linuxmemes

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.

At this point they don't deserve your money.

What happens if you change the useragent? It stops working at all?

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.

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)

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.

does spoofing user agent fix this?

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

so in my country (I’m European, specifically Romanian) we have this streaming service called SkyShowtime. guess what? its DRM is so bad that SkyShowtime just won’t work beyond being on the website. it won’t play anything to you.

that is because either Peacock or Paramount+ are also DRM-blocked, because all there is to it is Peacock and Paramount+ with the Commonwealth Sky and Showtime brands that NBCUniversal and Paramount are respectively owning, and they combined it together and sell it to countries with lesser purchasing power parity, such as Romania.

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.

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.

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.

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?