Quote:
Originally Posted by Zyber
Does the entire file have to be re-copied on the harddisk before serving it to the client? Or is it possible to simply make a precise surgeon cut and modify the necessary frames on-the-fly as the video is being delivered to the user?
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Making a temporary copy to serve, and then delete, may actually be less resource intensive, as you're not pushing bytes through a script. But I'll say my experience is not on the Web serving side, but on the encoding and encryption side. In my application, files were prepared for specific vendors, who then got their unique copy, which they agreed by NDA to keep in a safe place.
If a vendor leaked the video (we're talking pre-release movies here), the company - in this case a movie studio - could then do some forensics to find who leaked it. Prosecution and litigation against the vendor and its employees would commence. This actually happened a few times, but I wasn't involved in any of that. I was just a hack with a couple of ideas.
I don't own any of the patents, but I was constantly having to dodge them, and keep the legal dept updated in case some technique could not be worked around. Royalties for these kinds of things run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, even for minimal use cases.
Technicolor developed an interesting dongle that watermarks on the fly. From their public description of the process, I'm not sure if they do every frame, but every frame was, or could be, encrypted. This is probably the wave of the future for downloaded content. As it's downloaded and received, your device emplants a permanent watermark on it. This is maybe 5-10 years down the road, and obviously for videos of more intrinsic value than 'Not Lie to Me XXX" ... though I'd actually pay to see that one!
But I'm sure something like that is coming. That's really what these patents are for, and they're worth hundreds of millions overall.