
The Scene: Pirates Ripping Content from Amazon and Netflix - Ultramanoid
https://torrentfreak.com/the-scene-pirates-ripping-content-from-amazon-netflix-190707/
======
sidkhanooja
Tangential, but I've recently noticed that due to huge fragmentation in the
streaming industry (Netflix, PrimeVideo, Hulu, Disney+ et al.), I'm only using
two - Netflix and PrimeVideo, and a third torrent streaming service
(PopcornTime) when I can't find a specific movie/TV series.

I prefer to use the third option as few as possible, but I find myself having
to use it more and more often as the years go by - geolocked content, huge
swathes of content being removed on the whims of providers (The Office comes
to mind), and 'originals' that are beyond even the so-bad-it's-good category
that cannot even _begin_ to fill the void left by the good content leaving.

I cannot _ever_ see myself subscribing to a plethora of services - the best
case is subscribing to a service when it's absolutely necessary (HBO/Hotstar)
and then unsubscribing when you're done, which is not at all conducive to
fulfilling long-term revenue plans of such services.

So what is the endgame of such services? Is it simply to build a huge catalog
of content that you'll mindlessly devour whenever you're bored? Or something
else?

~~~
mysterydip
One more frustration to add to your list: only having x seasons of a show
available instead of all y.

~~~
mgoetzke
or splitting up the seasons in the UI like Amazon does it (the amazon UX is
quite dismal anyway)

~~~
mysterydip
They also have interlaced two seasons of some shows together (noticed this on
a couple kids shows for my daughter). So it would go season 2 ep 1, season 3
ep 1, 2-2, 3-2, etc. In general it wouldn't matter for a kids show that
doesn't have a continual storyline, but when you only pay for season 2, it
then stops at the end of each episode instead of continuing on automatically,
and you have to go back to the UI and skip one.

------
dmitriid
Thanks to content owners/distributors we’ll see a resurgence in piracy.

After Fox, Disney et al pulled content from Netflix, coupled with regional
restrictions, there’s literally nothing to watch on Netflix in Sweden except
Netflix’s own original content.

Hulu isn’t available outside of US.

HBO is just as bad as Netflix outside the US.

Even iTunes Store is subject to regional restrictions (but the selection yhere
is still much larger)

~~~
bubblethink
>we’ll see a resurgence in piracy

I am not so sure about that. It will always exist, but it is getting
increasingly difficult to break DRM. So we may have long periods where the
rips are inferior compared to the source (i.e., transcodes via capping). All
the new 4K stuff is already quite difficult due to SGX/other hardware
enclaves. So it's not a question of just time/dedication to reverse engineer a
blob.

~~~
praptak
An inferior rip beats 4k "not available in your country".

Also, hardware does get hacked too.

~~~
vectorEQ
indeed, sgx is poor and broken like most of intel 'security' featurs :D

------
air7
How do these pirates make money? It seems like so much work is/has gone into
their operations that it can't just be for karma points.

Edit: I'm referring to the content ripping groups. Apart from the technical
and legal challenges depicted in the article, they need to seed their files
which (must be) very costly. Also, content is released consistently and
extremely quickly.

The common answer is that the motivation is non-monetary: Fun, community
service, group pride etc. But I find that hard to believe entirely. The
product is just too polished, subjectively resembeing in quality a revenue
generating operation rather than a(n illegal) side hobby.

~~~
madez
Some people do things for other merits besides money.

~~~
winternett
Yeah... Bitcoin mining? :P

------
peterburkimsher
The article says that "Subtitle files... are not encrypted". Netflix subtitles
are really interesting to me, because they're aligned in different languages.
A lot of unofficial SRT files have different timestamps.

The reason is that I'm trying to collect data for learning languages,
especially Chinese. Kind of like VoiceTube [1] and Youglish [2] are doing for
English. So far it's only for personal use, not a revenue-taking company.

I tried investigating a Netflix stream, but the subtitles weren't plain text!
They were distributed as PNG files [3].

Does anyone have more information about this? Do the pirates really OCR the
subtitles for their MKV files? (I doubt it). Is there another way to get the
plain text? Contact me directly if you're afraid to comment publicly.

[1] [https://www.voicetube.com/](https://www.voicetube.com/)

[2] [https://youglish.com/](https://youglish.com/)

[3] [https://www.slideshare.net/RohitPuri23/timed-text-at-
netflix...](https://www.slideshare.net/RohitPuri23/timed-text-at-
netflix-58522643)

~~~
superpermutat0r
> The reason is that I'm trying to collect data for learning languages,
> especially Chinese.

Subtitles sites (opensubtitles, podnapisi, etc.) have similar data and simple
alignment algorithms will work for unaligned subtitles.

> Do the pirates really OCR the subtitles for their MKV files?

OCR is really simple for text. No reason why they wouldn't do it. There were
free programs decades ago for OCR when you were ripping DVDs and they worked
mostly on character patterns (you would start with an empty database and then
just tag the pattern, after a minute you'd have the whole subtitle OCR-ed).

~~~
peterburkimsher
Please can you recommend a "simple alignment algorithm"? I can send some
example ENG&CHT subtitles your way. There's a different number of subtitles,
shown at different times, breaking lines in different places. It's a mess. If
you know how to align it quickly, please tell me! Doing it manually takes me a
couple of hours: longer than the whole movie. That's why I've only done it for
a very few, specifically for movie nights with friends.

~~~
superpermutat0r
You need good dictionaries, giving you all possible translations of a word
both ways. Given that subtitles in both languages will have matching sentences
very closely you can easily determine (be it some counting criteria, simple
linear model or dynamic programming) which sequence of let's say 3 subtitle
lines matches a sequence of 5 subtitle lines in the other translation.

People/place/town names align stuff pretty easily. The fact that a sequence of
lines matches some other sequence of lines makes finding the optimal alignment
very efficient too.

I'm guessing that just making a set of words for each subtitle line, counting
the common words and picking a criteria of deciding if line maps to other line
is more than enough. Subtitles are much easier than free-flowing documents
because they are time constrained.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Please show me your best transcriptions for this channel [1]. There's over 2
TB of video data. No way to get access to the original PPT files.

At least the subtitles on there are already aligned English & Chinese, but
they do require OCR. Message me directly if you want my OpenCV script that can
pull the yellow text out.

Tesseract gave me this. The W0「d n! Gnd has bP〔‥mE ‥任Sh 嬰孩降生 道咸肉員 Peace has
Come for O… Km… 峒 ﹏m US 靜安 來自‵我君手 `

I'm sorry to continue insisting, but seriously, Tesseract gave me terrible
results. Identical lines don't even give the same OCR result, so trying to run
partial matches on Google Translate-quality word equivalents isn't going to
cut it. The OCR can't even give me the right number of characters! In the end
I'm trying to do it manually, but it's really time-consuming.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8_emPVKZvOwJnoBVpU0ytg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8_emPVKZvOwJnoBVpU0ytg/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1)

~~~
superpermutat0r
Poured out on the feet of Jesus

我們傾倒耶穌腳前

This is my output from tesseract (chi_tra) (for
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzIh2pamcwU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzIh2pamcwU))

I have just extracted the U component (YUV colorspace), binarized the image
and tesseract just loves it. The players in the background are completely
removed.

I would probably use some background removal or some morphological operations
from leptonica to make stuff more robust (instead of binarization).

Of course, if tesseract does something incorrectly you can do a quick
connected components in leptonica, extract the symbols and do your own OCR
(manually). For chinese it's a bit of an issue because there are bunch of
symbols, but for english you will be done tagging all the unique symbols in no
time.

~~~
peterburkimsher
That's amazing. Please can you tell me which version you're using? I tried

tesseract 3.04.01 leptonica-1.74.1 libgif 4.2.3 : libjpeg 9c : libpng 1.6.34 :
libtiff 4.0.9 : zlib 1.2.11 : libwebp 1.0.0 : libopenjp2 2.3.0

If you could email me your scripts, that would be extremely useful. And then
I'll send you some subtitles where alignment is important. I just used this
channel as an example of where I'd tried Tesseract and given up.

------
z3phyr
"The Scene" here also have a close relationship with the Demoscene,
CrackmeScene and KeygenScene. These groups work/compete on challenging
technical problems involving extreme and artistic programming. Almost all of
these groups work with similar (and sometimes closely shared) custom
compression, graphics, debug and platform code.

------
lostgame
I live in Canada, where regional laws force the majority of even casual users
into piracy. One could not even subscribe to enough number of services to get
the amount of content Netflix has in the USA alone. This may be an
exaggeration, but honestly, it's been this way for years. I've honestly put a
lot of effort into seeking out legal sources for material here in Toronto, and
had little luck in certain cases I easily find through a proxy.

It's literally self-deprecating behaviour.

------
mistat
Did anyone watch the WebTV series called "The Scene" ?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_\(miniseries\))

[https://youtu.be/xIs_5nfJKu4](https://youtu.be/xIs_5nfJKu4)

~~~
cypherg
Remember the parody show called "teh Scene"?
[https://archive.org/details/Teh.Scene](https://archive.org/details/Teh.Scene)

------
jankor
The big inconvenience of encrypted netflix content is that I cannot run it
through madvr for better upscale 1080p->4k, the paradox is that a free torrent
content might in the end take less size and look better. And let's not forget
about some phones (poco f1) where netflix only allows lq because of missing
Widevine L1.

------
esistgut
I own subscriptions for both Netflix and Prime Video and (try to) use them
most of the times from my Linux desktop on a 21:9 monitor. I have to force
proper full hd resolution using a browser extension but can't find a way to
fix aspect ratio / black bars problems. Just yesterday I tried to watch the
third season of Stranger Things and I had black bars on all the 4 sides. After
boring my SO for about 10 minutes messing around with extensions I just fired
up qBittorrent and fixed the problem in 2 seconds using the autocrop feature
in mpc. I end up the torrent way so often that I'm starting to doubt the
reasons that push me to support these platforms and their broken features. Is
the desktop userbase a niche so small they can afford to ignore?

~~~
valzam
How much of their userbase do you think uses

\- Linux Desktop \- 21:9 monitor

? If you guys are cracking one 10th of a percentile I would be surprised. I
also use netflix on linux desktop (regular monitor though) but I cannot
pretend that they should have to care about such a tiny portion of their
overall userbase.

~~~
esistgut
They are different issues: Windows and Mac OS users using 21:9 monitors will
have aspect ratio / black bars problems, Linux users with standard 16:9, 16:10
monitors will have problems with full hd and 4k resolutions. And even if these
are two small user bases please consider the efforts required in order to fix
the problems we are talking about. What could possibly take to lift the block
on full hd as I am already doing with some browser extension? How hard could
it be to copy the crop detection algorithm from mpc?

~~~
gsich
Black bars are not a problem. It's simply the result of another aspect ratio.
It shouldn't be fixed.

~~~
esistgut
They are a problem if you have 4 of them.

~~~
gsich
Zoom in. But black borders should be cropped, so it's an encoding error.

------
IronBacon
So, on PC hardware, outside of Windos and Macos, _Widevine_ it's the only
option available and it's capped at 720p, but the same DRM is used on Android
and it's OK to stream at 1080p...

P.S. on Netflix, I should verify on Amazon Prime

Edit: after posting I recalled a plugin for Chrome/Firefox that forced 1080p
playback on Netflix, the github page has the details
[https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p](https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p)

------
mensetmanusman
Tangentially related to the concern with platforms losing content and
fragmenting: check your local library for their DVD library :)

~~~
acomjean
I was shocked (in a good way) at the number of dvds/blul rays the library in
my city has. No wonder all the video rental stores are gone.

------
Buge
>After starting with a large raw file, the finalized version ready for release
is around 30% smaller, around 7GB for a 1080p file.

Huh? Are they recompressing it? How else would it shrink? If they're
recompressing it, why don't they just use a capture card and avoid the hassle
of reverse engineering stuff?

~~~
pavs
Re-encoding with lower bitrate. 99% of the people won't be able to tell the
difference.

~~~
denkmoon
Transcoding like that is very heavily frowned upon. A scene group would not
risk their reputation like that.

I suspect what they are referring to there is the process of remuxing the file
and removing extra audio streams, ie. a BD50 BluRay of "They Shall Not Grow
Old" comes in at 20GB with two audio streams, DTS-HD and Dolby Digital. The
remux of that BluRay comes in at 16GB and has an identical bit-rate on the
video stream, but the Dolby Digital audio stream has been removed, as well as
the menu graphics (though this would not apply to a WEB stream).

~~~
saiya-jin
No its not, look at piratebay. By far the most downloaded versions are 1.5-3GB
1080p rips, or much smaller 720p ones. And on some 55" screen, they are just
fine

~~~
FineTralfazz
The files on TPB generally aren't the original scene releases. They get
transcoded to lower qualities by other people for the masses who don't care.

~~~
gsich
Depends on the release.

