“Your monitor is too old to view this content.” | Hacker News Reader

“Your monitor is too old to view this content.”

np.reddit.com

96 pointsjordigh23 comments

The Reddit thread is pretty funny with regards to shifting the blame.

Someone says it's Apple's fault, someone else says Netflix is to blame, then someone says it's all because of the studios....

How about blaming each and every one of them? Everyone involved could have refused to take part in this stupid game, that just drives people to download movies from inofficial sources.

Hm, odd. I'm watching Netflix right now on a oldish HP monitor at 1920x1080, connected via VGA.

So it only cares about protections if it's going through HDMI? Seems useless, I could just run the VGA into any capture device and rip the whole thing.

I'm assuming some contract with some specific company required it so it might only be for certain content. Also, it looks like this might be through a native app and not a browser.

Yes. HDMI is digital, VGA is analog. You could rip the video from VGA, but it would not be a perfect copy. If you do an HDMI capture, you'll get a bit-perfect recording.

Or you can just copy the media directly from the stream.

I've been trying to work out for a while how the Netflix webrips that are floating around the scene are done. They're not screencaps like the Amazon webrips are, but I didn't think you could copy the stream directly like that.

I bet it's done using something like this

https://www.amazon.com/HDMI-Cloner-need-Capture-streaming-vi...

or, in a world where such devices are outlawed, you could take the outputs of the LCD matrix controller and convert the signals meant for the physical pixels to a video stream :)

It's useful for gaining a foothold over the potential customers who would be scared off at the need to upgrade all their equipment in order to watch the films they can already watch. Give it time.

The edge case is HDMI to DVI, everyone wss weaned off VGA painlessly, deluxe DVI monitors aren't so readily upgraded.

This situation was the big fear of DRM and HDMI, also the 'evil' plan. Seems the introduction went smoothly, there were no riots, just the odd reddit thread many years later.

This is ancient news. Apple macbooks have had this form of copy protection since 2008. There are hundreds of anecdotes like the one submitted all over the internet.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2008/11/apple-brings-hdcp-to-a-...

I wonder how the detection works. I have three different monitors hooked up to my desktop computer at home, and one of them is exceptionally old and running on a VGA to DVI-I adapter. When I get home I'll see if Netflix complains if I drag the window over to that monitor.

just an assumption here but I'm going to guess it doesnt apply for all netflix content, just the content where the owner is unnecessarily strict about where they view it

It probably happens in the Widevine CDM. Note that Widevine is Google, and they mislabel it as a "Video Optimizer". DRM is evil and anti-consumer, but trying to spin it as a codec improvement (what "video optimizer" actually means) is just fucking slimy, and I'd love if a Google employee reading this could bring this misrepresentation up with an internal ethics officer if they get a chance.

Could be a risky career move - depending on the point of view as who it flows through to

Sometimes HDCP is only required for digital connections. VGA may be exempt.

It won't, since VGA is analog and HDCP only applies to digital outputs.

I've just checked it and I have no problems.

The monitor I have on my PC is DVI-D only and it works fine with both the webapp and the Windows rich client.

On my Mac I had no problems using mini-DP to DVI or VGA adapters and I've tested this on 3 monitors.

I've also tested it on different resolutions and CDN's using the secret menu and I haven't seen any problems or restrictions (Chrome/FF is limited to 720p, but 1080p works on Edge/Safari without a hitch even over a non HDCP connection).

I've tested 3 different adapters, a Lenovo one, an original Apple one, and some combo adapter (DP to HDMI/DVI/VGA) none of them showed signs of this.

This was tested on both Netflix original content and a few non-Netflix shows/movies the Netflix account is a UK account.

Fortunately it's easy to work round (I have a cheap HDMI splitter, and a HDMI->VGA converter, and both pretty much ignore HDCP), but these sort of arbitrary restrictions are frustrating.

Amazon does the same thing on my iMac. I can't watch 1080p video on it, only lower resolution. I assumes it was just Amazon and Apple fighting, since I can't watch HTML video in Safari either.

^ Not an actual quote.

It is however the title of the reddit post. So the poster is keeeping with HN guidelines and being overly pedantic isn't particularly useful here-- the comment amounts to the same thing. I will give the reddit OP the benefit of the doubt that they couldn't decide on an appropriate standards body to cite this paraphrase properly.

Or maybe I'm just pointing out that the title of the reddit post isn't an actual quote either?

Never had this issue on Windows, is this a Mac/Linux only issue?

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