Nice thread bro
I love people that take the time help others like that
The tutorial rocks!!
On the other hand, I'm not saying at all this schemes are not valid or should not be taken into consideration, still, if the end user is able to watch the movie, then its just about how complex and time consuming the leecher wants to spend on the reverse engeneering process ....
And when it comes to watching a stream, there is a server which sends it ( encrypted or not ) and the end user who renders that stream ( encrypted or not ), at the end, its all raw information, an experienced leecher would just have to hook the appropiate syscall/DLL call after the stream is decrypted and he has the full stream as if he downloaded it ....
Again, i think its an interesting thing to discuss about letting end users download or not the movies to prevent piracy, but i think thats the discussion we should focus on, not in just protecting out movies, believe me on this one, the leechers, the big ones .... Usually are very experienced users with enough knowledge to do this or have plenty "hacker" friends close who would easily make a DLL/syscall hook for him to achieve this stream encryption bypassing.
So the question here is, are the average end users who we are targeting on selling memberships and actually buy them the ones that leech content, or its only a bunch of guys that join, download all content and then upload it to major tubes, torrents, etc?
If we are talking about this bunch i mention, forget it, all you mentioned wont secure the stream, now if an important % of the pirated content comes from the average end user, then its worth the try.
I think the only good way to know this, would be that some big player starts fingerprinting their movies, if we start finding all their movies with only a bunch of fingerprints, then as i told you, forget it, its a bunch of specialized leechers you can't fight, if we find out thousands of different fingerprints, then the average user is becoming a threat and we should stop letting them download movies. Problem is, today most major big players are involved somehow in piracy, so who would give the step and fingerprint their movies to check this???
Why not just implement it still? Because i personally like downloading movies and i think lots of end users do too, to watch it on their TVs, have it on their collections, etc, and not necesarily to pirate it, so, if that end user is not the problem, it would be a bad choice from a marketing point of view disabling them from the ability to make the downloads.
My two cents.