AMD Adds Secure Video Playback To Their Open-Source Linux Driver

[shmerl]

Secure! What about you just call it "restricted"? Can you be honest for once?

Yeah. It's not secure. It's "hidden from the user". There is nothing secure in DRM schemes.

[ed31337]

End to End does not happen with HDCP as often as people think as there are quite a few splitters people use to extract audio or duplicate video output that do in fact strip the HDCP off.

Of course capture will require re encoding that will generate a lower quality than the original as most video encoding is lossy to encryption to save on storage space.

In practise all HDCP does is mean a person wanting to capture has to have more hardware and don't get exactly the same quality.

Seems to me, if you have access to an encrypted stream, and you have access to the decrypted stream, you have everything you need to calculate the decryption key. Therefore, there is no reason why you'd have to re-encode and lose quality.

Perhaps I'm missing something... maybe the issue is compression makes it more difficult than it's worth to try to calculate the decryption key?

[smitty3268]

Will it be possible to take screenshots? If not, I am going to disable Secure Video Playback on my machine. In Windows, the screen area protected by DRM is blank in a screenshot.

I can't tell if this is a serious question or not.

In case it is, the answer is that screenshots won't work.

If you think about it logically, if you are able to take a screenshot of the DRM'd video, that means there is nothing stopping you from taking screenshots of every single frame of that video. At which point, you have duplicated the entire video - making the DRM broken.

Anyway, it's not like regular videos will be using this. Turn it off or just don't use it, your call. Having a new ability for people who do want to use it isn't a bad thing.

[GreenByte]

Yes, I meant to ask whether it will be possible to take screenshots containing 1080p video (for recording history over the years of my life).

HBO Go supports 1080p playback even without DRM (from my location), while Netflix and others support only 720p without DRM.

A major issue isn't the 720p resolution itself, but the very low video bitrate associated with 720p, i.e. it isn't uncommon for the 1080p bitrate to be 10-times larger than the 720p bitrate when playing the same movie. 1920*1080/1280/720 = 2.25.

fun fact with netflix. You can watch 1080p DRM free as well! There is an extension for both firefox and chrome that spoofs netflix to think you are on a chromebook.

[Alexmitter]

Mac OS is the real benchmark when it comes to usability and good design.

LOL. That joke of a OS? If I had to choose between OSX and Windows, then Windows every day. Its a parody on what a Unix like OS should be.

[oiaohm]

Seems to me, if you have access to an encrypted stream, and you have access to the decrypted stream, you have everything you need to calculate the decryption key. Therefore, there is no reason why you'd have to re-encode and lose quality.

Perhaps I'm missing something... maybe the issue is compression makes it more difficult than it's worth to try to calculate the decryption key?

The problem here is you have normally already lost quality. Lets use netflix as example. Lets say they are forcing HDCP. But what they send over the wire was in fact H.264 High Profile/VP9 that has been decoded by the GPU and then sent out on HDMI. Remember those codecs are lossy so they don't encode all information when the encode and when they decode they don't produce exactly the same results every single time.

Its the simple rule every time you encode with a lossy protocol you are losing something. The encrypted stream going to the montior has had GPU colour correction and other things applied as well. So you are abstracted away from the source material.

Basically getting the hdcp decryption key does not give you perfect quality because what going down HDMI to monitor has already been damaged by the prior gpu processing and the codec the content was in being decoded.

[bemerk]

On the one hand i often hear that every Windows system should be replaced with Linux but on the other hand the same hardliners are unwilling to do the necessary trade-offs. If there is no good streaming experience due to the lack of DRM methods on linux systems, it becomes hard to convince people to switch.
Nobody forces you to use it, Linux was always about multiple options. KDE, Gnome, XFCE or whatever, nobody forces you to something there either.

[mdedetrich]

Will it be possible to take screenshots? If not, I am going to disable Secure Video Playback on my machine. In Windows, the screen area protected by DRM is blank in a screenshot.

Well isn't that the whole point? Its to prevent people capturing (by screenshot or otherwise) a DRM video (note that I am not justifying this, just stating that this is one of the DRM goals).

[piorunz]

DRM. Defective by design.

[Mez']

On the one hand i often hear that every Windows system should be replaced with Linux but on the other hand the same hardliners are unwilling to do the necessary trade-offs. If there is no good streaming experience due to the lack of DRM methods on linux systems, it becomes hard to convince people to switch.
Nobody forces you to use it, Linux was always about multiple options. KDE, Gnome, XFCE or whatever, nobody forces you to something there either.

Some trade-offs are harder to make than others. For me, the question is not Windows, it's been entirely removed from any home computer at least 12 years ago, hence out of the equation.

15 months ago I bought a 65" TV on which I have the netflix app that gives me 4K/HDR + Atmos via ARC on my AV receiver. It's not theatre quality but it's pretty damn good.
Really fortunate that I did, because until then I was stuck with 720p and 2.0 audio on my HTPC, let's say 1080p when abovementioned add-on was actually working,
The HTPC AV output is passing through the same capable AV receiver and displayed on the same TV. And yet there's such an entire world of difference.

I don't turn that HTPC on as often these days (Prime video and Spotify do not require it either). So if your leisureflow involves watching shows/movies a lot with good video AND audio quality, then it might be a reason good enough not to use Linux. If getting this secure video playback on Linux allows to turn that reason around, I only see a win. And I don't care about any "yeah, but it's DRM".