Watermarks

[radiah]

Has anyone yet heard of any charges filed or convictions/fines based upon these digital watermarks? I would think if it actually happened, they would not be able to keep it quiet and everyone would have heard something by now.

 

[Ch3vr0n]

probably because it hasn't gone live yet, last news was amz only patented the technology. Not all patents make it to reality

 

[Steve55]

Agreed

I personally don't think companies like AP and NF and such care much about personal use. It's the uploading and sharing they want to crucify you over for obvious reasons.

In amazons case a friend of mine was working till very recently for aws and you are wrong. They definitely are thinking a lot about this and watching you. This is for various reasons not least they are liable in some cases for their hosted content. As for the watermarking it‘s coming but not yet.

 

[DQ]

In amazons case a friend of mine was working till very recently for aws and you are wrong. They definitely are thinking a lot about this and watching you. This is for various reasons not least they are liable in some cases for their hosted content. As for the watermarking it‘s coming but not yet.

I have no doubt they are watching. Never did. But the priority will always be those who post/share content because that is where they lose money. Money is always the motivation. That's not to say the personal use road and the sharer road don't lead back to the same spots.

 

[mtdub1970]

Not uploading torrents does not necessarily mean you're safe. If you'd put your files on NAS and decide to share it over DLNA to your TV, everyone who you share your Wi-Fi with is able to download the data. Of course it's rather marginal example, it would mean many things, including either you wrongly choose people around you or some people are jerks. But still, we're giving our Wi-Fi passwords to our friends and we don't ask what stuff they've got on their devices and if they take care of updates (so they're not unconsciously checking all of your devices).

Back to the topic - the only way to check it, IMO, is a kind of reverse-engineering attempt by downloading an item several times using different accounts, maybe from different IPs (but from the same region and using the same method), extract tracks and compare them. I don't think that providers have enough power to encode a video stream for every user yet, as it is going with watermarked audiobooks. I don't know, however, what kind of things to check, as everything may be a part of steganography. in HLS or DASH streams, for example, we interact with playlists which contain chunks of video/audio. If the provider has a given quality stream encoded as two slightly different but interchangeable copies (e.g. P+B+I frames at the same time, the same encoder settings but unnoticeable bitrate/quality difference...), the server-side orchestration software is able to serve different chunks' combination for each user. And there may be more fuses than this one.

Sceners, I think, have either a possibility to obscure the mechanism by mixing two or more streams together, doing other things they think it's necessary or not caring at all, as they usually can use bogus accounts. That's my idea, I don't know how it works, and I suppose I don't know way many more thinks than I know. Hence, I like the ability to download the content uselessly and use it on whichever capable device I can (I don't like DRMs, I like fair customer/provider approach), but I would recommend avoiding sharing it somewhere else (and the possibility of being "catched" is closer to the end of the list).

Plex, Emby and etc you can disable downloading with people you share with.

 

[James]

Two different people could download the same file and compare.

 

[muppler]

What about the meta tag with the time of the encode?

 

[towboat]

I decided to test this. Used Invincible episode 8.
File 1: NTb WEB-DL
File 2: My own download thru Chrome from the good old days when widevine-l3-decryptor still worked
File 3: File downloaded by AnyStream just today

Extracted the H.264 bitstream from each and computed SHA256 checksum. It is identical on all 3. Even if the watermark was only flipping 1 bit or something like that, SHA256 would differ. Ergo, no watermarks of any kind.

I've noticed Amazon has started serving videos in segments as other providers do, before it was just one file for video and audio respectively. That way they could in theory sneak a unique user-based watermark into one of the smaller segments without having to keep a unique multi GB file for each user, which is obviously absurd and unfeasible. But at least for now that's not the case.

 

[Hobadee]

I have been thinking about exactly this for the past couple days.

Watermarks are certainly possible in theory, but NF uses CDNs and all the others likely do as well. Watermarking would defeat the purpose of a CDN, or the CDN would have to handle the watermarking, or the watermarking would be a very generic "it came from this region".

That being said, it should be easy to check for watermarking. As @towboat did, you can check the checksum, but you can also do a more analog comparison. By downloading the same thing twice (from different accounts) and syncing them perfectly, you can invert the audio polarity to check for any audio watermarks, and you can subtract the video streams to check for any video watermarks. Any watermarking would show up as noise.

As far as what a watermark would do - as long as you don't share it, a watermark would do nothing. A watermark must be viewed by someone who has the ability to decipher it, cares about it, and desires to take legal action for anything to come of it, so just keep everything for personal use, don't give anyone a profit motive to come after you, and you should be fine.