Hacker News Reader

Comment by banana_giraffe | Hacker News Reader

I've done this as well, but quickly ran into a limitation that most of the major services like Netflix limit the video they send to Chrome to 720p. Defeats the point of using this for viewing videos on my big screen HD monitor, to my mind.

I don't have a great solution.

View on HN

I haven't tried it, but you might be able to use Chrome via WINE to get the Widevine support Netflix requires.

Back in the day, I was able to use Android Flash plugins on x86 Linux browsers by loading them with binfmt_misc. You might be able to use binfmt_misc in a similar manner with WINE.

Sorry, to be clear, I tried this on a full fledged Windows box with all the things that Windows wants to enable TPM support and just generally make Widevine happy.

Another poster suggested Edge, I'll try that, though honestly the entire process has just taught me how little I value the streaming services anymore, so I'm not super motivated.

Oh, wow, I didn't realize that streaming via the browser was so hindered even on Windows.

But, yeah, the market has diverged so far from the Netflix streaming heyday that I just download the things I want to watch these days.

The solution is to stop fiddling with proprietary streaming whose entire purpose is to create these headaches, and just torrent the content instead.

I miss the state of streaming piracy from a few years ago, where you could just run Kodi with Exodus and have instant access to basically every movie and TV show to ever grace a screen.

I would pay good money for that service if anyone would fucking offer it! Gabe Newell nailed it long ago when he said that piracy was a service problem, but unfortunately nobody fucking listened.

Doesn't Edge have a fancy pants DRM, which combined with a (potentially backdoored) Intel and Ryzen CPU can allow better than HD Netflix ?

Yes, but still no 4K, HDR or 5.1 audio IIRC. Streaming on PCs is just inferior and at this point clearly intentionally so. I was waiting forever for "native" apps for all the streaming providers on the Windows store so I could just use my HTPC as a streaming box without sacrificing on video and audio quality, but the streaming services just don't care as they'd rather have more control over things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com