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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

> I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do

This is incorrect. The DRM on Windows varies based on the browser. Trying playing Netflix in Edge vs Chrome and take screenshots. The video will be black on Edge but visible on Chrome. If you use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D on Edge or Chrome to bring up the stats or view their test videos at https://www.netflix.com/watch/80164785, you can see that Edge plays 4k HDR but Chrome only plays 1080p SDR. Netflix allows 1080p with weak DRM but requires strong DRM for 4k.

There are similar restrictions for mobile devices, VR headsets, etc. where the resolution is limited on certain devices and browsers because of their DRM configuration.

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> Netflix allows 1080p with weak DRM but requires strong DRM for 4k.

Well that's an improvement from when some browsers on Windows got 720p. Apparently that changed about six months ago.

But it's still 720p for most browsers on Linux. Huh.

It works fine in Linux, the limit is artificial. Multiple extensions fix it like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflux/

Coincidentally, this kind of thing is why you'll get 4K streaming on some browser/platform combinations but not the others. For example, Netflix will only give you 4K on Windows if you're using Edge or their own app.

If you torrent, you always get 4K, and VLC never has any issue with screenshots, either.

You also get that warm feeling from sharing with others, which is more than 4k and hdr combined. All we need is connection.

You'll also get an ad-free, offline first, non-tracked experience.

Fly that black flag high!

Why I still torrent even while paying for Netflix, prime video, YouTube premium, Spotify and audible.

Yes. Apparently Gabe Newell [1] was right:

> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...

It's a pricing to service ratio problem.

Unfortunately, the corporations that own the copyright thinks the price is zero for piracy, when it in actual fact, isn't "truly" zero. The fact of the matter is, these copyright owning entities want to extract the maximum amount of profit, rather than provide the lowest price, maximum service for the least cost.

I'm glad there's piracy as a floor to how bad streaming can get.

We have Netflix. The quality is unusable. There is no price at which I think the service is worth the money. As with so many things by 2025, capitalism has eaten itself and utterly failed. I only have it for a sense of moral rectitude - of which it provides almost none as well. Let me give money to these unbelievably greedy jerks because that's the right thing to do???

> There is no price at which I think the service is worth the money.

It’s fine if you don’t think there’s anything worth watching on Netflix. Worth knowing that more than 300 million people around the world disagree: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/netflix-subscribers-300-mil...

I would be in the metric as well, while detesting the service. However, I'm not the only person in my home and it's not always easy to transition the family onto my local solutions. It's why I have YouTube premium as well, while letting the family know it's easy to grab all of that content and self host. It's like the chance of seeing something to watch you didn't already know about outweighs the cost and quality of service.

The problem is not what you can watch on Netflix. The two main problems I have are that Netflix is not a one stop shop and that Netflix turns my device into my adversary. The latter means I won't ever use the anything Netflix had made.

We use Linux in my house. My problem is with the quality of the video they send to my device. It is not worth a penny because it is actively disagreeable to watch. There is some good content there, not more than a small percentage, but I understand their fight with other companies greatly impacts availability.

Building a movie library with 1 to 4 movies a month you actually want to watch on Apple TV seems to be the better mid-term investment if you want to stay digital for the same price of an UHD enabled Netflix subscription.

I own a bunch of UHD-Blurays, but the friction to get up from the couch there is also quite large and you can't just decide to watch them on vacation.

Also Netflix bitrate for UHD is abysimal and rarely has any third party stuff.

Amazon bitrates are also good, but I lost a lot of trust in their mid/long term commitment to user needs.

> It’s fine if you don’t think there’s anything worth watching on Netflix. Worth knowing that more than 300 million people around the world disagree

Meh. You could practically say the same about junk food. Just because it's convenient doesn't mean it's the best thing available.

> capitalism has eaten itself and utterly failed

Is it really the capitalism, or is it the monopolism of exclusively owning the copyright and making the money out of it? Who'd fund the widely expensive shows, the CCP? Guess what the quality of the TV shows was during Socialism (and the level of creative freedom they had)?

The capitalism gave the pirates the way to cheaply reap, host and distribute by providing the means to do so for a fraction of the price. If you don't like the service, you don't pay, netflix shares go down and they end up like Blockbuster. If they succeed that means there are enough people who pay gladly.

Copyright system is flawed, but it's not because of capitalism per se (private ownership of the means of production), but because of the over regulation coerced from the government by the copyright owners. But that's bad governance, not the capitalism itself.

If the best that market capitalism can give us is an endless flood of superhero franchises with Grade 6-level dialogue (to serve the largest possible audience), deadline-damaged CGI and $300m budgets, I have a hard time seeing how socialist cinema could do worse.

The market gives what people want. If the majority of people want (and can be influenced to want) shitty franchises and cold popcorn, it will produce this. That's why Italian food is better than German, not because it's capitalism's fault. You cant' find a decent tomato in a German supermarket, but easily find one in even the biggest supermarket in Rome.

VLC even lets you save a full-res snapshot of whatever you're seeing, regardless of the window size!

Since Netflix never (edit: rarely) releases Blu-Rays for their original content, there's no source to produce high-quality versions of their 4K content right? Could be wrong but I thought webrips that screen capture are relatively low quality because they're reencoding a video that's already being compressed for streaming.

Don't know if I notice these things much personally but if someone already cares about 1080p vs 4K they probably would.

The scene has ways of getting the data without reencoding. Look for web dl.

This is still far less bitrate than the equivalent BluRay. Netflix dropped their 4k bitrate during COVID and never looked back.

This is the difference between “rip” and “DL”. You can certainly pull content from Netflix without re-encoding.

This even extends to screensharing on Teams. If I recall correctly, DRM protected content is completely black even when using Chrome.

Yep, it's super annoying to pull up a movie on your machine and want to cast it over to the TV to watch and only getting a black screen because you didn't do the DRM dance correctly.

Pssst disable hardware acceleration.

Which, reasonably, significantly reduces your resolution.

this is just the standard way the video overlay works

In the compositing world we probably shouldn't be using overlays anyway.

Teams is just several Edge webviews in a trenchcoat.

Yeah not many people know about this.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081

This Netflix support page shows that 4K streaming is only available in the Edge web browser on Windows devices and in the Safari web browser on Mac devices.

If you use Chrome or Firefox you get locked in to a lower resolution when using Netflix even if you are paying for 4K streaming.

Can you trick it with a different user agent? Most of the times websites put arbitrary restrictions like this, it works by changing user agent for me.

In this case they're probably using browser-specific APIs to implement the DRM rather than naively detecting the UA and providing a higher quality stream.

I have a feeling it's eventually going to be possible to work around this by setting up live AI upscaling to 4k - should be a year or two before that starts to work in real-time on higher-end gamer GPU.

(Of course I suspect DRM will then get extended deeper into the GPU.)

HDCP already encrypts everything starting from video decoding to the signals being sent to the monitor. It really can't get "deeper" than that, other than maybe fixing whatever current vulnerabilities pirates are using to bypass it.

Then it'll get re-extended to 1080p again? Point being, I can see live 1080p to 4k upscale via generative AI becoming a feasible alternative to watching the original 4k stream where DRM prevents you from accessing the latter.

This wouldn't be possible, since Edge supports both Microsoft PlayReady and Google Widevine DRM schemes and as far as I know, Widevine's ChromeCDM is less secure in browsers (L3/software DRM) while PlayReady is more secure as it uses some hardware components.

Netflix probably uses PlayReady for 1080p+ content, but I don't have a Netflix account to test so I can't confirm

L1 in Chrome is now available if your hardware supports Playready SL3000, but if it is officially supported at this point rather than being a beta that nobody guarantees from build to build seems surprisingly undocumented.

I've never been able to get Edge to streak Netflix in high def. Same with the official Windows app.

Your monitor, GPU, HDMI cable, etc. need to be HDCP compatible, to get a higher resolution.

True, but the streaming provider had a CHOICE to enforce that requirement, and the user experience has suffered as a result of their choice.

The streaming provider doesn’t have a choice. They must implement and prove they have a working DRM solution or publishers won’t hand over the streamable media

I don't know why the publishers care. The scene has it all already.

Exactly, and they still have it from day one every time. It's not an effective method against piracy, it's just an annoyance to paying users.

They just never learn this lesson. Remember the meme joking about all the unskippable bullshit people had to watch on a DVD, when they could just download a pirated copy and press play :)

Scene pirates complain quite a lot that they frequently do not have access to day one Netflix UHD releases and they have to burn hardware keys to do it every few months.

It's about control

It always felt like a lottery, if all stars are aligned you can watch it in high resolution

Can you watch netflix on edge in a VM? I'd guess you can't as VMs likely don't have HDCP for their virtual devices.

Only in SD.

Though in some cases a VM can enforce HDCP.

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