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Comment by freehorse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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