this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Should I be concerned before I share a video I downloaded from a site I needed to log in to with a username and password? Does the file I have include data that references my account? If so is there away to remove it before I share it?

Signed I am tired of feeling like I don't contribute to the community.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's unlikely that there's some identifying information, but you can use ffmpeg (using the "copy" codec to avoid a re-encode) to strip metadata. It's also theoretically possible for the video to have used some stenography techniques, but that would be much harder and expensive for the video creator/publisher so I doubt that happened.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's not unlikely. Watermarking is real. And they don't make it easy to strip off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

why is your username a password

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Would this require specific stripping flags or is a simple

ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c:v copy -c:a copy out.mkv

enough?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Use -map_metadata -1 to strip all metadata.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The :v and :a is not needed.

ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c copy output.mkv

This will automatically copy the audio and the video without a reencode.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  1. Yes, because:
  2. It could
  3. And if it does, you probably can’t remove it

Streaming sites can embed an unhearable data stream into audio signal. It’s possible

That being said, it’s extremely improbable, given the costs to do it at scale.

If you’re part of a large company’s beta program and have access to some unreleased product, maybe worry.

If you grabbed a file from some mega host updown whatever site, don’t worry.

And if you’re still worried, take a sha256 hash and put it into google search. If you get any results that even mention your file’s title, then you’re good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think Amazon does this, right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

A stream copy with only a audio change is pretty cheap computation wise.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't you convert to to some lossy format?. Mp3 compresses files by erasing all audio channels outside (or on the edge of) human hearing range, maybe there's some format that does the same in video? (I was thinking of mp4, but mp4 is lossless)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spread-spectrum audio watermarks will survive multiple re-encodings and are extremely difficult to detect.

Iirc google widevine will embed a device code, and if a pirated copy of some content is found, they will blacklist the gpu’s device code so it can’t receive 4k content anymore. That’s video, but it’s the same idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't understand how anyone can choose to watch 4K. maybe I'm just so cheap I tell myself I can not tell the difference, but anything higher than 480P just feels like overkill to sell more bandwidth and overpriced hardware.