I assumed HDMI had some form of encoding, thanks for the correction. Looks like v 2.1 does.

I think the syncing idea between the spy device and db is still useful. The video itself has stuff to use for reducing the search space by making sure they puck the same instants to fingerprint and exfiltrate.

Why think of it as a compression problem? Isn’t the spy device already getting compressed video form some source? That makes it a filtering problem. You would set it to grab and ship key frames (or equivalent term) if you wanted a human to be able to see the intel. But for content matching, maybe count some interval of key frames and then grab the smallest difference frame between the next two key frames. Gives a nice, premade small data chunk. A few of those in sequence starts looking like a hash function (on a dark foggy night).

Would want some way to sync up the frames that the spy device grabs and the ones grabbed when building the db to match against. Maybe resetting the key frame interval counter when some set of simple frames come through would be enough. Like anything with a uniform color across the whole image or something similar.

Just spitballing here. I like your impulse to math this.

You meant, pointless makes roundabouts traffic lights?

Ditto.

Canceling cable used to be, at the very least, a long, phone call that alternated between stretches of hold music dulling the senses and combative sales technique verbal jousting. Canceling a streaming service… I don’t think that has ever taken me more than four minutes of finding a webpage and clicking. The collective consciousness is in danger of forgetting/underplaying just how far we have come on this.

If pirating ever takes less than four minutes every other month, I guess it will have reached convenience parity. But it certainly wasn’t that back when I was in that game. And I really, really doubt it is now.