this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Hypothetically yes. But consider that much like a virus growing in a petri dish, it needs an appropriate environment. A mp4/mkv/whatever file sitting on your hard drive that you never access is not going to be problematic. Even when you do access it, it is probably is not going to do anything unless you also open it in the viewer that the malware author intended the payload for. There is no general purpose video decoding malware. They target the players.
as a reminder: in systems on Linux, remember to check the permissions of non executable files if you're extracting them from a zip folder or similar, since those tends to preserve file permissions before you double-click them.
Also for Linux: If you're paranoid about getting hit by a video-player exploit, I think you could thwart most attempts by throwing your player into firejail (maybe a properly configured flatpak could also do the trick?)