On Mar 06, 2011 I wrote Game of no thrones, on the subject of Musings, DRM, Ubuntu, and aSoIaF.

I like A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin's long and partially completed fantasy cycle. (Memorably described by mightygodking as Knights Who Say "Fuck".) HBO, the American TV channel, is making it into a series called Game of Thrones, and it looks pretty excellent to me. GRRM is heavily involved in the production, so this won't be one of those books that suffers horribly in the transition to celluloid (Constantine, I'm looking at you) but it seems that they're not afraid to change things where it makes most sense, so it's not a slavish adaption designed to only please the hardcore fans (Watchmen, now I'm looking at you.)

I've been reminding myself of the plots of the first four books (the fifth book, A Dance With Dragons, is coming out on July 12th!!!) by re-reading them all, and I now have full character biographies for all the books on my phone via a neat little aSoIaF Android app (there's apparently an iPhone one too). Anticipation grows mightily.

You see, in addition to HBO (which I can't get, being in Blighty), Game of Thrones is being shown on Sky Atlantic here in the UK. So I thought to myself: maybe I should subscribe, so I can watch GoT each week. However, I'm not a Sky subscriber, and I don't want another box in my house. Fortunately, Sky are aware of people like me, and allow you to subscribe just to watch online, either monthly or on an episode-by-episode basis. Nice one Sky TV.

Big downside, though: the online Sky Player requires Silverlight.

Now, we have Moonlight for that. The version in Ubuntu appears to be heroically out of date (it's Silverlight 2, and the Sky Player requires Silverlight 4), but you can download a Firefox extension direct from the Moonlight website which is Silverlight 4. Nice and easy. (The Moonlight page says they only test on Ubuntu 9.10 (wtf?) but it works fine on 11.04 for me and so presumably will work in interim versions including 10.04 LTS.) And once that's installed, it starts up OK on the Sky Player site.

Doesn't work, though. Now, at the moment, there's a bug in the way which throws some kind of traceback, but it looks rather as even were that bug fixed the Sky Player still wouldn't work on Ubuntu, because the Sky streams all use DRM, which is not supported by Moonlight (see "Does Netflix work with Moonlight?") and likely won't be; the problem isn't technical, but seems to be that Microsoft won't licence PlayReady DRM for desktop (read: non-embedded) Linux distribution. There is speculation that this is because embedded use is harder to reverse-engineer, but no-one seems to really know for sure except Microsoft, and they're not telling.

Anyway: as far as I can tell, this puts me shit out of luck. No-one has Game of Thrones except HBO (which I can't get) and Sky Atlantic (who won't support Ubuntu). Damn.

ludo

Easy (in order of preference): demonoid, isohunt, rapidshare, google search "Games of Thrones S01E01 download"...

If they don't want your money, there are always other ways. I used to pay for Serie A matches through our largest phone company's web tv, now that they've closed it I have to resort to p2p streams. I hope company suits will wake up sometimes, and realize there's people like us who don't mind paying for a good quality stream, but who don't want to get a satellite dish and another box (plus being tied to the TV screen location).

Canek

ludo is right; you tried to play nice, they didn't want your money to watch the series in your legally installed Operating System, fuck them.

Get the series from a torrents site or streamed; I recommend http://eztv.it

dobey

Crikey your site fonts are beyond insanity in their enormousness.

The WinDRM licensing is bloody insane. It really would not be terribly hard to reimplement, so I don't think reverse engineering is really the issue there. I'm surprised they licensed it for embedded Linux players, but I suspect those are probably special case situations (ie, Roku or someone wanted to do it, and realized the current license sucked, and was halfway into development, and got MS to add it in, because they were willing to pay the insanely exorbitant fees to get it done). The license itself though really hasn't changed much from way back in the day when it was written and MS was engaged in their huge internal anti-Linux campaign. It's more likely the license is the way it is, because they wanted to make it more clearly illegal to run Windows Media Player under WINE or something stupid like that. :)

Also, the whole "well if you can't buy the high quality version, just steal it" mentality is quite degrading to the cause. How can you expect someone to respect your copyright and choice of license for your own code/art, when you clearly don't respect theirs?

sil

dobey: completely agree on the "just steal it" argument, which is why I'm not gonna steal it. I'm just trying to work out how to not steal it; currently it looks like I fall back to the base case, which is "just do without and watch it on DVD when it comes out", which is annoying but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Rasi

I'd also download it - and buy the dvds afterwards.. easy as that. Thats what i always did and believe me, i buy lots of media.

dobey

Well, with Netflix, you're basically "wait until the DVD comes out" anyway, because well, that's what they do, right? And it's not that bad, there's plenty of other stuff to keep me entertained while I wait for a new season of $SHOW to come out on DVD and end up on Netflix streaming.

On the other hand, you could not steal it, but download it and then slip the publisher a reasonable fee for the .mp4 or whatever you downloaded, via paypal or something. That would at least make it clear that you are trying to accomplish something, support them, and they are making it hard to do so. As opposed to just stealing stuff and having people not get reasonable compensation for their works. :)

Livio

Conclusion is simple: until DRM gets implemented in Moonlight and Flash/Adobe AIR and some Vividas crap gets ported to Linux, it'll always stay behind.

Honestly I see nothing bad in DRM for "watch and forget" use.

Livio

Conclusion is simple: until DRM gets implemented in Moonlight and Flash/Adobe AIR and some Vividas crap gets ported to Linux, it'll always stay behind.

Honestly I see nothing bad in DRM for "watch and forget" use.

Josh Triplett

Given that quite a number of people would benefit from support for PlayReady in Moonlight, I wonder how well it would work to arrange a Kickstarter project or similar to implement such support? Assuming we can find someone willing to do the work if funded, and with sufficient skill in reverse engineering and the relevant technologies that we feel confident they *can* do the work.

If such a project existed, I'd donate to it.

dobey

@Josh, there isn't really all that much in the way of doing reverse engineering. ORM-DRM is an open standard, and anyone can "easily" go implmeent it, and provide nice DRM integration with GStreamer for example. The only thing PlayReady/WinDRM do is provide some weird API that breaks compatibility with the standard, so Windows developers have to license from MS and rely on their API instead.

Yes, I've already looked a bit into doing this before, several years ago. :)

dobey

@Josh, oops. I meant OMA-DRM. Not ORM-DRM. Too many TLAs. :)

Josh Triplett

@dobey: Glad to hear it doesn't require reverse engineering to implement. That should make it easier for someone to implement it. Do you already know the details of the API differences between the the spec'd API and the PlayReady API? Do you have an idea about how much work it would take to implement the API sites like Netflix and Sky actually use? Know anyone willing to do that work?

dobey

@Josh: I don't know all the details, no. And I'm not sure it's really necessary to provide the MS API. Netflix and Sky don't use them. They just provide data which is DRMed. Silverlight is what does all the actual work. Should be able to do the same thing in Moonlight using a different API, unless they implemented the DRM in the Windows Media file formats in some crazy way. I suppose the real tricky part will be getting the keys needed to decrypt the data, as that is typically done weird. Most of the ones I've run across when poking about with WM-DRM files, end up running an installer which injects the key into the WM-DRM db.

Matt

I also can't find anywhere throughout Sky Player a way to just pay for a programme rather than subscribing for a minimum of £15/month. The only mention I've found is a thing that says you can do it, but is silent on the how...

chun

Have you seen this video of thousands of Chinese enjoy a good rock concert in a European band? It is certainly not what Tibet, and Al Jazeera is not going to broadcast ... I do not think is as important as the issue of Libya and Gaddafi, but it's fun to see how China can not censor a good concert style with Muse, Suede, Audio's Pain, etc ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ZFy3x0FMY

Iksf

Whenever i cant watch something like this i go as far as i can to pay for it then i just watch it on tubeplus.me or download it off the piratebay, until companies offer a decent way to buy their products dont care what they say bout this