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Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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