Keeper of Hellfire wrote:And no, it doesn't prevent from stealing. With the right tools, streams can be captured too.
Actually, I've still not found something that can capture Quicktime RTSP (although I thought that one program in particular could, but if it really does, it requires hex editing to get the video into usable form). Currently that's the only one that I know of that can't be though (RealMedia RTSP can be captured with just about any stream capturing software).
Unfortunately, it's actually much higher quality than your average streaming media, about on par with the freely watchable (and downloadable with the right know-how) music videos that iTunes used to have available before they launched the video store. Case in point: the Dani California video that's streaming from the Red Hot Chili Peppers' offical site.
Eh, if you don't want people to steal your video footage, it's probably pretty safe right now to just use a format that's not easily manipulated without knowing your way around AviSynth or Graphedit. Most people who try to take credit or do crap like all this controversy over YT or this new site I would bet don't really know much more about converting video formats than trying to open it in WMM and export as WMV, which only works in some circumstances which are very limited in scope. MPEG-1, DivX/XviD in AVI, WMV...yeah, those are fair game because they require very little in the way of conversion knowledge - at the very least, WMM and possibly VirtualDub as a last resort.
I've already switched to H.264 in MKV, and yeah, I've already seen the sheer amount of downloads go down just because of the format (never mind that I also had an indirect link to an XviD version for one or two of them, but it didn't get nearly as many clicks either). Fact of the matter is, if they can't play it or be bothered to mess with it, they're not going to take the time to try to pass it off as their own or convert it to another format so they can hack it to pieces. I could care less about the amount of people that see it; sooner or later the standards of encoding are going to change and the viewers have to cope. It happened before and it'll happen again. A lot of the historical bias against MKV is just not true anymore (VSFilter actually was the source of the problems anyway, if I remember correctly, that and people having codec packs already installed), and it's been proven, via CoreAVC, that even low-end machines like mine can play H.264, given the bitrate isn't too high (which it shouldn't be in most cases, because of the advanced features that AVC possesses), and it's not HD - which would be the case for the vast majority of AMVs at present. The point is, unless there's some magical, readily available, n00b-friendly and completely obvious conversion software, it's currently a tad sight more complicated than just plopping the video down in WMM's timeline or using VirtualDub without AviSynth, and more complicated in a direction that most that have the impulse to plagarize avoid like the plague.
I'm not saying everyone should immediately switch so that they can protect their editing, because sooner or later it is going to become [even more so] child's play to convert out, but I can't foresee that people will bother much to try because the current tools will probably still have far more clout behind them than ones meant to specifically deal with newer formats/containers. While the fansubbing and AMV communities might have near completely moved onto H.264 in MP4 or MKV three years from now, the average user will still be confused why DivX in AVI won't play on their computer.
But I wouldn't like to see my AMV's crippled that way.
