaming to GrapheneOS. Every piece of software and hardware in the signal chain must be Hollywood–approved, including your OS, GPU and monitor.

I honestly have no clue! This is just a tidbit I randomly learned about haha.

compsciphd 143 days ago

and its easy enough to figure out who ripped the web-dl, because you can have each frame copied into 2 slightly different but functionally identical versions (or perhaps just a longer GOP, but still the same). Create 32 of these sets of 2 (i.e. bits, or even do it for every 32 sets in the video) and assign every user a unique set of 32 "bits" and you'll have the ability to uniquely identify every web-dl (as by definition they aren't modifying the streams) to the user who downloaded it and just a cost of 1x the storage vs not doing anything.

michaelt 144 days ago

Most users can't tell, and if you deliver the $18/month service while charging $25/month that's $7/month pure profit - money for nothing.

It's a legal contractual requirement with the companies who provide the content.

I've spent a long time wondering the same thing. The standard answer is that it's fallout from the anti-anti-piracy cat and mouse game. The more conspiratorial answer is that bandwidth is expensive and streaming sites will take any excuse to serve you a lower resolution than what you actually paid for, while still being able to say that they technically support 4K.

There are sensible-ish technical reasons why they can't deliver DRM'd 4K on linux, but when browser extensions can upgrade you to 4K there are no excuses on the technical level.

hermanzegerman 144 days ago

The point is, people usually pay because it is more convenient for them than getting it illegally.

But when I have to fiddle around for 30 Minutes to see a picture (it worked before until it suddenly didn't work anymore), pirating the movie is suddenly the better option. Because I certainly don't see a point in paying and wasting more of my time.

And the piracy cat and mouse game is stupid, as in the End it's always Available illegaly, except for the people developing and selling DRM

nitwit005 144 days ago

Netflix does charge more for 4k, so they simply pass along the cost: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

Netflix still saves money when someone watches in a lower resolution.

bobdvb 143 days ago

There's a fine line, reduce quality too far and customer satisfaction drops. Some customers will have a higher tolerance to dropping quality than others, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.

So you do studies, you look at the impact of quality changes to customer churn and then you move the line appropriately.

Marketing emphasizing 4K helps reduce this.

nitwit005 144 days ago

Yes, but what they care about is profits. People aren't going to pay for the expensive plan if they can't actually use the features of it.

Most people who aren't getting proper 4K don't even notice.

apparent 143 days ago

Bingo. I mostly have watched Netflix for the last decade and recently tried Apple TV. It looks so much crisper. I didn't realize what I was missing.

TacoCommander 144 days ago

We need to divorce "corporate" from "tech"

reactordev 144 days ago

Never going to happen. Tech came from corporate.

stavros 144 days ago

Bandwidth is only expensive if you're getting it from Amazon or Google. Cloudflare gives it away for free.

Netflix is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic. That's expensive no matter how you slice it, and dropping that by a mere 1% is a huge saving.

stavros 144 days ago

Hm, true. Then again, I don't know if that's worth the reputational hit. These subscribers are paying for 4K.

aljgz 144 days ago

It's simple: Lawyers creating market for themselves and other lawyers. A head of legal department at Netflix would have a better job and pay if ge has 50x more employees. Hence, the incentive to find ways to get involved in everything, even if it arguably hurts the company's revenue, let alone the rest of the market.