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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why movie and television piracy is still big.

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.

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I am a paying customer for Netflix and Primevideo and I just had to pirate the Altered Carbon tv series because I play it on a ultrawidescreen monitor (21:9, 3440x1440) and the Netflix web player is putting black bars all around the videos (horizontal and vertical black bars). This is because the video is supposed to be played on 16:9 with horizontal black bars only. With the pirated version I can just tell MPV to apply an autocrop script and use much more space on my monitor.

I don’t have that issue with my ultra wides are you using a browser or the Netflix app?

Chrome on Linux.

I think this has something to do with the chrome viewport not being reported correctly on Windows I have no problems with either any browser or the UWP Netflix app.

3440x1440 user here. I needed to use an extension to play Altered Carbon in ultrawide. I have definitely had problems with netflix on ultrawide.

Very true. Plus, neither the Netflix app on windows nor the web app are able to set an appropriate display refresh rate that fits the frame rate of the content when going into fullscreen mode. Unless I manually set the refresh rate in the OS display settings most Netflix content looks awful and micro-stutters on my projector.

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.

Some ripping groups (particularly Russian ones) have started putting ads in front of the videos, and super-imposed logos in the corners.

Pretty brazen, if you ask me.

How dare they try to capitalize on the content I steal... If I wanted shady conglomerates with a loose relationship to morals and ethics to get my money I'd just be paying the MPAA directly!

But yes, I found it extremely ironic.

That last part is the worst. Torrent sites rarely just stop uploading a show (unless it’s very old and never became noteworthy)

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