Thanks a lot for sharing such a wealth of useful info :thumbsup

Please repost this thread in the "Content thief" forum where it'll be easier to find it, and it'd be great to add it to your sig for more people to see and read it.

In the repost, please add some input regarding the IP/login/date overlay as it is a very important issue for many who plan to go streaming.

I'd like to thank Aymeric who is GFY shy for putting on this brain twisting road - don't worry buddy, nobody will steal me away from you!

Thanks Nautilus - shame on me for being a fucking around lurker. Linked it in now.

http://stream-recorder.com/forum/rec...ed-t2324.html?

nevermind... looks like it won't be any different from ripping a normal flv...

Interesting thread. :2 cents:

First let me applaud you for your extensive protection solution. You basically described an industry Best Practice guide in one single post. :thumbsup

There is no need to re-encode the video. In the Flash player (or via Javascript API) you can write the username and IP address to the screen on random frames and on random x,y coordinates. You just write on top of the video in a transparent layer.

Since it is only displayed on few frames it is too fast for the human eye to notice, but will get recorded by the screen grabber. Obviously the members need to be told that the videos are watermarked and traceable to scare them from trying.

EDIT: I see video overlays where already mentioned..

Chronig - come one

The *only* one on that entire list (that I was refraining from listing because of the surfers) that is worth anything is rtmpdump.

I can assure you all the above techniques, if followed, will wipe them all off the plate.

--edit
with the exception of
And of course you can record RTMP video streams from embedded flash player using screen video capture software

But that is what the discussion was all about that has now brought forth other ways to identify those persistent pests....

ps zyber - yes, read a few posts down from that one you quoted - exactly. I love constructive discussions :D

Very well thought out and tested approach by the look of it.

Great post :thumbsup

Is anyone aware of any programming libraries which will allow me to embed a serial number / hash inside a WMV keyframe of my choice ?

I like the idea of being able to tag a file where they won't be able to easily find it like in the normal metadata area.

I concur. :2 cents:

I concur. :2 cents:

+1 for the OP.

I had a similar conversation with a couple program owners @ Internext Miami 09 and they still had the 'members demand downloads' mentality.

Another major program that I've spoken to regarding this has started doing testing on some of their smaller sites.

The bottom line is - you lose HUGE revenue due to downloads. Torrents/tubes/member downloads everything in 30 days and never rebills.

IF your member base is HIGHLY RESISTANT to the change and you lose 20% of them, do some napkin math and figure out how much you actually SAVED in not having to paper your walls with DMCA request, lost revenue due to torrents etc. So your lost membership costs you 5k monthly, how much less are you paying lawyers/remove your content/etc etc. How much more valuable did your content become as result of your actions?

Thanks Frasier - that is exactly the point.

And in any case, even if you don't care about your downloads going on the tubes, at least it's a HowTo to protect your streams ;)

This thread doesn't need titties!

I cannot even watch youtube videos perfectly, unless I pre-buffer a major part of them. There always is an occasional freezing and jumping.

I always hit the stop button and watch how the youtube movie gets pre-loaded. Or rather, instead of watching, I browse elsewhere till it is downloaded.

3G wireless internet on a friday night will not cut it. DSL often does not get the speed I desire either. Unless I use a download manager that opens 4-8 connections at the same time. But, ok, I am in Brazil. That might make a difference.

Additionally, I like to watch movies off line. DRM gets badmouthed simply because they connect back to the server once in a while for a short handshake.

And do you really save bandwidth if the guy keeps watching the same scene over and over?

Still, nice to see someone elaborate an entire system. But I am afraid, it might go the way of all DRM and copyright schemes. Not liked by customers.

Alternative ways to distribute content?
 

Actually, I normally am against the terror spread by the terror spread by the music industry. In the case of the music industry, I think they should just change their business model. Slim down, admit that there is not much overhead in delivering an mp3 file to an ipod and stop charging customers as ithey still had to press master shellack disks, and then ship disks out worldwide to stores, pay transport, pay storage, keep inventory, take back unsold disks, and just radically drop their prices.

And then find a way how people would voluntarily pay small deserved amounts of a couple of pennies per music, that then would go 60% to the real artist who produced the music. Unfortunately, this still is an unsolved, and maybe an unsolvable problem.

Now what can the Adult Industry learn from that? How can this be applied here?

Actually, unlike the music industry, adult content got MUCH cheaper. Instead of paying 30 dollars for one Video, one can get a subscription with hundreds of videos for 30 dollars.

Of course, shaming individual downloaders by publicly listing the names of the files they downloaded would be a very efficient method of collecting settlement monies, but might not garner the sympathy of mainstream society.

Maybe we can get a porn Kindle. Seems the book industry somehow got things figured out the right way. Hardware oriented copy protection. A special purpose porn viewer. I know, I am kidding.

Food for thought. Haven't gotten the solution either.

Weirdly, that what exactly what I came back to post as the iPod+iTunes transformed music buying.

Borged

I dropped you an email

Let's get on ICQ in a bit - I am *very* intrigued by it!

Youtube is a free service... also - being in Brazil you are stuck on seperate servers, like me. North Americans (90% of market) don't experience the same kind of youtube lag that you do.

If you were to implement streaming on HD video, you'd need to consider using a (relatively expensive - 400$/month) streaming service that has the kind of backbone and technology to support nearly instant streaming - I've seen it. It even streams instantly for me here in Colombia.

I was thinking all yesterday afternoon whether I should make a post like this then in the evening went to task of writing it out - I expected lots of negative comments, the usual diatribe, but I'm glad I did it as it brought to the surface lots of like-minded people.

People who care about trying to prevent piracy in the first place or making identifying the primary pirates so much easier.

There has been some great ideas in this thread as well as off the board. Hopefully, something a lot more productive in terms of an easy-install type thing that can be taken on by the masses as a de facto standard.

Everyone has their own idea on how to tackle piracy. This was my own that I "open sourced" for want of a better word, to have others increase its potential.

Looks good folks - thanks for the contribution :thumbsup

Great advice thanks!

Great read and a very doable game plan:thumbsup

I am elevating this thread to a GFY Educational Series thread. Not only is the OP's comments very useful for many, but many of the comments in the thread can be very valuable.

Eric

Great thread borked.

Wouldn't the audio stream be missing for pirates using video screen capture software?

If pirates know that videos have embedded watermarks or tags with IDs that could be traced back to them, they'd probably just sign up with stolen credit cards or use stolen username/passwords. In this scenario, watermarking or tagging the videos wouldn't help identify the pirates.

To those who are bitching that these protective measures would scare off the customer ..

How about when you go to your local clothing shop to buy something. You have cameras watching every step you make in the shop, you have security guards and you have those detectors at the entrance... and people still buy clothes.

Think about it

UPDATE - inject user details into a mpeg movie on the fly

OK, so I was pushed to get my head around injecting user data (or any unique idenitifer) into a downloadable movie without having to re-encode the movie....

Well, I figured it out and with zero server load and very very minimal delay (time taken to inject into a 905KB test movie: 0.155 microseconds)

Test it out for yourselves:

http://borkedcoder.com/movie_injector/?user=borkedcoder

(user=borkedcoder is just an example of how to display username in the injection, of course it would be done in a live script from cookie/session vars)

skip through the movie 1 frame at a time - the identifier is injected every 100KB of movie (modifiable) and so the first one is within the first second.

For the moment, this isn't production ready as the injection comes from a transparent PNG that doesn't work well (grey background). When I get more time, I'll modify the script to use the last frame of each chunk to overlay the text onto which will create a seemless movie where the end user has no idea it's been overlayed with his identifiable details....

Thanks Eric :thumbsup

Is that possible to do the same with AVI (DivX) and WMV (wmv9) files?

not possible for on the fly injection into wmv files due to the proprietary nature of wmv.

Possible with avi, but you run a very big risk of losing sync between video and sound...

Interesting :)

Comment:
Think the overlay interval ought to be random.

The Geo details may or may not be a good idea as there seems to be 2 choices always given for my ip address and your database is the one saying I am 200 miles away. I think it possibly adds a unnecessary level of confusion.

Injection is now totally random, though this now makes it harder to find the injected data yourself!!

Strangely, by doing it random, I don't see the flash on the screen of the injected data now

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh
That was just an example of useful stuff - you could inject anything you want!

Hey, why not inject http://domain.com that way by watching the movie the user is bombarded with subliminal advertising and without knowing it they will type in your domain!

With the previous version I just put it on 0.12x speed and could see the overlay clearly. Now I can't find it.

Not necessarily. A lot of screen recorder software records audio too.

Yeah, it's really hard (but frame by frame finds it - just a pain)

I've made it so the data gets injected once and only once at the half way point. This way it's random for each movie, but can be customised to each user (ie half way plus X)

That way you know exactly where it has been injected in your videos.

If we have learned anything from Middle Men, it is that the best anti-piracy is shit content that nobody wants

Will read it all later. I'm off to watch the soccer.

How do you stop people pirating DVDs and others going to view them rather than paying?

Sadly not enough of the content on Internet porn sites is good enough to warrant shutting off their content from downloaders. They will watch one babe on a sofa as soon as watch the other one.

You have to have something worth protecting before you start protecting it.

You know now that I think about it why not clearly embed the user details at the beginning and end of the videos. That will cut down on 90% of the file sharing right there because no one wants to re-encode each video clip and they would have to do that if you they wanted to edit out the embeds. Also, if you include the person's actual name in the embed details that would be one hell of a deterrent. On top of the obvious marking you could put some hidden stuff too if you really wanted to.

Yes - this injection of the user details into the mpg is purely a proof of concept that it can be done on-the-fly with no server/time overhead.

To my knowledge, this has not been demonstrated yet.

So, yes - some will want to show the user details at beginning/end (quite easy to strip out though by the end pirate), some will want random insertions, some will want it placed at a certain time point etc etc. What you inject is purely up to you!

Add the credit card details too - then the pirate gets raped by other pirates lol!

It's a matter of adapting the proof of concept to your own needs.

Paul - If I knew how to stop DVD pirating, I'd sell the idea to the MPAA for a billion bucks! Like I said in the OP - this is *purely* for online material and now with the mpeg injector, you can adapt it to your needs to track the original pirate and so still leave downloads on.

Beginning to wonder if I got a version where it failed to put the overlay on as i've been through several times frame by frame now and still found nothing.

Chopping the beginning and end off something is a really simple job.

It's currently injected at exactly half way (8 secs) and at the very end.
I'm seeing it clearly with quicktime (pause the movie then advance frame by frame with the left/right arrow key).

The original mpg is lousy and buggy to start with - if someone wants to send me a lightweight HQ mpg movie I can use freely for this test, please do (email in sig)

For one video sure, but it's not really that easy to do in bulk though. They import the clip into an editing program, clip off the embeds and the render out a new video (quality loss). Many people will just not bother. The more organized releasing groups, if they do porn (I have no idea), may make the effort to strip out the details, but I think even they would prefer to just pirate other porn and skip the more difficult stuff.

Now, how about a way a way to do this with JPG files on the fly in the same way? :thumbsup

Just downloaded it again.

It is on the very last frame in this one.

Can't find it anywhere around the middle though.

that's easy!!

http://borkedcoder.com/photo_injector/

I meant as metadata, but that could work too. Might stop a few hearts though when members first see it :1orglaugh

I think this would be a great solution here if it could be done on the fly and kept totally invisible to the end user: http://www.phpclasses.org/package/33...anography.html

You could encrypt their own personal details in each jpg image. Then you could have scripts scrape forums and torrent downloads and run through all the jpg images to find who released it. Then Steve could sue them specifically and he would have the support of all of GFY :)

the exact middle of the movie...

http://borkedcoder.com/movie_injector/example.jpg

very easy to add comments to photo exif data on the fly with exiftool

That should be quite easy to adapt - I'll have a look at it later on as I need to pop out.

You should package this all up and license it.

I looked into that - works great and would have been great for this. However, 2 probs:

1) only output as PNG can be done as the resulting image has to be lossless

not a problem as most browsers can handle PNG but...

2) created images containing the stenographic injection are 10x larger than the original (blame PNG)

So, is fine if you don't mind having 10x more bandwidth from images...

--edit
and yeah, I tried outputting the image as 100% jpeg quality, but it didn't work