I reverse-engineered Netflix's 4K restrictions | Hacker News Reader

I reverse-engineered Netflix's 4K restrictions

github.com

80 pointspicklepixel96 comments

Hello HN, I have an important thing to point out:

THIS EXTENSION DOES NOT WORK!

let me put it another way:

THIS EXTENSION DOES NOTHING USEFUL!

The author did not reverse engineer anything. He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

The author did not check if the extension actually works. He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

Other commenters in this thread have noted that this extension cannot do what it claims. [1] The author simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

Thanks for listening to my ted talk.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803836

Have you tested it? I have no doubt that it was vibecoded, and there's a lot of bogus stuff in the readme, but there's also a good chance it's at least slightly functional.

WTF does "slightly functional" mean in this context.

There are a bunch of factors that affect whether Netflix will give you the highest resolution available for your hardware. Some of them are "soft" constraints, like the user agent, the pixel resolution of your screen, and what profiles the client requests from the server. Then there's hard constraints like the DRM version, HDCP level, and what codecs your hardware actually supports.

This extension tries to spoof HDCP status and codec support which is stupid and will not provide any benefit, since it is ultimately enforced by hardware.

But it also patches Cadmium to request a custom set of profiles which is useful and can improve compatibility: https://github.com/Pickle-Pixel/netflix-force-4k/blob/72e179...

For example, here's a set of profiles that makes 1080p work on Linux, as opposed to a mere 720p: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/Turbo-Recadmiumator/blob... (or at least it used to, I haven't tested it in ages)

> The author did not check if the extension actually works.

The author said the extension did not work in Chrome.[1] But they did not respect other people to say this where everyone would see it and plainly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803459

> He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs

Many such cases

The submission title is indeed correct, but the README there is indeed so bogus. What's the point even discussing environments that don't have Widevine L1?

Thank you for your warning. I checked the code and I don't see how this could possibly work. If not for your warning at the top of the comments, I would have assumed it worked as intended, and congratulated the author on their successful project of deshittification.

I never get why those idiots make it harder for paying customers to watch content, than for those just torrenting it. It's the same with Amazon Prime Video which will get me a black screen on Linux or force me to SD Quality, while the torrented Movie runs just fine in 4K

I've spent a long time wondering the same thing. The standard answer is that it's fallout from the anti-anti-piracy cat and mouse game. The more conspiratorial answer is that bandwidth is expensive and streaming sites will take any excuse to serve you a lower resolution than what you actually paid for, while still being able to say that they technically support 4K.

There are sensible-ish technical reasons why they can't deliver DRM'd 4K on linux, but when browser extensions can upgrade you to 4K there are no excuses on the technical level.

We need to divorce "corporate" from "tech"

Never going to happen. Tech came from corporate.

The point is, people usually pay because it is more convenient for them than getting it illegally.

But when I have to fiddle around for 30 Minutes to see a picture (it worked before until it suddenly didn't work anymore), pirating the movie is suddenly the better option. Because I certainly don't see a point in paying and wasting more of my time.

And the piracy cat and mouse game is stupid, as in the End it's always Available illegaly, except for the people developing and selling DRM

Bandwidth is only expensive if you're getting it from Amazon or Google. Cloudflare gives it away for free.

Netflix is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic. That's expensive no matter how you slice it, and dropping that by a mere 1% is a huge saving.

Hm, true. Then again, I don't know if that's worth the reputational hit. These subscribers are paying for 4K.

Netflix does charge more for 4k, so they simply pass along the cost: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

Netflix still saves money when someone watches in a lower resolution.

Yes, but what they care about is profits. People aren't going to pay for the expensive plan if they can't actually use the features of it.

Most people who aren't getting proper 4K don't even notice.

Bingo. I mostly have watched Netflix for the last decade and recently tried Apple TV. It looks so much crisper. I didn't realize what I was missing.

There's a fine line, reduce quality too far and customer satisfaction drops. Some customers will have a higher tolerance to dropping quality than others, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.

So you do studies, you look at the impact of quality changes to customer churn and then you move the line appropriately.

Marketing emphasizing 4K helps reduce this.

Most users can't tell, and if you deliver the $18/month service while charging $25/month that's $7/month pure profit - money for nothing.

For Netflix specifically; it’s because the groups that rip 4K content from Netflix burn a device (i.e. a Widevine L1 key). This is why they typically release 4K Netflix shows in batches.

Here is a good thread on the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/17ez7mi/how_come_it...

Thank you for sharing the breadcrumb~

How does Netflix detect "suspicious" activity? Does $NFLX allow 4k streaming over GrapheneOS? If so, could you pin a different certificate and do some HTTP proxy traffic manipulation to obfuscate the device (presumably an Android phone) identity or otherwise work around the DRM?

I want to understand more about this but unfortunately the reddit thread is bits and pieces scattered amongst clueless commentary, making it challenging to wade through.

I honestly have no clue! This is just a tidbit I randomly learned about haha.

They can trace a torrented 4K piece of content to the device (or private key) that ripped it using A/B watermarking.

See AWS offering: (and probably what they use for Prime Video, Netflix has their own)

  For large-scale per-viewer, implement a content identification strategy that allows you to trace back to specific clients, such as per-user session-based watermarking. With this approach, media is conditioned during transcoding and the origin serves a uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to the end user. A session to a user-mapping service receives encrypted user ID information in the header or cookies of the request context and uses this information to determine the uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to serve to the viewer. This approach requires multiple distinctly watermarked copies of content to be transcoded, with a minimum of two sets of content for A/B watermarking. Forensic watermarking also requires YUV decompression, so encoding time for 4K feature length content can take upwards of 20 hours. DRM service providers in the AWS Partner Network (APN) are available to aid in the deployment of per-viewer content forensics.

<https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/streaming...>

They also use a traitor tracing scheme (Tardos codes) such that if multiple pirates get together to try and remove the watermark they will fail, you would need an unreasonably large number of pirates to succeed for some length of time.

To what extent does this watermarking survive transcoding? Would not transcoding multiple times possibly affect it?

> They also use a traitor tracing scheme (Tardos codes) such that if multiple pirates get together to try and remove the watermark they will fail, you would need an unreasonably large number of pirates to succeed for some length of time.

Why?

> To what extent does this watermarking survive transcoding? Would not transcoding multiple times possibly affect it?

They are designed to survive being recorded by a phone at an angle. The embedding is only 1-bit per segment which can be multiple megabytes.

> Why?

Tardos codes scale as the square of the number of traitors times a constant. For example, a movie would typically have 2000 segments -> 2000 bits of encoding. By my calculation, at around 7 traitors some start to skate by detection. And there are ways to make detection additive across leaked content, so with another 2000 all 7 will get caught. This is because while they may not score highly enough to be reliably accused, they will be under suspicion, and that suspicion can later be enhanced.

To be clear, what the traitors are doing is pooling all the segment versions they have available to them, and adversarially choose a segment at random. This is the best strategy they have, a close second is to choose the segment that the majority have.

Trying to remove the actual 1-bit watermark from the segment isn't typically feasible. Every segment will have a unique adjustment to encode it. The embedding algorithm will take a secret key.

That's fascinating, thank you.

> They are designed to survive being recorded by a phone at an angle.

Any idea what this looks like? I assume it's not visible to the human eye, but being able to survive this level of degradation is quite impressive.

It depends on which vendor they're using.

It generally occurs as patterns which are slightly in the noise. Good systems pick locations where its easier to hide and turn it off when the scene would expose it. Usually when badly done increasing sharpness in a scene can help reveal it.

Basically, if you can damage the watermark the picture quality is bad enough that it's harming your viewing. You need to compress into crap SD quality to make it hard to detect and even then you'll get something.

You don't even need a complete pattern, if you can get enough fragments you can narrow down the possible identities until you have a high match probability. I.e. partial fingerprints or DNA match.

My understanding is that it has gotten fairly complex. Don't know if they still use this particular facet but look at the Fourier-Mellin transform: <https://sthoduka.github.io/imreg_fmt/docs/fourier-mellin-tra...>

They don't use the highest frequencies as those watermarks are easy to obliterate, and they don't use the lowest frequencies as those would noticeably affect quality, the focus is generally on the mid range frequencies. However for A/B watermarking in particular which involve 1-bit watermarks, low frequencies may actually be fair game.

Keep in mind that when embedding watermarks of significant size (>100 bits) as for example if you want to create a camera that includes the serial of the device in every photo, error correcting codes would also be used. For 1-bit watermarks the error correction is likely ad-hoc and involves constructing some mathematical object (for example, a few real numbers derived from frames of a segment) which remains approximately fixed through transformations, you can afford to be wasteful.

The main character holds an apple in her hand. The apple is either pink or bright red depending on the LSB of your user ID. Without comparing several rips, you can't tell this is happening.

Netflix does not encode content per-user, it's all static content on CDNs

A/B watermarking is about static content on CDNs...

For every segment in a video there will be two versions. Every user will get a unique sequence of segments served to them.

Netflix puts flat MP4s on the CDN, the segments all reference different offsets within the MP4.

Have you inspected the contents of their CDN servers? Because assembling an mp4 on the fly from segments is not difficult. Especially if they condition them to have identical sizes.

I have indeed inspected the contents of their CDN servers. The URLs have an auth token in them but you can edit the range parameters to grab the whole mp4 in one go without invalidating the auth.

Then this is either an exploit or more likely the mp4 file is virtual. You can find out if you are so inclined by grabbing it from two separate accounts using two separate devices (or keys) and then compare how many of the segments are identical.

Also, I assume the file in question is 4K content. Don't know about how they treat other types.

The normal way to do it would be to deliver different byte ranges per user

Wait, that’s a brilliant way of encoding a watermark without having to embed it within a stream per user.

If a single video has say 100 segments, you get more than enough unique combinations to guarantee uniqueness. There would of course have to be a mapping between user/device ID and segment order.

Isn't it trivial to know all the segments if they are static?

A DRM system is, abstractly, a black box that contains some initial static key material, which is used to identify+authenticate the device and load in more keys at runtime, typically over some network protocol. The DRM uses those dynamically provisioned keys to decrypt the content.

For hardware DRM schemes, the initial key material is typically provisioned during manufacturing.

Since the server-side is able to identify the client device, they can in theory fingerprint the content if they want to. That way if someone cracks and shares the content, they can look at the fingerprint and figure out which device (and which account) leaked it - and then ban them.

I've never seen direct evidence that Netflix fingerprints their 4K content (although I've never properly looked), so I suspect the device-burning thing might be a bit of an urban legend. But it is technically plausible.

If it wasn't real, Netflix would leak 4Ks more frequently. We're inferring by a third-order effect.

Netflix does not allow 4k streaming to GrapheneOS. Every piece of software and hardware in the signal chain must be Hollywood–approved, including your OS, GPU and monitor.

What I've noticed about Netflix's supposedly 4k content is that it looks like crap compared to the same show downloaded through illicit means (and viewed on Plex or something else).

What's the deal with Netflix's not-very-good 4k streams? Colour quantization or something? It's not just a one-off, why do 4k netflix shows look like rubbish compared to a moderately encoded whatever from bittorrent?

Probably extreme compression, their 4K streams are very low bandwidth.

Must be that way - watching "an evening" (yes, i just made up a time unit) of Netflix consumes 1/4 to 1/3 of the bandwidth "an evening" of consuming content on AppleTV+.

So, about 10GB or less on Netflix to 30GB or more on AppleTV+, dissected by DPI on my TP-Link Omada Gateway.

And indeed, i think it shows - i can't notice any banding or moire effect on pretty much any AppleTV+ content, while it is as clear as night and day that Netflix compresses the hell out of their content.

It depends. The most common reason is bitrate - the non-Netflix could have been ripped from another source (BD), or even from another service that has rights to the show in a different market (with higher bitrate).

The other trick some groups use is so-called hybrid releases. This involves combining video and audio from multiple sources to achieve the best possible quality. These are usually explicitly tagged as HYBRID, and afaik mostly applies to 4K remuxes.

Semi-informed guess: Even when the rip comes from the same source (and not e.g. Blu-ray), they have a blazing fast internet pipe and/or a custom client that locks into the maximum bitrate -- while your residential connection and/or the local PoP's available capacity make your stream use a lower bitrate.

All video encoders have bit–rate — target number of encoded bits per second — as a tunable knob. Lossiness is compensated to match the target bit–rate. When a video is encoded with a lower bit–rate, it produces a smaller file that looks worse. Resolution almost doesn't matter, if your bit–rate is so low that the encoder doesn't have a chance of encoding pixel–level detail.

Bittorrent pirates may source shows from Netflix but they may also source them from other places with higher bit–rate encodings.

and its easy enough to figure out who ripped the web-dl, because you can have each frame copied into 2 slightly different but functionally identical versions (or perhaps just a longer GOP, but still the same). Create 32 of these sets of 2 (i.e. bits, or even do it for every 32 sets in the video) and assign every user a unique set of 32 "bits" and you'll have the ability to uniquely identify every web-dl (as by definition they aren't modifying the streams) to the user who downloaded it and just a cost of 1x the storage vs not doing anything.

It's simple: Lawyers creating market for themselves and other lawyers. A head of legal department at Netflix would have a better job and pay if ge has 50x more employees. Hence, the incentive to find ways to get involved in everything, even if it arguably hurts the company's revenue, let alone the rest of the market.

It's a legal contractual requirement with the companies who provide the content.

I may be an idiot, but: What does this actually, y'know, achieve? It seems the answer to me is probably nothing?

It doesn't work on Firefox. It appears not to work on Chrome. The suggestion is to use Edge, which on Windows already gets 4K support in Netflix anyway.

Fellow idiot here, and the gist seems to be:

Here's a 4K enabler that only enables 4K where it's already enabled.

i don't think it works! there's no mystery here...

I can't vouch for this extension in particular (because I haven't tested it), but I've used and written similar extensions myself and can confirm that the concept is legit.

Spoofing the user agent and decoding capabilities and [...] is a useful way to unblock things that are crippled on various browsers, indeed.

The problem here is requiring hardware-attested DRM: Widevine L1 on Edge on Windows, and Apple FairPlay on Safari on MacOS. The only way to get hardware attested DRM is via browser specific (i.e.: native code) support that interfaces with the OS & GPU drivers. You can't get there through an extension.

Right, but the point is that Netflix still refuses to play 4K on some browsers with hardware DRM support. Even getting it to work in Edge was a challenge last time I tried - iirc I got it working via https://github.com/lkmvip/netflix-4K-DDplus

I believe the benefit for Edge is faking HDCP 2.2.

Then why does the extension try to fake a bunch of other properties, like the user agent and decoding capabilities, which should be redundant?

The same plugin spec runs across several browsers and Edge is now chrome based. It’s likely just hard coded defaults that seem a little silly when used on the target browser it pretends to be.

You misread the README. Although it suggests using Edge at the very bottom, the extension doesn't require it and actually spoofs Netflix into thinking it is Edge via changing the user-agent.

Did I, though?

I understand it spoofs all of the checks it can, but the only Chromium browser that supports Widevine L1 (a requirement for 4K) is Edge, so even if all of the check spoofing works, it still won't do 4K.

There's even a table in the README that describes this exact scenario.

I'm putting a lot of weight on this part from the README:

  > If you're paying for 4K but using Chrome, Firefox, or a setup Netflix doesn't "approve," you're stuck at 1080p or lower. This extension fixes that.

But I get the confusion though. I'm now second-guessing if I misread the README.

It's this section that puts the lie to the entire project: https://github.com/Pickle-Pixel/netflix-force-4k?tab=readme-...

It appears to only be useful on Edge on Windows.

Let's go back to tangible media

https://www.rasputinmusic.com

https://www.amoeba.com/

I would pay a non-trivial amount for a service that 1) bought a blu-ray on my behalf, 2) ripped it to a file, 3) gave me that file to download, once, and 4) after confirming I had it, shredded the blu-ray.

I don't want to copy things and distribute them to others. I want to have one copy that keeps working indefinitely and doesn't go away or fail to follow me across systems.

That's still illegal. A company tried to do that with an array of DVD players.

Debatable. Streaming content to someone while keeping the physical media is debatably public performance. I'm not sure if anyone has tried to make the "first sale" argument yet.

Awesome. As someone who has spent some time researching DRM systems, figuring out these "soft" restrictions before you can achieve playback in the first place is often more challenging than breaking the DRM itself.

Does Edge currently ship Widevine L1? Last time I checked it was Playready SL3000, but that was a while ago now.

This is why piracy is gaining more and more traction lately.

Is anyone else reading this like WTF I pay for 4K and I dont actually get and I didn’t realize it!?!?!

I'm reading this like "if I don't realize I'm not getting 4k, I don't need 4k".

If you're paying for 4K and you never notice whether what you're watching is actually in 4K, then I have a suggestion for how you can save some $

Why is this flagged ? Can HN force people who flag to provide a reason, even if only the mods see it?

"A Chrome/Edge extension that forces Netflix to serve 4K Ultra HD content on devices and browsers that Netflix artificially restricts."

It doesn't work in Chrome/Firefox, it works only in Edge.

The top comment says it doesn't actually work because it's just AI slop. A quick code check agrees with this assessment.

I pay for Netflix Premium but was stuck at 1080p. Turns out Netflix layers multiple capability checks before serving 4K: user agent, screen resolution, Media Capabilities API, codec support, DRM robustness negotiation, and their Cadmium player's internal bitrate caps.

Built an extension that spoofs all of these. The interesting discovery: you have to intercept every layer. Miss one and you're back to 1080p.

Here's the catch though. Even with all the JavaScript spoofs working, Chrome still won't get 4K. Netflix requires Widevine L1 (hardware DRM), and Chrome only has L3 (software). The browser literally can't negotiate the security level Netflix wants. Edge on Windows has L1, so the extension actually delivers 4K there.

So what's the point on Chrome? Honestly, not much for 4K specifically. But the reverse-engineering was the interesting part. Understanding how Netflix fingerprints devices and decides what quality to serve. The codebase documents all the APIs they check.

On Edge: works reliably, getting 3840x2160 at 15000+ kbps. On Chrome: spoofs work, DRM negotiation fails, stuck at 1080p.

The repo has detailed documentation on what each spoof does and why. Happy to discuss the technical approach or answer questions.

i can understand the enthusiasm around LLM authored code bases.

but i cannot understand why someone would write comments on hacker news with an LLM. how could you say something was interesting, if you didn't even do it?

That's crazy that Chrome, which basically owns the web standards, does not have a compliant implementation to run Netflix, which leads streaming market share.

> Happy to discuss the technical approach or answer questions.

Netflix says "Ultra HD (2160p)" requires Microsoft Edge on Windows [1].

This is a "Netflix 4K Enabler" extension that spoofs being Microsoft Edge on Windows - but unless I'm misunderstanding, the extension only works on Microsoft Edge, on Windows.

Under what circumstances would a user want this extension?

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081

So your extension does a bunch of hooks to spoof edge, but then only works on edge? And edge using Netflix normally already supports 4k. So this does nothing and does not solve the stated problem of chrome and Firefox 4k Netflix streaming.

Am I missing something?

I would imagine it's less a product to use and more documentation of the various techniques that are involved. It seems pretty reasonable to share that with others.

Edge on Windows supports L1? I thought L1 requires secure hardware support.. is it about SGX or newer Windows devices have some anti-user crap builtin already?

UPDATE: Apparently newer Intel CPUs have builtin support for PlayReady 3.0. What a beautiful anti-feature of the CPU..

You can't spoof L1 Widevine.

You could but it'd be much much harder than this.

Everything your computer can do is inspectable with correct application of nitric acid, electron microscopy, and image processing algorithms running on a supercomputer.

You could also try to get hired on the Widevine team or a GPU vendor. Corporate espionage, yay!

Disappointed to learn that it requires Edge, BUT very grateful for the investigation and write up ! That is why this is called Hacker News.

"I made X" now means "I asked an LLM for X, this is what it gave me".

TLDR; I made an extension to force 4K on Netflix.

Did you make it or did AI make it? Does it actually work?

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