This restriction is meant to protect high definition content from being ripped by pirates. Open systems don't offer the same DRM guarantees as the locked ones.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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What happens if you change the useragent? It stops working at all?
No, changing the user agent doesn't change anything. I believe it's the Widevine DRM level or rather the lack of support for L1. The whole point of DRM is to make it not easily circumventable, so the best solution is piracy.
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At this point they don't deserve your money.
I do keep seeing the argument that you can vote with your wallet but I mentioned this in another thread I think a week ago.
I think voting with your wallet doesn't quite work here because you're not going to a competitor, you're simply opting out. What happens is then they don't see your platform of choice as the issue. All secretly gathered data points like your platform of choice often present a survivorship bias in the usage data.
With that being said, piracy has always been "... An issue of service not price" (GabeN) and I wholly support piracy as the alternative. I just don't think these services like Amazon are going to ever get the memo.
I do have a weird Tin Foil hat feeling that they're losing something Linux platform that's more than support or DRM. What if it's harder to monitor your usage on Linux platforms and they think that they can encourage you to leave the platform by forcing you to see lower quality so they can get those usage metrics back? (Again, tinfoil hat hypothesis)
I'm pretty sure people grabbing the HD streams don't care about that restriction, because they know how to circumvent it.
But normal viewers who don't have time to deep dive into TOS are getting scammed subscribing to HD tier plans.
We need some mad genius to crack Widevine and make a plugin that works for Linux.
It's going to have to be restricted-source, but hey, honestly we need to break Google's stranglehold anyways.
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The King and his men stole the queen from her bed And bound her in her bones The seas be ours and by the powers Where we will, we'll roam
Yo, ho, haul together Hoist the colors high Heave-ho, thieves and beggars Never shall we die
does spoofing user agent fix this?
More than just that was required for 4k netflix, when it worked. Last I heard they came up with additional DRM bullshit. I would expect Amazon to at least attempt the same thing
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Drms need to be installed and enabled on the browser. Drms like widevine and others.
If the drms aren't enabled and installed on the browser, and able to communicate to the service it's "safe", spoofing the user agent won't do anything.
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Peacock won't even work on Linux and it drives me crazy. I sail frequently, but my friends and I do a podcast where we watch old pro wrestling. WWE moved all their content over to Peacock. A lot of that old Mid South or Mid Atlantic wrestling isn't on the high seas, so... Somebody has to screen share through my log in when we record. It's just so dumb like just let me watch what I pay for.
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My understanding is that there's some DRM stuff that can't really be implemented in open source stuff. Not sure how accurate that is, or which sites use it, but I guess it's a technical reason. Still very scummy and annoying how poorly they treat paying customers.
If it's open source it's under the user's control, so it's almost impossible for a company to guarantee DRM is actually implemented instead of the device just claiming to implement it, decrypting the stream and not actually implementing any restrictions.
The whole point of DRM is to take control away from the end user so their device does what a company wants instead of what the device's owner wants. If the user has control, you can't have DRM.
I wonder if you can install their android app using WayDroid and then run 1080p/4k streams.
Prolly not worth the effort considering they're treating linux users like shit, they don't deserve our money.
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interesting - is chromeOS not carrying the modified glibc that allows higher widevine compliance since it moved to running its chrome as a separate process from the windowing system?