So where did the competition go ??

[Zammo]

The current known situation is that anystream plus has been shut down, and now streamfab is the only option

Who said that ?

[hizbf]

Who said that ?

Is there any other downloader besides Anystream Plus that is better than Streamfab?

[jimc115]

Is there any other downloader besides Anystream Plus that is better than Streamfab?

Not for the average person....

Streamfab is not bad, it's different and more expensive. As for better, they both basically do the same thing.
Overall, if you want mainstream streamers, Amazon channels will give you the best quality normally. If you are looking for 1080p on Disney or Apple, you actually stand a better chance on
Streamfab. They will add keys when they can obtain them. If you are looking for 4K, that was always a plus for AS that was never guaranteed.

Be thankful Streamfab is left and keep your fingers crossed that AS will return. There is no indication they were shut down, but a catastrophic server failure could take a while to overcome.
Even if their current provider just to them it's time to leave, finding a new server could take some time.

[artsunlimited]

Not for the average person....

Streamfab is not bad, it's different and more expensive. As for better, they both basically do the same thing.
Overall, if you want mainstream streamers, Amazon channels will give you the best quality normally. If you are looking for 1080p on Disney or Apple, you actually stand a better chance on
Streamfab. They will add keys when they can obtain them. If you are looking for 4K, that was always a plus for AS that was never guaranteed.

Be thankful Streamfab is left and keep your fingers crossed that AS will return. There is no indication they were shut down, but a catastrophic server failure could take a while to overcome.
Even if their current provider just to them it's time to leave, finding a new server could take some time.

Disney+ in 1080p, for sure. But I don't believe Apple+ ever downloaded at anything better than 862x360p (with really lousy audio, too) for either StreamFab or AnyStream. Any Apple+ content I want to keep, I have to old-school rip from my teevee.

[jpp72]

Disney+ in 1080p, for sure. But I don't believe Apple+ ever downloaded at anything better than 862x360p (with really lousy audio, too) for either StreamFab or AnyStream. Any Apple+ content I want to keep, I have to old-school rip from my teevee.

I personally just use the scene since they provide H265 with proper audio.

And since i use Newsgroups, i get ultrafast speeds and no rights owners can track what i am doing like with torrents.

[dasauge]

What makes us all skeptical here is the fact that SF was back with a working downloader for Amazon one day after AS went down. I'm not gullible enough to believe in such a coincidence either. So the suspicion arises that they sold their solution to SF. That's an obvious explanation. But is it credible? The obvious is often just a tempting deception. Couldn't it have been completely different? It has been reported several times that AS uses (used) PlayReady for the new DRM, not CDM like SF. Somewhere someone reported that RedFox originally planned to cease operations at the end of 2023. Assuming this premise is true, the following scenario is conceivable:

So they wanted to stop, but fill the coffers as much as possible before the end.
First step: They announce that they will soon no longer be issuing lifetime licenses and thus entice many of their customers to quickly get another lifetime license. The cash register is ringing.
Second step: Then the new DRM comes along, and they soon have a solution for Amazon, while SF fails. It is foreseeable that many SF customers will buy an AS license if the competitor fails for a long time. And SF fails for a very long time. The cash register is ringing. We do not know how many licenses they have sold and will never know. But one thing is certain: If they did not have to limit themselves to cryptocurrency, there would have been more.
Then the day comes that had to come at some point: SF has found its own solution for Amazon. Could it be that they found out about it before SF itself came out with it? jpp72 also knew about it before it was official:

Holy shit guys!

Looks like StreamFab came through at the right time...

A little bird told me StreamFab will revert to full download mode for Amazon and Netflix in v6.1.8.1

Netflix is not ALL new titles (Just some) but will be in future releases

Checked my calendar and it's not April 1st soooooo... Fingers crossed

That made it clear that the cash register would no longer ring. Wouldn't that be the perfect time to pull the plug? And it takes the random factor out of the game.
A few days later, SF comes with 6.1.8.2 and full functionality for Netflix, as they say. I can't check this myself, as I only use Netflix sporadically, most recently in early January, before the DRM debacle began. - How should we assess this? As we know, AS could download Netflix, but only in 540p. So did they sell their 1080p solution to SF? Why would they have done that? Why would they have saved it instead of integrating it into their own software, which would undoubtedly have made the cash register ring again?! Or did they only find the solution after RedFox was shut down? That would be another one of those coincidences that I don't want to believe.

The evening before RedFox disappeared, I posted a post in the AS forum. I asked a question about Amazon and wrote a lot more. I received a one-line answer to the question about Amazon, and then there was the sentence: I'll read the rest in a minute. That seemed strange to me. My text would certainly not have taken more than a few minutes to read, it was much shorter than this post. Looking back, it seems to me that he already knew what was coming at that point and was busy making preparations for it.

Of course, this is pure speculation, like practically everything that is posted here on this topic. But it is at least a variant that resolves this supposed coincidence. Speculation in all directions is the logical consequence of the current situation. And that is completely legitimate as long as AS/RedFox does not provide any clarification. Maybe we will never know. Maybe we will be lucky and they will come back.

[artsunlimited]

I personally just use the scene since they provide H265 with proper audio.

And since i use Newsgroups, i get ultrafast speeds and no rights owners can track what i am doing like with torrents.

I haven't done that yet - thanks for the info. Tracking was my major concern when I dabbled in torrents years back; I never felt too secure doing it, so I quit. To be honest, I wasn't even thinking that Apple content was downloadable in anything other than SD, so derp on my part.

[dasauge]

How do the Usenet specialists manage to offer in-house productions from Amazon, Netflix, Disney and Apple not only in 1080p, but even in 4k?

[Cats4U]

I personally just use the scene since they provide H265 with proper audio.

And since i use Newsgroups, i get ultrafast speeds and no rights owners can track what i am doing like with torrents.

As we have personally discussed this before between you and me, I've gone back to torrenting for about the last few months. The Scene is the only thing that makes sense if you don't want to deal the periodic cat and mouse interruptions that you get with stream downloading.
I have nothing against newsgroups. I used them for years. The main reason at the time that I switched over to torrenting was the excessive spamming that was going on. Obviously today that is not a problem with the various newsgroup filtering and index sites that are available now. But since I was already set up for torrenting and used it at times when I couldn't get something from StreamFab, I went back to torrenting. If I had never made the change from newsgroups to torrenting way back when, I'd probably be running newsgroups right now like you. When you come right down to it, it's not really about the transport method, but the source being The Scene. I'm a member of 3 different private torrent trackers for which I can get a TV episode within 5 minutes of its airing (sometimes before it airs locally if recorded in a more easterly time zone) rather than having to wait a day for it to show up on a streamer. I could go on and on about the benefits of The Scene rather than stream downloading, but this is not really the place for such discussions.

[Cats4U]

I haven't done that yet - thanks for the info. Tracking was my major concern when I dabbled in torrents years back; I never felt too secure doing it, so I quit. To be honest, I wasn't even thinking that Apple content was downloadable in anything other than SD, so derp on my part.

I have little fear in regard to identity tracking with torrenting. I belong to 3 private torrent sites. They have such strict initial vetting that I feel quite secure using them. I haven't used a VPN on any of them in the about 12 years (maybe longer, I forget) I've used them. Now, in the rare occasion that I can't find the video I'm looking for on the 3 private sites, I will use a VPN to try public sites.

[slottedpig]

As a word of the wise, this is an endless cat-and-mouse game. No matter how much "protection" these cats add, someone somewhere will find a way to break it sooner or later. They can't make it impossible; all they can do is make it harder so that it takes more time.

If we talk about StreamFab, the way they do things are through cracking the ChromeCDM. Now if we talk about the ChromeCDM, extracting the private key of the ChromeCDM is nearly impossible. If you want to understand how difficult this is, I recommend reading this and this. These links describe the processes of two different people attempting to extract the ChromeCDM's private key in the past. You'll see how incredibly challenging it is. The person in the first link I mentioned is the only one I know who managed to extract the complete 2048-bit private key of a ChromeCDM. The guy in the second link only managed to extract half of it despite all his efforts. These were processes done for the past versions of the ChromeCDM. Extracting the private key of the newer versions are going to be 10x harder. Each new version changes obfuscation methods and related functions, so you won't be able to repeat the same process again.

However, StreamFab uses a slightly different method. They (most likely the individual reverse engineer they are paying to do this), do not attempt to extract the private key completely or even partially. Instead, they use a method similar to this one. In the readme, it is mentioned as a "universal method," meaning it can be applied to any future versions of the ChromeCDM. Note that StreamFab does not use that exact method. The principle is the same, but StreamFab's actual approach is very different and quite smart. They were able to do this for the ChromeCDM versions 2209,2392,2449,2557 and now 2710. So yeah. They will surely be able to do it for the future versions too. (Assuming they don't lose their reverse engineer.)

The challenge is time. With each new version, it becomes increasingly harder to apply this process. For this process to work, the widevinecdm.dll has to be reversed and some specific values from some functions inside it needs to be extracted. However, because of the obfuscation methods and the needed functions themselves in the newer versions becoming more and more complex, it is going to take more and more time to reverse it each time. (Unless someone finds an easier way which is extremely unlikely btw.)

Many people might be mad with the amount of time StreamFab takes each time. However, they need to understand that being able to do this is a sort of miracle, and people should appreciate StreamFab a little more. (At least the person behind reversing these.) He has my absolute respect!

thank you for this thorough description.

[Down2Earth]

thank you for this thorough description.

Totally agree...seeing not so new members that are breaking down mad science reporting...I love it!!!

[KidJoe]

Many people might be mad with the amount of time StreamFab takes each time. However, they need to understand that being able to do this is a sort of miracle, and people should appreciate StreamFab a little more. (At least the person behind reversing these.) He has my absolute respect!

I appreciate what you are posting. It's the first time I've ever had a picture of "under the covers" of how they get around the DRM.

While some of it is going over my head, and I still don't think I understand for sure what process Fox used (and how it differed, not that it really matters), What I can take away is that it is re-enforcing my prior thinking that the process FAB is using to crack and bypass DRM is difficult, and is only getting harder to crack. So going forward, its likely we'll see similar delays as CDMs get revoked.

I think most of us were mad at the Poor communication and lack thereof, and the perception of lack of progress and effort around the DRM. Especially when AS had been fixed so quickly.

While we can understand that cracking DRM is hard and complex, and only going to get more difficult, keep in mind that I, and probably most of the StreamFab users, may have thought that Fab and Fox used different methods to get around DRM, but we didn't/don't know for sure, and we don't know why each is doing something different if they are. Like are there advantages/disadvantages that made FAB use process X and Fox use process Y?

We only see/saw the "50,000 feet view", which makes it difficult to reconcile why Fox fixed AS so quick (except NF) and Fab was still working on SF for so long.

Not only that, but every day that went by with no forum posts from Wilson or staff, no updates, etc., every time the info the volunteer mods had posted info turned out to be wrong (due to them being given wrong info), adding re-encoding without any clarification or plan conveyed, adding new porn downloaders, Chinese holidays with no updates, small lingering bugs not being fixed, etc. made it difficult to see the forest for the trees and I at least (although I could read it in other's posts) began getting anxious, losing hope, getting worried, assuming the worst, getting angry.

I realize its hard to communicate "still working on it" without being able to provide a fixed version. But a road map, why Porn modules being added didn't impact DRM work, etc. could have alleviated the concerns and fears.

[Chameleon]

I mean i agree which means that fab is temporarily alive as a downloader unless they also inherited the devs that know how to crack the drm. The only other thing could be that fox will regroup and reopen under a new name and no longer offer lifetime since they ended that anyway. Here's hoping because fab was DOA prior to june 7

What is obvious is that 8 hours after AS went down, Fab had a solution. Whether it's a long-term or short-term solution still has to be seen.

[MrGrackle]

Many people might be mad with the amount of time StreamFab takes each time. However, they need to understand that being able to do this is a sort of miracle, and people should appreciate StreamFab a little more. (At least the person behind reversing these.) He has my absolute respect!

I reserved my criticism of the problem when it crept, I have a basic understanding of the complexity of the whole situation. Someday (maybe it's already been done) someone will get an epiphany and open it wide open with a bulletproof method, regardless of cdm updates. Without showing my age, I remember the first DVD rippers like it was yesterday, and the method to extract the key was genius. 4K discs? Yup, a 'different' approach is what prevailed, not the actual brute force decipher.
At some point every company could use the system Vudu uses, seeing as no commercial solutions have figured that one out.

I personally just use the scene since they provide H265 with proper audio.

And since i use Newsgroups, i get ultrafast speeds and no rights owners can track what i am doing like with torrents.

Long time Easynews member right here! Still $60 a year. The issues I often see though on newsfeeds are recodes and such.