[HN Gopher] The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
___________________________________________________________________
The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
Author : _Microft
Score : 630 points
Date : 2023-03-09 14:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk)
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| > Truth be told, I don't care very much about Netflix - the UX
| offered by BitTorrent is superior.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Maybe true for English. But possibly who prefer other language
| dub/sub, it will be harder to find torrents.
| go_elmo wrote:
| getting what you want fast. It is literally that easy & netflix
| messes it up with being nondeterministic and screaming at me
| trailers I've never asked for. My autistic self is o.u.t.
| thewebcount wrote:
| FYI you can turn off the auto-playing ability of trailers in
| your settings on the website. They will then take affect in
| any Netflix app you use, too. It's stupid you can't set it
| from the app, but I turned off autoplaying trailers the day
| it came out and have liked using Netflix a lot more since
| then.
| wilg wrote:
| Netflix is designed this way because most of the time people
| don't know what they want. So it's a browse, not a search,
| interface. But it has search so I don't really understand why
| it's a problem to see things you don't care about for a
| second before searching.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Other services are browse-mainly, too, but are far less
| annoying than Netflix. Their UI being so goddamn obnoxious
| for so long, with apparently no intent to ever change that
| back to something sane, was part of why I cancelled
| recently after being a subscriber since the DVD days. (Yes,
| I used the "stop autoplaying, jesus god who could possibly
| want that" option they finally added, but it didn't seem to
| affect all platforms, or else they reset it at some point,
| I dunno and I wasn't paying Netflix so _I_ could go find
| out how they screwed it up)
|
| Like, it's terrible specifically for browsing, so its being
| oriented around browsing isn't really a defense of how shit
| it is. Sitting there chatting with someone about what to
| watch and you have to keep moving from thing to thing
| _constantly_ or it screams over your conversation and /or
| shows you spoilery, distracting shit. WTF. A few others
| autoplay or play clips/trailers but without sound, which
| still sucks but is at least better. I shouldn't have to
| slam the mute button every time I return to the menu just
| to keep Netflix from doing stupid crap it shouldn't do in
| the first place.
| toyg wrote:
| Because the search is pretty bad too, even when you know
| what you want and you're sure it's there.
| andsoitis wrote:
| How would you improve the search?
| pbmonster wrote:
| Better filters instead of permanently inventing new
| "categories".
|
| Allow me to filter (and sort results) by playtime,
| IMDB/Letterboxd score, original language, whether I have
| watched it before, ect.
|
| If I don't already know the name of a movie, I just need
| Netflix to show queries like "a French movie shorter than
| 2:20h with at least 3.5 stars on Letterboxd".
| trollied wrote:
| Just goes to show that the DRM is just security through
| obscurity.
| socRate35 wrote:
| The "security through obscurity" chant needs to die. It's such
| a generalized concept it applies too broadly.
|
| Encryption is "security through obscurity".
|
| Having few admins is security through obscurity; a guessing
| game of who is the admin?
| compsciphd wrote:
| security through obscurity is generally not about keeping a
| well known encryption scheme's keys "private". It's generally
| about not knowing how a system works at all. In this case (and
| the same for blurays actually), we know exactly how the system
| works, given the keys we could decrypt the content, but the
| keys are kept "well" protected (depending on widevine level,
| different levels of protection). In BluRay land enough player
| keys have leaked to make it basically irrelevant. It's also
| harder to determine whose keys are being used to decrypt,
| making it harder to revoke. In an online widevine world where
| one has to use one's baked in device keys to get the content
| key, its much easier to determine if a single device's key is
| being used an abnormal amount of time and then revoke it.
|
| while one can view the efforts to protect a widevine l3 key as
| security through obscurity, its mostly there to make the effort
| hard enough that most people are interested in doing it, than
| to keep it perfectly secure.
| [deleted]
| klodolph wrote:
| True for Widevine L3, which is what the article is talking
| about. Not true in general, and not true for L2 or L1.
| babypuncher wrote:
| At the end of the day, the user's hardware/software has to be
| given a decryption key for the content, and the DRM scheme is
| all about obfuscating that encryption key so that users can't
| find it.
| klodolph wrote:
| I'd say that a key stored on hardware is not merely
| obfuscated, when that hardware is designed to prevent you
| from recovering the key.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The hardware ultimately has to decrypt and play the
| content, so you can use it as a decryption oracle even if
| you can't extract the key itself.
| klodolph wrote:
| Sort of, within constraints. L1 both decrypts and
| decodes, so you can't really use it as a pure decryption
| oracle, but it doesn't matter if you're going to re-
| encode it anyway.
|
| Not that it really matters, since HDCP has been cracked.
| There are a lot of holes here and a lot of problems with
| DRM.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Eehhh at the end of the day, L1 is still almost impossible
| to bypass and hasn't been broken in years. So it still
| works, meaning it doesn't really matter even if it's
| security by obscurity (I dont think it qualifies for the
| term but anyways).
| a257 wrote:
| L1 has been bypassed by piracy groups for years (through
| social engineering). They just don't share the keys
| publicly because it would give their opponents an
| advantage. See [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29702110
| mardifoufs wrote:
| True, I didn't realize those were l1 keys. I'll have to
| read up on the revocation mechanism, if there is any. I'm
| also wondering how those keys usually leak. Is it through
| vulns, or just exploiting unsecure key handling?
| GOATS- wrote:
| The Nexus 6's L1 keys were dumped through a vulnerability
| in Qualcomm's trusted code execution environment.
|
| http://bits-please.blogspot.com/2016/05/qsee-privilege-
| escal...
|
| https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/07/trust-
| issues-...
| grishka wrote:
| If it hasn't been broken, then where do all those 4K HDR
| torrents come from?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| From cracked HDMI HDCP?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Nvidia Shield[0]
|
| 0: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/nvidia-shield-pro-
| widevin...
| dublinben wrote:
| Circumventing higher levels of Widevine has been
| unnecessary until now, since the HDCP protecting the
| inevitable HDMI video output has been thoroughly cracked.
| Pristine 1080p and 4k copies of Netflix content is widely
| available.
| loeg wrote:
| > since the HDCP protecting the inevitable HDMI video
| output has been thoroughly cracked
|
| My impression is the stuff coming from the various
| streaming services is not captured and reencoded, but
| direct bit-for-bit copy of the original H.264 (or H.265)
| encoding (sans DRM). (Yeah, others will do reencodes
| later but quite a bit of the source material encoding
| comes directly from the streaming sites.)
| dublinben wrote:
| You're right that there is plenty of directly stream-
| ripped content out there, presumably using cracks of
| various levels of Widevine. The makers of these tools and
| the groups using them tend to keep quiet about the
| details of the precise exploits they're using, for
| obvious reasons. Ultimately, there's no shortage of DRM-
| free 4K content, whether from streaming services or Blu-
| Ray, since there's always a weak point in the chain
| somewhere.
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah. With blurays, you can always extract the device key
| out of some Bluray player. It's an extremely poor user
| experience for bluray consumers to have their devices
| stop working for new movies, so my impression is these
| keys aren't blacklisted all that quickly. For the
| streaming sites, I have no idea. But, yeah, the cleartext
| bits need to get in front of the user eventually.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| BluRay has two security systems. One is based on key
| revocation (AACS) and one is based on embedding programs
| written by companies contracted by the movie studios
| which do dynamic detection of rippers. AACS failed almost
| immediately because indeed, keys leaked faster than they
| could be revoked. BD+ proved much harder, at least in the
| early years. But it was only ever designed to last about
| 10 years according even to the sales pitch of the
| designers and it's older than that now, so I wouldn't
| expect it to be all that effective anymore especially
| since Intel pulled SGX from their client chips.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Capturing video via HDMI is less than optimal, since you
| then have to encode a 2nd generation lossy copy. Ideally,
| you want to decrypt the original audio and video streams
| before they've been decoded and sent to the display.
| no_time wrote:
| I'd argue the same goes for L1 and L2. But the obscurity is
| provided by the silicon packaging process.
|
| Would be nice to crowdfund a lab to break these hardware
| backed treachery schemes.
| a257 wrote:
| While cracking the hardware is an interesting technical
| challenge, it is certainly not the only method. Security is
| only as good as the weakest link -- the human factor. Thus,
| piracy groups are able to use social engineering to crack
| Widevine without relying on advanced laboratories. See [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29702110
| klodolph wrote:
| When you say "security through obscurity" there's a certain
| understanding that we're drawing a line between
| implementation secrecy (obscurity / obfuscation) and key
| secrecy. If we extend the word "obscurity" to include the
| notion of physical security, I think we've gone too far--
| even if physical security is just the physical security of
| a secret embedded in silicon that you have physical access
| to (because it is _super difficult_ to recover secrets from
| silicon).
| the8472 wrote:
| With DRM the user who owns the machine is the "attacker".
| The keys have already been handed to the user, he only
| needs to get them out. This is like hiding an API key in
| a public website's javascript with rot13. Very much
| security by obscurity.
|
| Proper security means that the attacker should never be
| in possession of the key.
| klodolph wrote:
| You're saying that a hardware security module is like
| rot13?
|
| When you say the attacker "only" needs to get them out,
| the "only" is doing a lot of work, there.
| yipbub wrote:
| Yes, but it only has to be done once.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The same goes for the HSMs that power the internet's
| certificate authorities then. If there were a precise
| enough CT scan that could read the current state of atoms
| and flash, we'd have a major security problem.
|
| The only reason L1 doesn't prevent people from pirating 4K
| HDR movies is because the Nvidia Shield has a bypass, and
| Google is too afraid to revoke its keys (or maybe Nvidia is
| paying millions of dollars a year to rights holders for
| their 'lost sales' from pirated movies at the hands of the
| Nvidia Shield).
| [deleted]
| no_time wrote:
| Ah the Tegra X1 bootrom exploit is the gift that just
| keeps on giving. I instantly bought a switch when the
| news came out.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I believe that L2 would be _weaker_ than L3 in practice,
| which likely explains why I 've also never seen it
| implemented (If you know about an L2 instance I would be
| genuinely interested in taking a look)
| pakyr wrote:
| > I believe that L2 would be weaker than L3 in practice
|
| How come?
| Retr0id wrote:
| According to the descriptions I can find, L2 does
| cryptography in secure hardware, but video decoding in
| software. (as opposed to L3 that does both in software,
| and L1 that does both in hardware).
|
| In L3, you can obfuscate the cryptography and the video
| codecs together as a unit, blurring any defined border
| between them. A determined reverse-engineer can
| inevitably unravel that obfuscation, but it's non-
| trivial.
|
| In L2, there must be some interface between the hardware
| and software components. That interface presents itself
| as a very obvious weak point. As an attacker, all you'd
| have to do is watch the data flowing out of the
| cryptography hardware, and into the video decoder
| software, and you'd be able to siphon out the plaintext
| video data.
|
| (To be clear, this is entirely "in theory" because I've
| never seen an L2 implementation)
| favorited wrote:
| > Addendum: The EME API is a good thing! (kinda)
|
| Hard agree. There was so much nerdrage when the EME was being
| considered for standardization, as if by _not_ standardizing an
| API we 'd be preventing DRM from existing. People acted like Tim
| Berners-Lee was stabbing the collective internet in the back when
| he endorsed it.
|
| The choice was between a standardized web-based DRM, or a wild
| west of incompatible proprietary DRM. Personally, I'm glad I
| don't need Silverlight to watch Netflix anymore.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There is also the opinion that having a Wild West of
| incompatible proprietary garbage would result in DRM being less
| popular because it caused too much friction for users. Of
| course some stuff would still have it, but less would than the
| current state where it's easy and invisible to users until you
| hit an unsupported system.
| MBCook wrote:
| > ...would result in DRM being less popular because it caused
| too much friction for users.
|
| I agree. But that wouldn't lead to more content freely
| available. It would lead to more content being locked in apps
| and unavailable in the browser.
|
| Do you think they would've made an app for Linux? I don't.
|
| The dream that all content be available DRM free isn't
| happening any time soon. Rights holders clearly don't want it
| and I don't think anyone could marshal a big enough boycott
| to change that.
|
| So the choice is DRM or no content at all. Given that EME is
| a good outcome.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| It happened for music!
|
| I wonder why.
|
| But it makes music the one digital good I don't torrent on
| the reg cuz it's easier to just search it up on Amazon than
| on some torrent site. (The one weird exception is
| discographies, since they don't sell those for some reason.
| For them, archivists' torrents got you covered.)
| MBCook wrote:
| Yes but the music industry was willing. I don't see that
| in video.
|
| If anything the video industry appears to have "learned
| the lesson" of the "screw ups" of the music industry.
| scarface74 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35090355
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think Spotify web would have DRM if it required
| manually installing crap like silverlight. Music went drm
| free because it was inconvenient, and then when the drm was
| refined a bit, it's all locked up so the web ui doesn't
| work on Asahi.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Because users are so famously reluctant to download apps?
| Apple would like a word with you ;)
|
| It's mostly devs who obsess over the downloading and
| running of programs as if it's a great torment. Users
| don't care much. They're happy to go grab things from app
| stores or even just download and run them. Notch was able
| to buy a massive mansion in Beverly Hills on the back of
| people downloading and running his Java desktop app.
| jwandborg wrote:
| I can't download any iOS apps. Sometimes I try but it
| doesn't work, even though I'm using the latest web
| browser.
| scarface74 wrote:
| This is completely false and easily refuted.
|
| By the beginning of 2007, every music service that wasn't
| iTunes had failed to gain traction. The record labels
| wanted Apple to license FairPlay. Apple refused and Steve
| Jobs posted "Thoughts on Music" to the front page of
| Apple.com where he gave the music labels an alternative -
| license their music to everyone DRM free.
|
| https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_
| pos...
|
| > The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely.
| Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free
| music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a
| world, any player can play music purchased from any
| store, and any store can sell music which is playable on
| all players. This is clearly the best alternative for
| consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat
|
| The record labels wanted Apple to give them a cut of each
| iPod sold, allow variable pricing and allow more music to
| be bundled instead of sold as singles. Apple refused.
| Some other places like Amazon and MS acquiesced.
|
| Apple then released the iPhone. But didn't have the
| rights to sell music over cellular. Both sides came back
| to the bargaining table and by 2009, iTunes music was DRM
| free.
| rvz wrote:
| > This should be alarming to anyone with a stake in content
| "protection". Look how many hoops I had to jump through just to
| legally watch Netflix as a paying customer!
|
| This tells me I should just stay on macOS or Windows rather than
| go on a Safari hunt for getting Netflix working on a ARM Linux
| machine.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Or just pirate it and get DRM free 4k video basically as soon
| as it is released.
| krono wrote:
| "Hacker"news in 2023 ;-)
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| The browser compatability is still a bit of a mess on those
| OSes. The only way to get the full resolution on MacOS is to
| use some specific combinations of Safari and MacOS versions. If
| youre using OSX or using Chrome/FF you're limited to 720p
|
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
| chpatrick wrote:
| Pirates meanwhile have no issues...
| monetus wrote:
| Resolution:
|
| Google Chrome
|
| Up to 720p on Windows, Mac, and Linux
|
| Up to 1080p on Chrome OS
|
| Microsoft Edge up to 4K*
|
| Mozilla Firefox up to 720p
|
| Opera up to 720p
|
| Safari
|
| Up to 4K on macOS 11.0 or later
|
| Up to 1080p on macOS 10.11 through 10.15
|
| *Streaming in 4K requires an HDCP 2.2 compliant connection to
| a 4K capable display, Intel's 7th generation Core CPU, and
| the latest Windows updates. Check with the manufacturer of
| your system to verify specifications.
|
| ^ is this the lawyers or the programmers' doing?
| Retr0id wrote:
| You can get 1080p with a browser extension that forces it.
| jraph wrote:
| You wouldn't have to anymore thanks to this work. You can just
| install the necessary package now.
| godman_8 wrote:
| The support will get better over time. 10 years ago I couldn't
| watch any streaming services on Linux with Firefox or Chrome.
| There was a brief period where streaming services were still
| using flash so you could sideload the flash player onto Firefox
| but that didn't last long. Now I run Pop!_OS 22.04 with an
| Nvidia GPU and I can play almost all my DRM content including
| Windows games on Steam. While I still experience awful bugs
| that I wouldn't have otherwise experienced on Windows or macOS
| I can finally daily Linux desktop.
| dtx1 wrote:
| As a linux user i skimmed the page and realized about half way
| through that i'll just pirate stuff anyway and never deal with
| that kind of bs.
| Zuiii wrote:
| Piracy is increasingly becoming the ONLY option for many
| people. It's fascinating how this industry became it's own
| worst enemy.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Excellent writeup. Asahi is my daily driver, but I've never had
| the need for either Spotify or Netflix. I guess the gospel of RMS
| and the FSF over the past few decades has steered me away from
| anything DRM-related.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Spotify has alternative clients like raspotify, so there you
| should have alternatives that don't need hacks. There's also a
| web client.
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| raspotify/spotifyd aren't alternative desktop clients,
| they're connect clients, great if you want to modern-ify an
| old amplifier, but not useful for streaming.
|
| All of the native desktop clients (psst, spot, etc) are
| missing quite a few features compared to the official client,
| and spotify-tui is nowhere near as nice to use.
| slondr wrote:
| Spotifyd can be a desktop client. It doesn't have a UI, but
| you can send it commands over dbus.
|
| Spotifyd on my laptop (often started initially with
| connect) is my primary method of listing to Spotify.
| [deleted]
| Syonyk wrote:
| The web client seems to install some DRM packages.
|
| I've used ncspot extensively when on little ARM boxes - it
| requires a premium account, which I have, and it's just a
| nice little curses interface to Spotify, written in Rust,
| that seems to work on everything with a minimal of resource
| use.
| Aissen wrote:
| I use the web client, but I find myself lamenting how it's
| missing basic features, like playlist management (change song
| order, duplicate playlist); fortunately I don't use those
| often, but it is quite annoying.
| easrng wrote:
| The web client is what requires widevine. The native clients
| use a custom (easier to bypass iirc) DRM scheme.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Spotify is usable with alt clients. If I was using Asahi
| regularly I'd probably just torrent video content that can't be
| played due to drm.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Asahi is my daily driver
|
| I'm guessing you have an x86_64 Mac and not an arm64 Mac?
| NieDzejkob wrote:
| Asahi is specifically about arm64.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| In terms of freedom of using compute devices, RMS has a point.
|
| In terms of freedom of using media, I'm less annoyed by Spotify
| or Netflix than I am by "purchases" of media that have DRM.
| It's clear that one is renting with the streaming services, but
| Amazon can revoke permission for me to read books I have
| purchased or Valve can revoke permission for me to play games I
| have purchased, we are truly living in a dystopia.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah the subscription services for media I like and I feel
| like the proposition is straightforward. I pay per month for
| access to a massive catalog of media. If I don't like it I
| can just stop and maybe subscribe elsewhere.
|
| It seems quite fair. There's no mystery that it is a rental
| situation.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Instead of "buy", they should be labeled "rentals - as long
| as provider exists or chooses to give you access".
| toyg wrote:
| "Leases"? If contract is terminated, goods go back to the
| owner.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The terminology should be either "License", "Buy a
| License", or "Purchase<br><small>Indefinite
| License</small>", but it's distinctively "not renting"
| since it's a one-time cost to obtain that indefinite
| license. Renting anything implies and requires some form of
| ongoing cost.
| [deleted]
| coldtea wrote:
| What "indefinite license"? They can, and do, take content
| off at any time...
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, that fits within the definition of indefinite. It's
| not a permanent license, and at time of sale, it's
| unknown when it ends.
| ywain wrote:
| "Indefinite" in this context means that there is no set
| expiration date. It doesn't mean "perpetual" or
| "irrevocable".
| usefulcat wrote:
| Indefinite == not definite, i.e., not for a specific
| duration. It doesn't mean 'forever'.
| wil421 wrote:
| When have you ever been able to buy software? I thought in
| most cases you just buy a license to use the software or
| the license says it's free for X types of uses or sometimes
| "free for everyone".
| zamnos wrote:
| Back when it was sold on physical media; CDs, Bluray, DVD
| or floppy disk. Because it was a physical disk, you were
| allowed to do whatever you want with that disk. You
| weren't given the right to copy it and distribute those
| copies thanks to copyright, but you were allowed to
| resell your one physical copy due to the first sale
| doctrine. Hence we can quibble about the definition of
| "buy software", but we used to be able to do that. It's
| that the first sale doctrine kinda doesn't apply if
| you're renting software like a SaaS over the Internet; eg
| Adobe Photoshop/Creative Cloud.
| wil421 wrote:
| I don't remember it being like that with CDs and
| floppy's. I'm pretty sure most of them were still a
| license to play.
|
| Looking at my Diablo II (version 1.0 2000) and Warcraft
| III CDs I am given a license key and agreement to an
| EULA. Unfortunately the EULA isn't in the box but I'm
| almost positive they could revoke my key and I'd be
| unable to play.
| samstave wrote:
| Can one use "Kigo Netflix Downloader" in a WINE or native install
| for linux if they have one - and then play with VLC?
|
| https://kigo-video-converter.com/netflix-tips/play-netflix-o...
|
| (not associated with them)
| musicale wrote:
| That company doesn't look dodgy at all.
| PointyFluff wrote:
| [dead]
| arsome wrote:
| Does this actually get 1080p? I thought L3 was limited to 720?
|
| L3 is weak enough that you can dump it by just hooking the
| decoders.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Entirely depends on what the streaming service feeds you. IIRC
| Disney+ drops you to 480p.
| winterqt wrote:
| > Most streaming platforms will limit you to only "HD" content
| on L3 (as opposed to 4K on L1). On Netflix, this upper limit is
| 1080p (although it might depend on the specific content you're
| trying to watch?), but you are further limited to a mere 720p
| by default. For some reason, you can only get 1080p if your
| client asks nicely for it (at the protocol level), and there
| are browser extensions that do this for you automatically.
| bumhole wrote:
| Anyone who knows some technical detail about Widevine, please
| could you explain what is the difference between L1 and L3 (other
| than resolution/quality)?
|
| How does each interoperate with EME?
|
| And what sort of process would one need to do, to be able to view
| an L1 stream on a bespoke Linux distribution, rather than the L3
| stream that this person received? How difficult is it to do, and
| what are the specific challenges?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| EME is just an API to access the native code.
|
| Levels are primarily about various kinds of hardware
| protection, I think. The lowest level just uses ordinary
| software obfuscation in the widevine library that this article
| is about, and regular updates to change the media keys.
|
| Higher levels integrate more with special hardware "APIs" of
| various kinds. I think you generally cannot play the highest
| levels on PC hardware at all, it's more meant for Apple TVs and
| other such devices. Other levels may require things like the
| Windows protected media path, which lets you upload encrypted
| video data to the GPU and then it's up to the GPU firmware to
| decrypt it. So then it becomes a question of understanding how
| the GPU is decrypting the data and defeating that.
| reisse wrote:
| The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible
| for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all?
|
| It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make
| impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the
| torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection
| from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done.
|
| They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.
| [deleted]
| phh wrote:
| > The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How
| sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all?
|
| Well that investment is pretty low since Widevine is quite easy
| to integrate and the licensing cost is 0 for Netflix.
|
| The thing is, you do need some Digital Rights Management
| somewhere. If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you
| can just share that mp4 url, and you could watch movies
| directly off Netflix servers (so it would cost even more than
| torrenting).
|
| You could include temporary tokens in your URLs, but then you
| need your CDN to be a bit dynamic.
|
| Or you could have a completely static CDN, but the files are
| encrypted, and you download the encryption key off a server
| dedicated to DRM that will check you're properly authed. And
| well, here you've re-created Widevine. Widevine do provide more
| protections than just that, but that's just free for Netflix,
| they literally just have to switch some booleans.
|
| > They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.
|
| Yeah I mostly agree. As I mentioned before, there are some
| usages of DRM that are not completely non-sense. What kills me
| is the HDCP requirement. Many TVs have HDCP compatibility
| issues (for instance my Samsung TV has the two 4k60p yuv444
| hdcp 1 ports and one 4k60p yuv420 hdcp2 port, so I need to
| chose between 4k content and true 4k resolution), while HDCP2
| is utterly broken: you can find decrypting dongles for 20EUR
| directly from Amazon.
| mholt wrote:
| > If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth,
|
| I don't think anyone's suggesting that there's NO
| authentication. Authentication is a relatively trivial,
| commonly-accepted necessary nuissance that is distinct from
| DRM.
| asveikau wrote:
| > If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just
| share that mp4 url,
|
| You seem to think not having this specific DRM mandates a
| particular transport and authentication scheme? These are not
| at all related.
|
| Really it sounds like what is being requested is that there
| not be non-portable binary blobs. That's it.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| >It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to
| make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on
| the torrents
|
| This hasn't been consistently true for a while. Stranger Things
| season 4 did not appear in high resolutions online for a month
| after release.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.
|
| The user experience worse for all of the Linux users who want
| to watch Netflix on a computer? What percentage of the market
| do you think that is?
| dathinab wrote:
| Widevine is not from Netflix per-se but for all kind of DRM
| content, including that from other streaming services for all
| kind of media.
|
| Furthermore it is _not_ Netflix decision, but a decision
| legally forced onto them by companies which whole purpose it is
| to make money from selling copyright which have huge legal
| influence in both the US and the EU. (Through Netflix does has
| some influence on the legal framework leading to to, but very
| limited compared to e.g. Disney.)
|
| If Netflix wants to have any 3rd party content, even "old
| crappy stuff", they need DRM (or way more power/influence).
| Even for first party content due to round about legal things
| they might be required to have DRM, I think. (But I am not
| completely sure).
| goosedragons wrote:
| I'm sure it's probably a requirement from all the 3rd party
| media companies. They didn't seem to like VPNs either. But I
| also wouldn't be surprised if Netflix wants it to keep high
| quality versions at least off pirate sites.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| 4k rips land on usenet super quickly though and they're
| excellent quality. HDCP is already easily bypassed at this
| point.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| But probably re-encodes, so filesizes are bigger for close
| enough quality. A direct crack of the encryption would be
| best from a space-quality perspective.
|
| Doesn't really matter much though in most of the world as
| it used to though.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| This is incorrect.
|
| See the difference between a scene WEB release and a P2P
| WEB-Rip.
|
| > The landscape of the WEB scene has changed in the last
| four years. > Subsequently, the ability to defeat DRM has
| become ubiquitous.
|
| https://scenerules.org/n.html?id=2020_WDX.nfo
| admax88qqq wrote:
| Full stack protection from decoder the screen is coming.
|
| IIRC you can only play 4k Netflix on a smart TV which controls
| the entire stack from network to pixels
| phh wrote:
| > IIRC you can only play 4k Netflix on a smart TV which
| controls the entire stack from network to pixels
|
| Netflix won't allow TV makers to make their own Netflix app,
| they must use Netflix proprietary code as-is, and it's
| Netflix code that download chunks and forwards them to
| playback, while TV handles the secure video decoding, so TV
| can't "control the entire stack"
|
| Also, tv boxes are allowed to playback 4k Netflix just fine
| without controlling the screen.
|
| All the Netflix shows you can download on the internet do
| include the 4k versions.
|
| Maybe they'll obsolete older 4k devices that are deemed less
| protected (though I could probably point them "a few"
| security flaws to Netflix-endorsed 4k devices so that every
| is on par), but I doubt it. I don't think anyone ever done
| that (720p has always been fine without HDCP, 1080p with only
| HDCP1, before that macrovision was non-breaking) [1], and I
| doubt Netflix would want to push that badly towards e-waste.
|
| [1] There has been few cases of some devices being revoked,
| like Nexus 6, but it was usually long after their shelf life
| anyway
| stefan_ wrote:
| You know we had that, they called it HDCP. It continues to
| frustrate users of beamers and what not today, despite the
| root key being leaked for many years now. Even before the key
| leak, it never did anything to stop shows appearing as
| torrents on day one. It will never work, if pirates have to
| replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so.
| phh wrote:
| Nit, but I think HDCP 2 is still cryptographically secure?
| No leakage, no known crypto flaws on HDCP 2.3 if i remember
| correctly.
|
| That being said, It's still utterly broken because you can
| buy HDCP 2 disabler from Amazon for 20 EUR
| erik wrote:
| How do the cheap disablers work if the protocol isn't
| broken? Is someone signing devices that they aren't
| supposed to?
| lutoma wrote:
| FYI, the German word "beamer" is a 'false' anglicism. The
| English translation is (video) projector.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| Thanks! I was trying to figure out what the heck a beamer
| was. Didn't seem likely to be a BMW which is the only
| thing I've heard folks in the US call a beamer.
|
| Reminds me of when I visited friends in Germany and they
| kept talking about their handy and I eventually figured
| out that's a cell phone.
| jack1243star wrote:
| Learned this via LaTeX :)
| gpm wrote:
| > It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV
| panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so.
|
| Evidence does appear to point to you being right, but I
| really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate
| things for other people?
|
| A significant investment of time and money, from highly a
| highly skilled individual, for... bragging rights? Is there
| some financial motive I'm unaware of?
| reassembled wrote:
| An enterprising and skilled hacker or group of hackers
| finds rich financial backers to invest in the equipment
| and time necessary to build a solution. There's probably
| a whole underground scene or multiple connected scenes
| working on this stuff, composed of both hackers and their
| supporters.
| Strom wrote:
| > _but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths
| to pirate things for other people?_
|
| The people breaking the systems and the people doing most
| of the pirating are different.
|
| DRM breaking is a fun challange to some people. You can
| find these kinds of people breaking all sorts of things.
| Browser sandbox escapes, remote code execution etc. The
| mindset is well described in the article here as _I can
| only solve a problem if somebody else implies that I can
| 't_. It's a fun challenge! Plus if you do it before
| others, you get to feel really superior.
|
| The actual pirating is however done by different people.
| Usually initially by close acquaintances of the DRM
| breaker, but the methods tend to spread/leak.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I don't think it's that weird. People do stuff for free
| for a better all the time.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Often it's people motivated to watch something otherwise
| unavailable to them. Then the technique is easy to use
| for other content, so why not?
| atahanacar wrote:
| If I can crack any piece of DRM, or any digital
| restrictions, I will do it for free and release it for
| free. If publishers can't make paying for content more
| convenient than torrenting or downloading it from a
| random website, it is their fault. Also, the sense of
| accomplishment is too great to ignore once you finally
| crack it.
| lib-dev wrote:
| Fun technical challenge that many people will be grateful
| for.
| reisse wrote:
| > Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?
|
| As other people already said, some people do it purely
| "for the just cause". But the piracy is also a literal
| gold mine if you're able to manage legal risks.
| Basically, you take ripped content and either re-sell ad-
| free access worldwide (Netflix is really, really limited
| to the first world), or make it available for free with
| heavy ads, or both.
| snark42 wrote:
| Or make it available on DVD.
|
| I know this was the incentive behind a lot of the people
| financially supporting the warez scene in the past.
| barneygale wrote:
| > Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?
|
| Precisely the opposite. We do it for free because other
| people do it for money.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths
| to pirate things for other people?
|
| Content owners really seem to underestimate how far
| people are willing to go for kudos alone on setup cost if
| the reproduction cost is zero.
|
| Also for some people it's a point of philosophy / concern
| about future-proofing. Guy I knew back in the day was the
| biggest torrenter around... He was stuffing a hard drive
| full of '80s cartoons. His attitude on it was that the
| creators and owners _did not care_ if those half-hour toy
| commercials would be around in 100 years, but he did.
| spookie wrote:
| This, I've friends of mine who do this for a myriad of
| media. And I absolutely understand their philosophy.
|
| Looking at video games today, riddled with DRM reliant on
| the server infrastructure of a finite life company makes
| me sad.
| safety1st wrote:
| IIRC, the reason for incorporating DRM was that the major
| studios wouldn't license anything to them if they didn't.
| nl wrote:
| The point is to make the Netflix experience better for the
| average person than the experience of using a pirated source.
|
| And - IMHO - it works.
|
| I used to use Bittorrent quite a lot. There was a bunch of US
| shows I watched that were unavailable in Australia and so I had
| a pretty decent setup where things would automatically download
| when torrents were posted.
|
| Life happened, I stopped using it and haven't really tried
| torrents for maybe 10 years.
|
| I tried to get a show recently that isn't available here. Wow,
| that's a pretty bad experience - try to find the correct show,
| work out what client you need, find one that has seeders,
| downlaod one and the codec is wrong for my device etc
|
| I just gave up.
|
| I can get NVidia software working on non-standard Linux builds
| (which I think is a pretty high level of technical competency)
| but for most people getting pirated content isn't worth the
| effort.
|
| By putting DRM on the content, they limit distribution to
| people who know how to remove it and then to people who are
| experienced at finding what they want on pirate sites.
|
| TL;DR: The user experience is _much_ better for most people.
| Pirated content has such a bad user experience, but people who
| use it have invested a lot of time working out what works and
| don 't realize the effort it takes.
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| Google the arr stack + Plex. Should give you your own
| personal Netflix without much work, or so I heard...
| [deleted]
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I want to signal boost this a bit because it's so
| incredible once you see it. The "arr stack" is a suite of
| interconnected software that automates finding pirate media
| by integrating with a HUGE number of ways to search for
| torrents, Usenet, etc. It's all self-hostable and with
| Overseerr as "pick what to download" frontend and Plex as
| the media viewer, it works so well that it's a genuine
| Netflix replacement, so easy that parents can use it.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So, it's easier for me to go through the trouble of finding a
| good torrent with seeds that download fast than just paying
| for Netflix and automatically stream to my iPad while I'm at
| the airport?
| torified wrote:
| What? Piracy is so easy.
|
| Go to torrent site, download torrent, click on file. It
| really couldn't be easier. There's no DRM on the torrent. If
| you have a semi-modern GPU you can play any codec you might
| download. I'm really not sure what you're talking about,
| unless you're going to some weird torrent site.
|
| Piracy has a _great_ user experience compared to paying for
| DRM and having to use a particular app instead of your
| preferred player.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| _sigh_ you can lead a horse to water. Look around you,
| notice that people are not pirating en masse. People prefer
| to just pay for Netflix. But piracy is so easy! How could
| this be? Could it be... you 're wrong?
| nl wrote:
| I _almost_ wrote "just wait for people to say 'no it's
| easy'" but I thought surely we are over that now.
|
| I want to watch The Climb 2023 S01E01. I Google "The Climb
| 2023 S01E01 torrent"
|
| First result is www.stagatv.com/series/the-climb-s01 (not
| linking because it is spam)
|
| Hmm nothing else useful on the first page except this: _In
| response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have
| removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may
| read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org._
|
| Ok, lets look at that. Hmm a random list of very spammy
| domains like 123movies dot unblockall dot org. Hmm these
| don't seem to work.
|
| Ok what about my old torrent sites. No, they are all down.
|
| ThePirateBay! Yes I remember this....
|
| Oh where has it gone... Oh I need "The Pirate Bay Mirror"
| now? Oh there is a Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TPB/
|
| Ah.. I need invites. No, maybe mirrorbay dot org?
|
| Ok, search here: Yes, found a WebRip! I remember this...
|
| Oh.. zero seeders? Ok try another? 1 seeder? Hmm
|
| Can I use this in WebTorrent? Hmm doesn't seem to do
| anything.
|
| Ok, I give up.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Piracy has become slightly more difficult, mostly because
| of the difficulty finding good torrent sites.
|
| I've set up Prowlarr with the recommended torrent sites
| and have found two torrents (h264 with 4 seeds and h265
| with 9 seeds at 1080p, or h264 with 3 seeds at 480p) for
| your query; it took me no more than five seconds. A
| torrent client isn't enough these days, unless you like
| wasting your time on Google, but there are technical
| solutions for that!
|
| Combine this with Sonarr and you can simply add "the
| climb". It'll download all the episodes for you, and
| optionally start downloading new ones once the next
| season comes out.
|
| I can't find where I would watch this show legally. The
| local copyright lobby has set up a nice website where you
| can look up legal sources for TV shows, but it doesn't
| even list the show, let alone show the normal "not
| available right now" message. With legal-ish access to
| Amazon, Disney+, HBO, and Netflix through my accounts or
| those of friends, I'd expect to find it _somewhere_ but I
| 'm not going to bother manually searching through all
| that.
|
| There's an opportunity for media companies to take Sonarr
| and make a version that just redirects you to the
| services you're already subscribed to. They'll have to
| find some data source for situations like "season 1 is on
| Netflix, season 2-4 are on Amazon, season 3-5 are on
| Disney and the specials are on Paramount+" but the
| industry have done that to itself so it may as well fix
| it.
|
| Piracy is still often the easy way out for me now that I
| have the *darr collection set up. There was a short time
| where practically every streaming show was on Netflix and
| piracy was the stupid, difficult way to watch shows, and
| I actually kind of liked it. Then the industry had to
| fuck it up for itself by splitting off in a million
| different subscription services.
|
| Hell, nontechnical people still resort to piracy despite
| their inability to use torrents. For many, 123-super-
| movie.entertainmenttonite365.biz or whatever you call it
| is good enough. These websites, seemingly designed as a
| benchmark for adblockers, are hard to find or navigate
| but are still considered better alternatives than the
| restrictive, annoying, often expensive streaming
| services.
|
| My theory is that that's for one simple reason: you can
| find a link on Google and just start watching. No need to
| open seven different apps and do the search over and over
| again, waiting several seconds for animations and sign-
| ins.
|
| Some people may do it purely because they don't have the
| money to spend 20 dollars on watching two episodes of a
| show, but the same was once true of music and Spotify
| mostly fixed the music streaming market for consumers,
| and youtube caters to the rest. Even the people using
| weird streaming sites don't download mp3s anymore!
| dashtiarian wrote:
| I could connect to my Iranian VPN which it's VPS I bought
| through portals available in English, type "The Climb
| 2023 dnlwd", Click on first google Link and use google
| translate to find the download link in the page. Or use
| private trackers like IPTorrent or TorrentLeech through
| leecher (torrent to direct link) providers available in
| said countries. Will probably work on any other
| country/language combo with out copyrights law.
| Strom wrote:
| Things have changed a bit, but not much.
|
| First, Google heavily censors results nowadays. You will
| get much more results with say Yandex.
|
| Second, TPB is no longer the best public torrent host.
| For public sites rarbg and 1337x are better alternatives.
|
| Also, for anyone actually doing this kind of stuff
| regularly, the key is to enter the world of private
| sites. There is more than enough public discussion around
| them on sites like reddit.
| https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/
|
| So, it's still really easy. Your knowledge (like TPB) is
| just outdated. However for people who have equivalent
| modern knowledge, things are simple.
| nl wrote:
| See this is actually the point: It might be _easy_ but it
| 's going to take time. Even more-so with all the people
| suggesting setting up a whole software stack.
|
| Again, it's all easy enough, but..
|
| It's not time I'm not prepared to invest anymore.
|
| And to go back to the point: this inconvenience is why
| Netflix keeps DRM.
| seized wrote:
| Yes, that's one way to do it. It's the way that hasn't
| worked for years.
|
| The other way is fire up a VPN (I suggest Mullvad), setup
| port fowarding in Mullvad once time, start QBittorent,
| search in QBittorent, done.
|
| Yeah, not "easy"... But there are guides.
| fb0b7e5e wrote:
| Wants to watch FooBar S01E42.
|
| Opens Netflix, but it's not there? Huh, this show is
| licensed by BarBaz company, so goes to their website.
|
| Good, it's here. Wait... "Watch" button is greyed out?
| "Content is not available in your region"?
|
| Or simply the company decided that your device is not
| good enough to play the video at full resolution (e.g.
| Apple TV does that in LG TV app), and standalone device
| is like 3x overpriced in local stores?
|
| OK, searches for some random VPN (that's the part where
| spammy domains and adware come into play). Finds
| something that seems to be working.
|
| Or not? Searches for the problem, and oh no, the region
| lock is actually based on the account, and to change that
| you need to use a card or ID from that specific region or
| whatever.
|
| Searches for this stuff (more spammy domains), finds a
| marketplace, gets scammed but luckily there is a buyer
| protection so gets refund.
|
| Gives up, opens some popular torrent tracker/forum,
| downloads 2160p HDR/DolbyVision WebRip/BDRip, can watch
| with friends offline at a local party.
| smeagull wrote:
| I think their licensing agreements probably mandate that
| Netflix needs some sort of DRM to check a box.
| nimbius wrote:
| they do this because the board has a financial obligation to
| its shareholders to mitigate risk. they do this because the
| board also has a contract obligation to its content providers,
| artists and unions to safeguard against unlawful piracy.
| darig wrote:
| [dead]
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Netflix doesn't do it because they want to. They do it because
| it's part of the licensing agreements they sign to get content.
| nemothekid wrote:
| This is the only reason why they do it. It's not just
| Netflix, _everyone_ in the industry knows it 's pointless,
| but these licensing deals mandate it and no one wants pay
| lawyers or extra to have it removed.
| Longhanks wrote:
| Of course they want to. Who doesn't want to protect his or
| her intellectual property?
|
| There are probably millions of people subscribed to Netflix
| merely because pirating Netflix content is inconvenient
| enough to make people rather pay. How many would reconsider
| this if the user experience of pirating was exactly as
| convenient as a paid Netflix account?
|
| Most probably enough so that enacting DRM is the smaller
| price to pay.
| p1necone wrote:
| DRM doesn't _do anything_ for non interactive content. It
| 's trivial to rip video and music regardless of what DRM
| scheme is used because the content is useless unless it's
| eventually presented to the viewer/listener in a non DRMd
| form.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
|
| You can make this argument for DRM on games, because there
| is no analogue hole - I can't record me playing a game and
| give someone else the exact same experience (although some
| publishers try to restrict this too, not realizing that
| streamers and youtubers are just giving them free
| advertising by playing their games).
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Do people even still use the analog hole, or is it all
| about stripping DRM/HDCP/etc. in the digital domain these
| days?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > There are probably millions of people subscribed to
| Netflix merely because pirating Netflix content is
| inconvenient enough to make people rather pay. How many
| would reconsider this if the user experience of pirating
| was exactly as convenient as a paid Netflix account?
|
| The people extracting the content are people who do
| subscribe. The user experience of the people who pirate
| _instead of_ subscribing is completely unaffected by DRM
| because the DRM is removed by the time it gets to them.
|
| All the DRM does is make the experience of piracy _better_
| than that of subscribing, by inconveniencing paying
| customers and not pirates.
|
| Notice that the people complaining about DRM are almost
| never pirates, who have cracked it all already. They're
| people who want to pay Netflix money so they can watch
| Netflix on their weird Linux setup or whatever _instead of_
| just downloading whatever they want in the Netflix catalog
| from the piracy sites, which would be much easier.
| redeeman wrote:
| netflix content is pirated the moment it gets released, so
| them employing DRM changes nothing
| torified wrote:
| It was actually interesting to me the latest Chris Rock
| special which was on Netflix live recently. The first
| live event I've heard of Netflix doing.
|
| It took a day to get onto the torrent sites.
|
| So that was the first instance I've seen where buying was
| better than pirating.
|
| I did see comments on the torrent sites from people who
| were there because their legitimate paid setup was deemed
| incompatible with live streams by Netflix though... Not a
| great incentive to keep paying.
| Aissen wrote:
| If it was the whole story, they'd put their own content (the
| rare ones for which they have 100% of the rights) with no DRM
| and the maximum resolution. But they don't do that.
|
| In some cases you might get 720p (Netflix content) instead of
| 540p (third party) with widevine L3.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Why would they do this if they've already gone to the
| trouble to solve the problem for content they don't own?
| Just to show off by taking on unnecessary risk? The fact
| that they didn't build this infra specifically to protect
| their own content doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy the
| benefit of the extra protection anyway.
| depressedpanda wrote:
| The point is, the extra "protection" is worthless.
| ben174 wrote:
| It's not worthless though, because if it didn't exist -
| some browser extension would appear the next day which
| adds a nice little download right next to the play
| button.
| musicale wrote:
| > a nice little download right next to the play button
|
| This is obviously what we would actually want.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| But we are talking about _Netflix 's_ motivations, not
| ours. And Netflix does _not_ want this download button.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Not worthless, actively harmful to the user experience,
| and therefore actively harmful to the bottom line.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| But I doubt the harmed people will feel materially less
| harmed if some tiny fraction of content isn't in harm's
| way while the rest still is.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's in their interest to get rid of all the DRM, so it's
| a matter of setting an example. If they try to get
| Hollywood to stop demanding it while they're still doing
| it themselves, they look like hypocrites and fools. If
| they stop they can demonstrate the worthlessness of it
| and the success of their content without it and try to
| get others to follow.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > It's in their interest to get rid of all the DRM, so
| it's a matter of setting an example.
|
| Is it?
|
| I doubt it's a significant cost center. Plus, right
| management is viewed favourably by the rest of the
| entertainment industry. Actively going against the grain
| would impair their image with their commercial partners.
|
| I honestly think they don't care at this point.
| MBCook wrote:
| It's not. It's enough to deter casual piracy. There is
| some value in that.
|
| If you could just right click and choose "download" for
| any Netflix original don't you think that would be a
| problem for them?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > It's not. It's enough to deter casual piracy. There is
| some value in that.
|
| Is it? Anyone is able to use obs studio these days, you
| know, to be an influencer. It is all I needed to "backup"
| offline versions of some shows for my kids before we
| would take a plane. I am pretty sure I could have
| torrented them out as well.
| Zuiii wrote:
| > It's not. It's enough to deter casual piracy. There is
| some value in that.
|
| Casual pirates wouldn't bother right-clicking in the
| first place unless it's to store a local copy that they
| won't even know how to share effectively (since they're
| casual).
|
| The only thing DRM achieves for netflix is deterring new
| customers and hurting existing ones.
| MBCook wrote:
| I've known enough casual pirates like that in my life.
| People who would sign up for Netflix for one month every
| three years and immediately download everything and then
| cancel again.
|
| The fact they can't do that is a benefit.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > The only thing DRM achieves for netflix is deterring
| new customers and hurting existing ones.
|
| Out of their more than 231 million subscribing households
| around the world, I don't think more than 5,000 feel the
| way you think. Even if 55,000 felt that way it doesn't
| matter.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| This. DRM is a courtesy lock on a bathroom door. It makes
| ripping content enough of a hassle that only people who
| are willing to put some effort in will bother, and those
| people are going to find a way around it no matter what.
| It doesn't have to be unbreakable to have _some_ value to
| the content owner.
|
| If we accept that enabling DRM on _some_ of their content
| has _some_ value to Netflix, which it obviously does, and
| we accept that it doesn 't impose unacceptable user
| experience tradeoffs, which it obviously doesn't, then it
| is rational for them to enable it on all of their
| content.
|
| There is probably a hypothetical cost/benefit break-even
| point where it actually degrades the user experience _a
| little_ and thus is only acceptable in cases where it is
| absolutely needed, but it seems unlikely this is
| significant enough to even be quantifiable.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Most pirates are not subscribed in the first place. They
| just download something someone else had removed DRM
| from, which also makes it a superior experience. It only
| takes one pirate with a decent computer to encode a good
| DRM-free copy for it to be shared via BitTorrent. It is
| pointless to deter casual piracy when one "professional"
| pirate is enough to free the content.
| MBCook wrote:
| > It is pointless to deter casual piracy when one
| "professional" pirate is enough to free the content.
|
| For the piracy scene, sure. It's irrelevant.
|
| But for normal people the difference is huge. They may
| not know how to pirate content, where to go to find it,
| or be willing risk downloading it and getting in trouble
| (scary FBI warnings and ISP letters).
|
| But once it's trivial due to the lack of protection it
| will be all over TikTok and FB and _WAY_ more people will
| pirate. Those are the people DRM, even light DRM, stop.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| The way I like to put it is with an phrase your hear
| sometimes in the lock picking community. Locks actually
| don't really offer much protection. Their main function
| is to "keep an honest man honest."
| MBCook wrote:
| Perfect saying. For DRM it needs to be effective _enough_
| to stop most people, even if that's very weak in absolute
| terms.
| dathinab wrote:
| They have likely legal contracts with actors and similar
| which pay on a per-view basis which could sue Netflix if
| they would do that.
|
| They definitely license music for their original which
| likely requires requiring DRM.
|
| They would make offend influential huge organizations in
| the background of copyright monetization which could cause
| them tons of problems.
| pitaj wrote:
| It's probably more complexity to exclude certain content
| than to treat everything the same.
| koolba wrote:
| Technical complexity aside, it'd be a business risk to
| accidentally mislabel a stream as not requiring DRM too.
| rfoo wrote:
| Netflix already labels them. They show only their
| original content to users which are suspected to be
| behind VPNs. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-can-i-only-
| see-net...
| jsight wrote:
| The consequences of mislabeling it likely vary based on
| the severity. Mislabeling and presenting without
| encryption is likely to be a bigger issue with content
| providers than accidentally allowing it via a VPN.
| smeagull wrote:
| Tracking the difference would be annoying and pointless.
| Why do that when you can wrap it around everything and go
| home early?
| d4mi3n wrote:
| Bingo. Netflix doesn't own the majority of the content it
| streams and wouldn't be able to have the catalog they have
| (which could be better) without providing guarantees to the
| rights holders of said media.
|
| This is also why streaming video catalogs in Netflix and
| other providers can be anemic at times--even assuming nothing
| is exclusively licensed elsewhere, it's cost-prohibitive for
| Netflix to license all the media out there. Instead, they
| license popular stuff and use the rest of their licensing
| budget to rotate in/out a selection of less popular content.
| lycos wrote:
| I also wonder that about any audio/video DRM, but like most
| things it's probably something that is agreed upon in the many
| licenses that they'll protect the copyrighted material to their
| best ability. Even though everybody knows it's pointless and
| even ends up being a nuisance for some legit use cases like
| this story.
|
| Just reminds me of years ago when building websites for clients
| they always wanted me to block right clicks and put a
| transparent image over a jpeg so people can't right click/save
| even though I told them it does nothing against people who want
| to copy the image. "But it's a bigger hurdle to do so!" well,
| not really.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > well, not really
|
| But, it literally is.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's actually quite simple. DRM exists so regular users can't
| easily rip the stream and share it with friends. Sure, the
| video is already available on pirate sites. But theres a big
| difference between accepting a video file from a friend, and
| having to navigate the pirate sites (which are also full of
| viruses).
| jacobmartin wrote:
| > Or rather, that was all true at the time when I first
| investigated Widevine-on-Asahi, several months ago. A few weeks
| ago, Google decided to enter the 21st century and started
| shipping aarch64 userspaces on certain Chromebook models. This
| means that "Widevine-in-Chrome-on-Linux-on-aarch64" does exist.
| The ChromeOS blob extraction process works as before, and the Pi
| Foundation conveniently packages it as a .deb for Pi users.
|
| Not the point of the article but this is great news that I
| learned just now. I can finally upgrade to aarch64 chrome on my
| Raspberry Pis.
| erksa wrote:
| Anyone know if Asahi Linux work on the MBAir M2 as a casual
| driver on the go?
| gorbypark wrote:
| It does indeed! Even the alpha GPU drivers work. Not working:
| speakers, power management isn't ideal and I don't believe
| Thunderbolt works, although I haven't tried. I'm not sure what
| a casual driver on the go is..
| erksa wrote:
| Thanks! I wasn't sure if was even going to bother qualify the
| statement further. Mostly use it for light browsing or just
| light coding, nothing substantial. Reading the docs of a
| newly released framework etc.
|
| Some video-calls here and there, but I have other devices if
| I can use this purpose.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Probably the most annoying things for you will be the fact
| that sleep doesn't work so it just drains with the lid
| closed, external displays don't work, and webcam doesn't
| work.
|
| Most of those will be fixed soon but I wouldn't hold my
| breath on the webcam support.
| gorbypark wrote:
| You can see support is coming along nicely, with many
| things supported in the kernel directly or in one of the
| two yet-to-be-upstreamed packages. There's no hardware
| video encoding/decoding and no webcam support yet, so I
| don't think doing video-calls would be very good at this
| point. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-
| Support#m2-s...
| wetpaws wrote:
| Work: yes. Casual driver: no.
| erksa wrote:
| I am patiently waiting, the M2 Air is really everything
| physical I want in a laptop. MacOS is fine, but one can dream
| right?! :D
| freeplay wrote:
| Widevine has been privately cracked/bypassed. The method hasn't
| been made public as it would obviously get patched rather quickly
| (if it even can be patched).
|
| That's why Netflix content is available almost immediately on any
| decent tracker. The quality would not look nearly as good if it
| was grabbed using a capture card.
|
| Like others have mentioned, it's security theater for the content
| owners who most likely require Netflix to have DRM in place in
| their contracts.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Why would a capture card look any worse? Isn't it capturing
| lossless video output? Just because of the re-encode?
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| I think it's both things. Netflix, and other platforms, don't
| send lossless streams to you. Even at 4k. Plus, you are re-
| encoding it. Its like doing a VHS copy from another VHS, or
| creating a new JPEG image from another. Always there is a
| loss of quality.
| porbelm wrote:
| Well a 1080p stream at 30 fps would be 1,5 Gbit/s -- a
| little outside the spec of most people's internet tubes.
| And 4K UHD at 30 fps would be around 5 or 6 gigabit.
|
| It helps to capture the Netflix stream uncompressed to
| remove the extra compression step you'd otherwise get at
| capture time, and modern encoders are pretty good, I don't
| think most people would notice on a laptop screen.
|
| On a 40+ inch 4K TV though, it can be quite noticeable
| MikusR wrote:
| It's closer to VHS to DVD.
| yosito wrote:
| Capture is not lossless. Think about a photocopy machine,
| every copy loses a small bit of information. Recapturing
| video output is a similar situation.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Why? Photocopy is obviously lossy since there is a very
| noisy digital-analog-digital conversion going on. But a
| capture card is capturing a digital signal. There should be
| no loss except for video decoding/encoding artifacts.
| vel0city wrote:
| You're not understanding how lossy compression encoders
| work. Try recompressing a JPEG a few dozen times. Or take
| an MP3 and export it from Audacity, open the export,
| export as MP3 again a dozen times and see what it sounds
| like.
|
| All those artifacts keep getting amplified every time you
| re-encode until it's practically just the artifacts.
| Every time you render and recompress you're losing
| information, it's lossy compression after all.
|
| https://youtu.be/icruGcSsPp0
| botanical wrote:
| But JPEG purposely discards information to save space. A
| digital stream is copied directly, only a codec would
| subject it losing information
| happymellon wrote:
| Like the codec used to get the stream from Netflix to
| you, to be decompressed for the capture card (so lossless
| capture of a lossy source) and then back through x264/265
| so lossy compression on a lossy compression. Just because
| there is a capture card in the middle doesn't stop it
| going through multiple lossy steps.
| jenadine wrote:
| But if you want to share it or store it, it is not
| practical to keep the raw data. You will have to re-
| encode.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But the loss happens during re-encoding, not during
| capture.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| In practice, that difference doesn't really matter
| because almost no one is going to store their captured,
| already-lossy material in a lossless format.
| porbelm wrote:
| If you know you have to recompress and want to reduce
| unneccessary artifacts, you do. But beware that
| uncompressed video in 8 bpc (not HDR) 1080p @ 30 fps is
| 1,5 Gbps so you'll need 1,3 TB to store your 2-hour
| capture :)
| vel0city wrote:
| Lots of the time capture cards are returning a compressed
| video stream instead of raw frame data, at least for non-
| professional environments. I don't know too many amateur
| streamers handling SDI around their house.
| icelancer wrote:
| Thought for sure it was going to be the legendary Hank
| Hill JPEG meme:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEzhxP-pdos
| vel0city wrote:
| I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog!
|
| Truly a classic.
| yosito wrote:
| > except for video decoding/encoding artifacts
|
| Which is... lossy
| donkers wrote:
| The capture itself could be lossless but would be
| ridiculously huge, re-encoding that to a usable file size
| will introduce some loss.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The signal remains digital, but decompressed into a raw
| bitstream that would be many mbps (think how big lossless
| filesizes get). So it has to be re-encoded but you're
| doubling the compression artefacts, and can only avoid them
| by really dialing up the bitrate.
|
| Maybe someone made a video encoder algorithm that's tuned
| toward already compressed and decompressed video.
|
| Though I'm in the camp of watching for quality of the story
| etc. rather than the crispness of the video. If it's not
| worth watching in 480p, it's not worth watching in 4K either.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| A single re-encode will make a difference. But with the
| proper settings it will be almost unnoticeable.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Gigachad wrote:
| This is why audio and video drm is so useless. All the cracking
| teams have their own methods which they don't need to publish.
| Unlike video game drm where the cracks have to be published
| with the game.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's actually a bit dangerous for ripping groups to do that
| if they're in countries friendly to western interests,
| because the media companies can initiate a traitor tracing
| protocol to figure out where the leaks are coming from and
| then initiate prosecutions. Traitor tracing algorithms are
| well known in the literature and some are undetectable.
|
| When this game was playing out with BluRay, it wasn't
| possible for the media groups to directly attack the ripper
| makers because the primary developers were in Antigua which
| had a WTO ruling against the USA allowing Antiguans to ignore
| US intellectual property rights. I forget the political
| background. Later I think someone in China started doing it
| too. The point is though, that the tech converted (for a
| time) the problem from one of intractable scale to one of "if
| we get these two companies then the issue disappears because
| they're the only ones who have the knowledge". That opens up
| all sorts of new strategies for the media companies to
| pursue. They may not work, but, the situation is definitely
| not the same as before.
|
| BTW video game cracks don't have to be published with the
| game. They can just publish the patches to the game files
| without releasing any tools they created to make those
| patches.
| Strom wrote:
| Not just privately either, there have been tools circulating
| even on GitHub.
|
| For a L3 example there's one repo [1] that's kind of still up
| but not really. Still enough to show that it happened. L1
| bypass has also been on GitHub briefly. However these things
| get deleted rather fast for obvious reasons.
|
| --
|
| [1] https://github.com/tomer8007/widevine-l3-decryptor
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Widevine has been privately cracked/bypassed.
|
| Sort of.
|
| Widevine has various levels, and there are exploits for the
| lower ones.
|
| But the upper ones really only have a vulnerability if a
| hardware key gets extracted, and Netflix shows in higher
| resolutions are increasingly not available anywhere because of
| that. Stranger things Season 4 was only available at 720p for
| more than a month.
| dtx1 wrote:
| Just checked up on this, currently there are torrents
| available for Stranger Things Season 4.
|
| > Stranger Things S02E09 2160p NF WEB-DL DTS-HD MA 5 1 HDR DV
| HEVC-FRiENDS
|
| So either the DRM Level was reduced after the release (why
| would they ever do that?) or it was cracked but takes some
| time to do so.
| _a9 wrote:
| It's not even private anymore. Anyone can easily find tools on
| GitHub or other sites[0] that can download widevine'd content.
| It's easy to find L3 keys on GitHub too. There are public
| sites[1] that get the decryption keys but using their own keys
| on the backend if you cant find keys or don't know how to dump
| the keys. There is an all-in-one tool[2] that lets anyone with
| 0 knowledge of DRM to dump content from practically any site
| that uses widevine, costs a leg but it's meant for people who
| don't want to waste time finding tools and learning how to do
| it manually.
|
| [0]: https://cdm-project.com/CDM-Tools/
|
| [1]: https://cdrm-project.com/ & http://getwvkeys.cc/
|
| [2]: https://streamfab.com/
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The all-in-one tool only decrypts Widevine L3, which is the
| lowest security Widevine protocol according to TFA. 4k
| content is only available with Widevine L1. The others don't
| say which level they support, but I assume it's the same.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| That tool says it does for 4k for HBO Max. All the other
| platforms (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+) are 720 or 1080
| though. Wonder whats going on there.
| porbelm wrote:
| Perhaps HBO Max only uses L3 for all content then?
| MBCook wrote:
| Just because piracy is _possible_ doesn't mean they should make
| it as easy as it can be for users.
|
| There's value in even minor hurdles.
|
| They clear think it's worth it.
| autoexec wrote:
| DRM isn't really about piracy, it's about control and money.
| They want to be able to take content from people who already
| paid for it, censor/edit/change content after it's been
| purchased, track usage, and ultimately force people to pay
| over and over again for the same product.
|
| The fact that DRM sometimes slows pirates down for
| days/weeks/months is just a tiny bonus.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > they clearly think it is worth it.
|
| That is like arguing that "clearly people think fax is
| secure, otherwise they wouldn't use it". No, it is obviously
| theater but other people insist you use it and while useless
| the effort to change it is "not worth it".
| jwandborg wrote:
| Cell pagers are also deemed secure in some places, despite
| being broadcast over a wide area.
|
| Both of the technologies can be seen as "secured" by laws
| outlawing listening to the information sent in cleartext.
|
| I wouldn't call it "security theatre", i would call it
| "security through legislation" or something along those
| lines.
|
| I thought "security theatre" was a routine that promised,
| but did not provide, additional security, and while there
| is no technical security, there technically is some
| security, in the form of legislation.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Just because piracy is _possible_ doesn't mean they should
| make it as easy as it can be for users.
|
| > There's value in even minor hurdles.
|
| The hurdles only exist for the people who are paying them. It
| makes piracy _more_ attractive relative to paying, by making
| the experience you get when you pay worse.
|
| > They clear think it's worth it.
|
| They're corporations. Management is under pressure to be seen
| doing something about piracy and the DRM vendors saw an
| opportunity to sell them some snake oil.
| acomjean wrote:
| Making the experience worse fir customers than pirates is
| inexcusable. Can't watch on all my devices, that's not an
| issue with pirated stuff.
|
| Streamers work hard to make their interfaces good and
| recommendations valuable because that is their value add.
|
| I suspect DRM might be added because circumventing is a
| different violation as opposed to just copyright
| infringement.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| What's Widevine? Also it sounds like linux complexities made this
| unnecessarily difficult
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| Widevine is Google's DRM. Their lack of linux support makes it
| difficult.
|
| The point of the article is to support it instead of bypassing
| it, thus not violating DMCA.
| tarotuser wrote:
| For some reason, my Jellyfin and Navidrome instances doesn't use
| Widevine (garbageware) in any way.
|
| Radarr, Lidarr, Sonarr, and the other Arrs work beautifully to
| control what media I want, get it, and store it appropriately.
|
| And the files I download from Usenet and Torrents work on any
| platform powerful enough to play them.
|
| I was treated like a criminal when legitimately buying media
| years ago. Already learned https://xkcd.com/488/ this lesson.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Navidrome
|
| Thank you. The two things I don't like having in Jellyfin are
| music and youtube videos (the latter are a real PITA if what
| you've ripped doesn't have a TVDB entry, which, fortunately,
| some Youtube series do--yeah, there's a 3rd party plugin to
| help out, but it's so unhelpful I stopped using it completely,
| broke other stuff, very fiddly, not worth it)
|
| This gives me what looks to be a much-better solution for at
| least one of those. Looks like I'll be adding another docker
| container to my server this evening.
| tarotuser wrote:
| Glad I could help with a recommendation.
|
| I find it handles around 2TB of music very handily. The
| playlist handling is "weird", but simple. Basically, just
| take winamp or audacious, make a playlist using it, and then
| save the playlist in the root of your music dir. Auto-
| imports.
|
| And Navidrome also uses subsonic as its API, so there's at
| least 10 apps that'll natively use it. And there's a bunch of
| compatible hardware as well.
|
| Now, Navidrome isn't good for handling Youtube videos. To
| that, I do find Jellyfin to be useful.... but in conjunction
| with this plugin: https://github.com/ankenyr/jellyfin-
| youtube-metadata-plugin . From that plugin, you can pull all
| the metadata from a YT video.
| mattl wrote:
| > I was treated like a criminal when legitimately buying media
| years ago.
|
| What happened?
| bionade24 wrote:
| > What happened?
|
| Isn't that obvious? Circumventing the copy protection of your
| own property is a crime.
| zamnos wrote:
| Yeah but so is speeding on the freeway. People do that all
| day long and never gets ticket. Other times, people
| actually get arrested they were speeding so fast. So I ask
| again, did something actually happen? Did the FBI/whomever
| show up at your door and someone went to prison? Or is it
| just that format shifting got deemed illegal and now we're
| all running around scared?
| bionade24 wrote:
| This is different, because we don't have lasting evidence
| (yet). If circumvent a B-Ray's copy protection some
| person knowing I ripped them could still report me years
| after.
| mattl wrote:
| Not obvious, sorry.
| tarotuser wrote:
| A collection of media, that was conveyed as a purchase, was
| really a DRM locked rental. After the Microsoft auth servers
| were taken down, all the music went up in smoke. I was
| hundreds of dollars poorer and nothing to show for it.
|
| After that, sure, I'll buy tickets to attend shows and other
| 'people doing cool stuff on stage'. But buying DRM music,
| videos, and games are out of the question. I'm not going to
| throw more money to a badly described rental that's
| masquerading as a sale.
|
| Now, I have bought music and videos in recent years. But
| those discs go to my reader and converted to their respective
| formats for Jellyfin/Navidrome handling. But in 20 years,
| those discs will still work. The DRM crap won't. (And if
| Microsoft can't manage to keep up DRM servers for a decade or
| longer, I'd argue nobody can.)
| zenexer wrote:
| The target site is intermittently experiencing the HN Hug of
| Death, so if you have trouble accessing it, here's an archive
| link:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230309144317/https://www.da.vi...
| paines wrote:
| The link in the webarchive pointing to the gist of the script
| is wrong, for what ever reason (at least the name of the script
| is completly different). This is the correct gist:
| https://gist.github.com/DavidBuchanan314/c6b97add51b97e4c3ee...
| Retr0id wrote:
| It's the same script, just an earlier revision.
| lobocinza wrote:
| I don't remember about Netflix but Prime Video on Linux was
| capped to HD resolution (at least one year ago) so I went back to
| that thing that is more convenient and free.
| kuon wrote:
| Netflix quality is crap on Linux, I just torrent everything as it
| is simpler and I can use a player that allow me to put the
| subtitles where I want. I know I say this bluntly but I came to a
| point where I cannot get all this nonsense about not trusting the
| user. I buy music on band camp that I do not "distribute". I do
| not believe removing DRM would yield to higher unauthorized
| distribution.
|
| Also do not be fooled by resolution, low bitrate 1080p can look
| worse than 480p, and many services are quietly throttling
| bandwidth.
|
| High quality 1080p should be 8-10mb/s.
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| > The only officially supported way to use Widevine on Linux is
| using Chrome on an x86_64 CPU.
|
| To be precise it is "The only officially supported way to use
| Widevine on Linux is using Chrome on an x86_64 CPU using glibc."
|
| In other words, even though I have x86_64 cpu, since I'm on
| alpine, I'm fucked anyway.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| Maybe a flatpak would work?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| If you are using alpine as a desktop distro, don't you have
| bigger problems than Netflix not playing?
|
| (also how are you even using alpine for desktop. I tried to
| look it up once and gave up soon)
| bandrami wrote:
| Things have improved. Both alpine and void-musl are usable
| desktops nowadays; my DAW is on the latter.
| butterNaN wrote:
| What DAW are you using, by the way?
| bandrami wrote:
| QTractor. I used to master with Jamin but the master_me
| LV2 turns out to be easier to use (for me). I also use
| giada for live looping and mixxx for DJing, all of which
| work great on musl.
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| Not really, honestly these days it works pretty much fine.
| Basically only issue I have is the DRM and I can live without
| it.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Are you using some specific distro based on alpine, or just
| alpine?
| andrepd wrote:
| I've danced this dance at some point, I wanted to do things
| right and "reward content creators". Then I gave up.
|
| Paying money and having to install a proprietary browser and
| run proprietary software to stream low-quality video (not
| download, or move to a different device), _if_ the company
| deems it available to you at that particular place and time.
|
| Meanwhile torrents let you start watching most content in under
| 30s, at whichever quality you'd like, in a convenient mkv you
| can stick anywhere.
|
| No thanks. I'll stick to patreon and buying albums to assuage
| my guilty conscience and reward content creators.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I see Alpine Linux uses musl instead of glibc. Theoretically,
| couldn't you install or build glibc anyway and launch Chrome
| with LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/glibc?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You should see all the "system" libraries I have sitting in
| /opt/<app>/lib for each <app>
| coldtea wrote:
| What prevents you from ALSO having glibc?
| rfoo wrote:
| When people say glibc, they really mean ld.so + libc.so +
| libm.so + nss + ...
|
| And no, glibc really only work with its own dynamic loader
| (ld.so), and it has to be with same version.
| coldtea wrote:
| Again, what prevents you from ALSO having all those? You
| just need to point to them and run some programs that
| require them with those...
| rfoo wrote:
| There can be only one ld.so in each process.
|
| Widevine is a plugin-like .so meant to be loaded into
| Chrome/Chromium. Because it uses glibc, the entire
| process hosting it must use glibc. So, what prevents me
| from ALSO HAVING GLIBC CHROMIUM instead of musl Chromium?
| Nothing, but I hope you get that it propagates further
| and it's a horrible idea to just glibc everything on
| Alpine.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _There can be only one ld.so in each process._
|
| Sure, but you need it for Chromium alone iirc, no?
|
| > _Because it uses glibc, the entire process hosting it
| must use glibc. So, what prevents me from ALSO HAVING
| GLIBC CHROMIUM instead of musl Chromium? Nothing, but I
| hope you get that it propagates further and it 's a
| horrible idea to just glibc everything on Alpine._
|
| Well, don't glibc everything. Just Chromium and its
| dependencies. How does it "propagate further"? It's not
| like libraries leak outside where they're told to load!
| rfoo wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't say it clearly.
|
| I want to use the distro (Alpine) packaged Chromium,
| which links to musl. Not some random Chromium build I
| found on the Internet. Having to use a glibc Chromium is
| already too far for me.
|
| Do you suggest that in order to support Widevine, a
| distro (Alpine) should also build Chromium, Firefox and
| co also with glibc instead of the default (musl), or
| provide two varaints?
|
| Even when they have a Chromium with musl as libc working
| perfectly fine, _except_ no proprietary DRM support?
|
| I'm okay with running a proprietary binary, linked to
| glibc, by installing the glibc alongside. I'm not okay
| with having to randomly change other packages already in
| my system (in this case, my browser) to glibc variant.
|
| Edit: Oh, and anything Chromium depends on have to had a
| glibc variant.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| wasn't Firefox including widevine for DRM stuff ? I don't have
| any issues playing Netflix and Amazon Video from Firefox in
| Kubuntu
| pakyr wrote:
| Per the article,
|
| > In the instance of Chrome, the browser doesn't implement
| the DRM itself, but delegates it to a native library referred
| to as a CDM (Content Decryption Module).
|
| > This library is an opaque proprietary blob that we are
| forbidden to look inside of (at least, that's how they'd
| prefer it to be).
|
| > Graciously, as part of the Chromium project, Google
| provides the C++ headers required to interface with The Blob.
| This interface allows other projects like Firefox to
| implement support for Widevine, via the EME API, using the
| exact same libwidevinecdm.so blob as Chrome does.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| Which is odd because there's lots of ARM Chromebooks. I'm
| typing this one one right now.
|
| So they have a working version of this internally obviously. I
| guess they just don't ship it stand-alone?
| Qub3d wrote:
| In the featured article, it delves into this a bit:
|
| > Earlier, I said that 'Widevine-in-Chrome-on-Linux-on-
| aarch64' is not an officially supported platform.
|
| > I lied.
|
| > Chromebooks exist, many have aarch64 CPUs, they run Chrome
| on Linux (more or less), and they officially support
| Widevine.
|
| The whole post is worth a read. Its pretty sort and well
| written!
| MYEUHD wrote:
| what are reasons to choose musl over glibc? (or glibc over
| musl?)
| jwandborg wrote:
| > For broad-based usage, things are less likely to break with
| glibc. For a specific use case, that may be less important.
| As a dangerous generalization, musl is usually lighter on
| resources, but glibc is faster. If using ARM or very limited
| hardware, musl may in fact be faster, but with more available
| hardware resources, glibc usually wins, often by using non-
| standard optimizations (cheating).
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/muoqis/comment/g.
| ..
| mikojan wrote:
| Can't you just install glibc compat?
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > I don't care very much about Netflix - the UX offered by
| BitTorrent is superior
|
| What a laughable statement.
|
| I'll copy paste all of his blogspots on my blog and say I prefer
| the UX of my blog.
| 627467 wrote:
| I don't get that either. I would love a detailed description of
| the process to get BitTorrent to fully replace Netflix - though
| I suppose this description wont be public for legal reasons
| kzrdude wrote:
| Well, searching for a movie you want to watch often comes up
| empty on netflix unfortunately. For those use cases, there's a
| big difference. For just watching what's provided, netflix has
| a better experience.
| Havoc wrote:
| Many judge success on this by "do i get 1080". I've found this to
| be incredibly deceptive for _nix and DRM on netflix.
|
| My experience has been that even managing 1080 on a _nix platform
| the experienced quality is substantially worse. Thoughout I was
| going insane, but checked bitrate and sure enough netflix at 1080
| was streaming at much lower rate than on windows 1080.
| MBCook wrote:
| The article mentions there are three levels of Widevine DRM. I
| wonder if the level available to Linux (three) not only limits
| resolution but bitrate, at least as far as what Netflix is
| willing to serve.
| seizethegdgap wrote:
| Would changing the user agent to a Windows release of Chrome
| make any difference?
| Havoc wrote:
| I do not know.
|
| I jumped through all the hoops suggested at the time by the
| various get netflix to work on linux guides. Extensions and
| right browser and DRM enabled and whatever other stuff they
| recommended.
|
| No dice on comparable quality.
|
| I should add that there is always the possibility that there
| was some gfx driver or codec dynamic at play that I don't
| understand...but ultimately if it's visually noticably worse
| that's a fatal flaw regardless of reason.
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| I was looking into this very problem yesterday! Terribly scared
| by widewine, I ended up building webkit with eme support enabled,
| then enabled the relevent setting in the nyxt browser. Seems to
| be working fine so far.
| Retr0id wrote:
| So are you using Widevine?
| [deleted]
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| In the end yes, although it was much easier to get working
| than the authors adventures with firefox
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