Chrome extension to play Netflix in 1080p
github.com
github.com
If you pirate, you get high quality, ad-free video files that you can play on any device, anywhere, any time, forever. You can get any video resoultion and audio quality you want, and many (toggleable) subtitles which can be extended with third-party subtitles in post for languages the creators didn't bother to translate to. Every movie and TV show ever made is available through piracy, too. All for the low price of $0.
Or you can pay >$100/year to get stupid bullshit like this. It won't work on most devices, requires proprietary software to play back, can't be used offline in most cases, has questionable audio and video quality, is locked to specific regions, and will vanish when Netflix can't renew the contract.
Pretty brazen, if you ask me.
But yes, I found it extremely ironic.
I guess browser aren't able to do that but from a native app I expect better. This is a non-issue with MPC-HC, Kodi or any other decent video player, which are all abel to swith display modes as needed.
All the more reasons to watch Planet Earth on blu-ray.
So worth the hardware.
For what its worth, a lot of 3rd party content is actually restricted to 480p (at least in Linux/Chrome). That, is definitely noticeable.
And then there are the Netflix Original shows that don't even get physical release.
The only people that "notice" are those with a private movie theater room.
Could be similar for HD content as well - if you have a poor internet connection, you might not even be getting 1080p.
Like you, I paid for the HD membership assuming that I'd get 1080p video in Firefox but I subsequently discovered that Firefox is only given a maximum of 720p. I see in this thread there's a Firefox version of the extension so I'll try that.
If I watch Netflix in Safari I get 1080p video and I've been using Safari exclusively for Netflix because of this. Here's the Netflix system requirements page where they outline the maximum resolution for each browser:
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
You can also see the details of your currently playing video by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D (and press again to dismiss it). It'd be nicer of Netflix if they made this information accessible via a menu item rather than an obscure keyboard shortcut.
It sucks being labelled an untrustworthy customer despite paying for 1080p content.
Maybe it's a new development in widevine/netflix and they were getting it ready for release?
But somebody else mentioned that widevine on chrome os and chrome are different. So I wouldn't have expected their servers to accept those 1080p requests for chrome's version.
Edit: says so on Github:
ChromeOS apparently has a different DRM implementation than chrome, even though both use Widevine.The fix from the Netflix side would be to find a suitable alternative to user agent sniffing for h/w accel and swap that in to this code path.
What I am saying is: If they are blocking everything but chrome os intentionally, it would have been easier.
According to widevine docs [1] chrome on desktops does not support security level 1. They could have and probably did block access to 1080p content on level 3.
Which leads me to believe that netflix relaxed security to allow 1080p on level 3. As you said the next step would be to replace the user agent detection client side.
[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/wvdocs/Widevine_DRM_Architecture_Overview.pdfI don't think Netflix has any interest in you using a proprietary client. They don't gain money if you watch one way or another. They gain money if you keep paying them your monthly fee.
EDIT: Installing this extension took Chrome CPU usage to 75% for me.
Also, I'm not saying that users shouldn't be given the choice to use their CPU resources to run Netflix. Maybe it would be better if Netflix were just more transparent about it. "By default, we only display video with 720p in Chrome due to high processor usage. Click here to change that preference or watch with Safari whose direct rendering means 1080p video using less processor resources." That way, users understand the problem and can decide they don't mind other programs becoming sluggish or the fan running or whatnot. Of course, companies generally don't like giving users details.
720p will take less bandwidth, meaning less bandwidth costs ?
The information is there but Netflix certainly doesn't make it obvious how to get to it. If you press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D while playing a video you'll get a debug display which includes details on the video and audio codec bit rates and resolution.
GPU usage, per Process Explorer, is somewhere between 1% and 7%.
The Firefox addon to force 1080p takes it up to about 2% CPU and 9% GPU. Maybe. It's hard to tell, it's usually below that.
Basically, it's a rounding error on a machine with properly set up decoding pathways.
July 2016, Microsoft and Netflix make a deal to only stream 1080p to edge users.
November 2016, Intel and Netflix made a deal to only stream 4k on Kaby Lake processors.
So if you want to watch netflix on desktop, Microsoft brags about 1080p exclusivity and Intel brags about 4k exclusivity. Netflix makes bank in these deals as well as saving on bandwidth costs.
I can provide sources if anyone needs them, but you could just google.
Does Netflix make a proprietary client for Windows and OS X?
Amazon has a more-limited library, but it was able to get download support (at least on mobile), early on as part of its contracts.
The problem with regions is an even bigger can of worms. Although Netflix is doing a better job trying to solidify its library across regions, it has to make separate licensing deals in every single markets in which it operartes. The licensing side of entertainment, especially internationally, hasn’t modernized the way you would think it has, and the companies or groups who own a license in one place often don’t own it in another. So sales teams have to negotiate every single title, often separately, in every single region. One of the reasons Netflix has prioritized its own original content is that it can guarantee it is licensed in all of its markets. But even then, in the early Netflix international days, there were a few instances where flagship Netflix original content wasn’t available in some markets because that content was actually co-financed by studios that sold the streaming/VOD/rental rights to other traditional networks or local streaming services. That was quickly resolved, but it just showcases how hard international licensing can be for content playback, let alone licensing for download. This is also one of the main reasons Netflix had to aggressively target VPN users who would access the larger content catalogs in other markets. In order to get more robust licensing (as well as to actually enter certain international markets), Netflix had to prove it was actively enforcing geo limits.
It sucks and I’m not defending it, just providing some of the business context.
Amazon is so limited in its international expansion with Prime Video that it hasn’t had to address most of these issues. As Prime inevitably expands, it will also face these same challenges. (Hulu, too. Though Hulu has made some international attempts, largely through partnerships with existing local services. Hulu’s dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that it is almost wholly owned by the major American broadcast networks, who already have their own robust international licensing and sales divisions that aren’t keen on being disrupted.)
Also, when you download on prime video, it gives you proper high quality 1080p content. Netflix seems to top out at 480p! The quality is utter shit.
But at least Netflix lets me watch videos in HD. Amazon Prime always plays in SD, citing some kind of HDCP violation, even though I'm using the closed-source Nvidia drivers and using a DisplayPort connection from my monitor to graphics card. It's obviously discriminating against Linux because if I boot into Windows I can play Prime videos in HD no problem.
1. Download all the files for the extension into a directory.
2. Open chrome > Extensions window
3. Click "developer" checkbox
4. Click "Load unpacked extension" and select the directory where you downloaded the extension files.
5. Tada, extension should show up in the extension page.
Anyway, if you don't feel like doing that (you should do it), trust me (which you should not) and are ok with a (probably) relatively old version of the binary (I don't know whether it still even works, I haven't used netflix in quite some time now), you can get it here: https://transfer.sh/pYsRz/libwidevinecdm.so SHA256: d84e87d89d8e95ccfcd3dd86157dfd608a022e1e8bee397c3d4541a162bab5c2
If you have the most expensive subscription AND have hardware that has enough DRM builtin (eg. on a PC you need a Kaby Lake processor AND the native client or Edge (or Safari apparently)).
If you have the "HD" subscription, then it can be HD or full HD also depending on DRM details.
For example, their contracts could say that for 1080p the playback mechanism has to guarantee security all the way to screen (e.g no playback over digital video cables that don't support the requisite encryption primitives). Generally this requires support from the OS and hardware, and the relevant playback application using the relevant OS functionality.
This is why you get 1080p in IE and Safari, but Safari only on OS X 10.0.3 or later. You get 4K in Edge. You get 1080p on ChromeOS (where things are locked down in ways that prevent the viewer from exfiltrating data), but not in Chrome.
Similarly, last I checked, you could get higher resolution videos from the iTunes store on iOS or Apple TV than you could on desktop MacOS, because the latter is not as locked-down. That was a few years ago, though.
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