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Comment by esistgut | Hacker News Reader

I own subscriptions for both Netflix and Prime Video and (try to) use them most of the times from my Linux desktop on a 21:9 monitor. I have to force proper full hd resolution using a browser extension but can't find a way to fix aspect ratio / black bars problems. Just yesterday I tried to watch the third season of Stranger Things and I had black bars on all the 4 sides. After boring my SO for about 10 minutes messing around with extensions I just fired up qBittorrent and fixed the problem in 2 seconds using the autocrop feature in mpc. I end up the torrent way so often that I'm starting to doubt the reasons that push me to support these platforms and their broken features. Is the desktop userbase a niche so small they can afford to ignore?

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^This

On two of the three 4K monitors I own, I have no way of watching any films or TV shows at that resolution whatsoever. There is no mainstream content at all that can be consumed on Linux at 4K through any legitimate service that I know of. This is in spite of me subscribing to a ‘4K’ Netflix service, owning multiple movies in 4K in various forms etc. The only device that supports 4K legitimately is my Apple TV, which I bought simply to stream Netflix at native resolution. Now that I have it, I often find myself renting films on it, but the only options there are for watching on my laptop are piracy. And honestly, piracy is higher quality and a better UI (being able to download in advance, the press play with no worries about buffering).

How much of their userbase do you think uses

- Linux Desktop - 21:9 monitor

? If you guys are cracking one 10th of a percentile I would be surprised. I also use netflix on linux desktop (regular monitor though) but I cannot pretend that they should have to care about such a tiny portion of their overall userbase.

This should not be a problem to begin with.

They are different issues: Windows and Mac OS users using 21:9 monitors will have aspect ratio / black bars problems, Linux users with standard 16:9, 16:10 monitors will have problems with full hd and 4k resolutions. And even if these are two small user bases please consider the efforts required in order to fix the problems we are talking about. What could possibly take to lift the block on full hd as I am already doing with some browser extension? How hard could it be to copy the crop detection algorithm from mpc?

Black bars are not a problem. It's simply the result of another aspect ratio. It shouldn't be fixed.

They are a problem if you have 4 of them.

Zoom in. But black borders should be cropped, so it's an encoding error.

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