Pirates Learned How to Rip 4K Videos from Netflix & Amazon

[whitetop]

Entertainment industry faced another problem: pirates have learnt how to copy 4k movies and TV-shows from Netflix and Amazon. Just a few days ago, there were no high quality 4K resolution rips online at all, but today the sources are flooded with new releases from various groups.

Although ordinary consumers are usually not equipped to play 4K content on their devices, many video geeks are enjoying these new releases. In fact, 4K streaming releases have been provided by Netflix and Amazon for a while now, but those were always well protected against pirates by the High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection. Apparently, the pirates have now found a way to bypass the protection.

One of the online release groups confirmed the information about a significant change. The new 4K leaks originate from Netflix and Amazon, which allows to conclude there’s some loophole that lets pirates circumvent the copy protection on these services. Experts admit that new releases are true 4K and include Amazon’s and Netflix’s videos. Talking about the other rips, the file-sizes are much larger than traditional HD-releases.

One should admit that downloading a 4K release from the streaming services and getting a pirated copy out is not easy, since the original rips usually exceed 100 gigabytes in size. And it still remains unknown how the groups managed to circumvent the copy protection. The suggestions are that Amazon’s Fire TV and Roku 4K are likely sources, because they may not be as well protected: the former uses the weaker HDCP 1.4b protection and 23.976 frames/s, which only supports Amazon 4K releases and not Netflix. As for the latter, it recently released a new streaming player with 4K support and native refresh rate switching able to play Netflix’s 4K library. The software hit stores about a month ago, just before the first 23.976 frames/s 4k rips were released. Anyway, the number of new releases is unprecedented. The industry watchers note that it might be the beginning of a new era of high quality video releases.

The statistics showed that due to high-speed broadband and improving resolutions of the TV sets and other devices used to watch videos, many people have been downloading higher quality rips. However, it might take a few years before 4K becomes the new standard.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

[HEEL]

Not really "ripping" in the sense of getting the original files. They just let a show play on their Playstation and screencap the video via HDMI. Circumventing HDCP has been known for years, nothing really new only that they managed to make a stable screencap via 4K.