system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do pirates use strippers to get 4k content?

 Why do pirates use strippers to get 4k content of streaming websites? Why don't they just get a 4k screen capture service and record the screen while playing the video?
gpt
If you merely capture screen, you will only get pixel by pixel data. Saving pixel by pixel one hour of 4k video would take tremendous space

4k denotes 3840*2160. That is the number of pixels on screen on a single frame, or in other words, that's 8 million pixels per frame. Each pixel should have color information tagged on it as well, and usually you have 16 or 24 bits to denote color of a single pixel. So that's at least 120 million bits per frame. At 60fps, each second has 60 frames, bringing us to 7 billion bits per second, or 21000 billion bits per hour. That would be equivalent of 3000 billion bytes or 3 terabytes.

3 terabytes for a hour-long video is quite a lot.

How this works is that videos are actually highly compressed. Compression algorithms however lose information(unless you deal with lossless algorithms, but those are significantly less effective at reducing size down from that 3 terabytes). If you capture 3 terabytes of video, you then need to start deciding where to trim it down, and how to have something of usable size to produce end result similar to the video you captured.

But the 4k video you were watching was already compressed, and if you could just tap into that, you would directly have usable video file of very small size, and you wouldn't lose any video data on re-compression.