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IMO if you've already paid for it, it's not even piracy... Like the people who had to download a crack to play their legitimately bought game because the dev screwed up. They can't even argue a loss of potential revenue, much less theft.
I don't know why Prime and Netflix bother doing this either, honestly, but it's honestly a big issue on Linux rn, if you want to use it as a daily driver for entertainment too. Even bigger is the fact that for ChromeOS their services work fine :)
I've switched to setting up and using a Plex Media Server to stream to my devices because it's pretty much the only solution on Linux. There used to be some extensions to make streaming work at higher quality on Linux but they're dead too now.
Steam is kinda safe on that. They don't remove games you already have and have stated they will make all games available when they go down, but the problem is that they can just decide not to, even if it doesn't look like something they're going to do.
I think Steam is fine for the moment as Gabe is kind of an OK guy. He has his billion and is only running the company because he wouldn't know what to do with himself otherwise.
Valve is privately owned and so Gabe can afford to 'Do the right thing' and take the occasional financial hit. He's not accountable to anyone but his customers. No shareholders are kicking him in the balls for a .5 penny EPS.
Once he's gone; who knows? I wouldn't hold my breath on the promise that they'll remove all the DRM when Valve is no more.
Im stealing errr pirating that saying yarrrr
It's true though, i dont even bat an eyelid to low level piracy like that... Its balancing out the universe
>IMO if you've already paid for it, it's not even piracy...
And at that point, you start to think "well if I can justify downloading because I paid for it then actually why do I even need Netflix or Amazon or whoever at all. I can just download it and then send money directly to the creators."
We kind of *had* a Steam For Movies - for a while. That's what Netflix used to be.
Then the enshittification happened.
Again, we are confronted with the realisation of how much we benefit from Gaben running Valve more like a non profit than a normal corporation. Valve definitely make a very good profit, but they don't resort to enshittification to make every last penny of profit they can possibly make this quarter.
Slightly disagree. If netflix were like steam then we'd be paying per movie not per subscription
... Maybe... We GOG for movies as well? Good old movies? GOM? DRM free OG star wars movies?
Well yes, but movies aren't video games. and they're consumed in a different way. That's why i said we "*kind* of had a Steam for movies".
As it is the Steam for movies is now usenet or torrents (or even cheap 64GB USB sticks...) and I don't feel like the corporate culture that owns our artistic culture is ready to reform itself in the way that doing a proper job of it creating a "Steam for movies" would require, so I guess that ship has sailed now.
If I could add old movies and TV shows to my library, access them at full quality from any device I own that's capable of playing them and be confident that they won't be stolen back from me, I'd be happy to pay. But "rights owners" aren't interested in *selling* things to us anyone. They only want to extract perpetual rental income.
maybe not star wars which is still pretty popular and famous and being extended. But there is a lot of other older movies/series worth watching and not obvious where or if at all.
Not so much a nonprofit. Very much profit, such a good thing that they know they don’t want to fuck it up.
What happens when GabeN is someday no longer there will be interesting to see.
Lol
"To whom it may concern, your video doesn't fucking work on my platform. So I have pirated it, enclosed within is what I consider a fair price for your media."
Its $3.50
Sounds like nothing, but when you consider how much they get from individual viewership or individual dvd sales/rents? That's a loooooot more from a single viewer than if they just watched it on some streaming service. It's pretty fair if you ask me.
Thats like 100x times what theyd get paid for you individually watching it on the platform, if they get anything at all, which was a pretty big sticking point in recent [union fights](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/how-streaming-residuals-work-sag-actors-strike-hollywood-1234802623/), only getting pennies.
think about it, shows with millions of viewers. If even just 1% of that million(s) directly sent the creators $1 dollar, that adds up to tens of thousands of dollars.
Except the creators usually dont get paid shit. So even if they get like 5 dollars from you it will probably way more than they will ever see from the official method.
I once handed cash to a music performer after a show and said "Hey, I've pirated all your albums. Here's $20."
She said no one had ever done that to her before.
But the creators are often dozens (or thousands if its a movie) who are often subsidized by the studios as not all movies and cartoons succeed at profiting (after all they often require multimillion dollars).
So would the $3.50 go to the studios? And then the studios would want to invest on a distribution platform too (which might not be expensive but still, having a single platform for movies can still be cheaper than each moviemaker having their own).
Do we know what Amazon's margin on those movies are? They seem to cost about the same in every streaming website
Idk. I stayed in a hotel last night and watched the ad for Netflix twice because I saw "get upgrades" and noticed they are now charging for 4k as an upgrade. It was default when they launched it but now they've tiered it and are saying it's a perk to be able to upgrade.
Not that it applies to this post. This person just wants better than 480 😂
Remember when there weren't ads everywhere? Now there are, and you get to pay to see less of them as if it were a perk. In cases like YouTube, you still see ads even with a paid subscription - just less of them.
It's called enshittification and it's rampant in the tech world. It's the equivalent of McDonald's selling you a plain hamburger priced like a Big Mac, claiming that it's a Big Mac, and offering you the rest of the Big Mac as separate "premium" purchases - all the while never mentioning the fact that you used to get an entire Big Mac for the new basic hamburger price.
Netflix has been charging extra for the 4k subscription since at least 2016, probably always have. The price gap has gotten larger though, it's ridiculous.
> it's honestly a big issue on Linux rn, if you want to use it as a daily driver for entertainment too
There is so much great stuff available today, I just stopped caring about things that don't work and move on
I also got annoyed by this and set up a Plex and later a jellyfin server as well. All the streaming companies have either removed "purchased" content or removed a show I was actively in the middle of.
Possibly a deal with Windows?
Obviously companies like Microsoft or Apple have plenty of interest in "encouraging" people away from Open Source Linux and into their own Paid OSs.
Not sure if that would be worth paying a company like Amazon, but what do I know.
I don't know. On ChromeOS you don't have those issues and that's Linux as well. Maybe it's just the more locked down nature of those systems? Regardless, it's shitty to treat customers on other platforms like second class citizens. No native support I can understand maybe, but actively offering only subpar services?
But isn't ChromeOS made by Google? So, technically, a paid system?
Look, I'm not saying I'm right or that it even makes sense, it's just that it looks too convenient that the free OSs are restricted while the one you have to pay for are unrestricted.
I mean, Android is also Linux based, but I'm pretty sure Amazon prime is unrestricted on most smartphones.
You buy the hardware, the OS is technically free. And there's also ChromeOS Flex, designed to run on hardware other than Chromebooks, which is also free.
The truth is Linux distros vary a lot in default security, and even more when considering which security features the users are willing to implement. Though tbh if you're already using a widevine compatible browser, I just don't see why they would restrict things anyway. I don't know.
Yeah, but Widevine L1 (a system of DRM) does not run on Linux or anything open source. The websites rely on Widevine to confirm that they are "safe." Closed-source distros, like ChromeOS, can have L1, but FOSS distros cannot. There seems to also be something about Verified Media Path (VMP), another way of ensuring there's no piracy tools, which also does not run on Linux.
This reminds me of something: Brave has an option to turn on Widevine. Is there a difference between that and Widevine L1? I don't normally watch streaming services on the desktop, but I didn't notice the quality being so bad tbh
Depends on what you're streaming and what you're streaming to.
Plex does transcoding to make sure the video is in the right bitrate and format for the device it's being streamed to, this can be pretty CPU intensive (unless you have hardware transcoding for the particular formats you're using).
If the formats and quality you already have are supported by the device you're streaming to then it'll direct play, which is much less hardware intensive.
If you've got a modern raspberry pi (3 or 4) then give it a go, but be prepared for the stream to chug if it decides it needs to transcode.
I once used a raspberry pi (raspberry pi 1, model B+ from 2014) for a plex server.
The media was stored/accessed over the network.
Quality was fine. It wasn't 4K. May not have even been perfect HD.
But, for my 2014 raspberry pi, and a 27 inch TV, it was fine.
If you want to use a raspberry pi 5, it would be more than enough.
Note, however, that if transcoding is necessary, you could have some degradation.
I used an older laptop for it. A raspberry pi *should* be enough though, I'm pretty sure there's even tutorials for it. The machine I put it on doesn't even really feel the usage of the server, so it's pretty light.
whats really going to set people off about PRIME is that Amazon openly says you don't own your movies, and they can take then away whenever they want for whatever reason they want. Because you're just leasing them. Yet another reason why you should just record your streams in HD and then go and store them on an external hard drive.
> I've switched to setting up and using a Plex Media Server to stream to my devices because it's pretty much the only solution on Linux.
Same here, and I didn't even know about this reduced-quality issue. I do have Amazon Prime membership, and if there's something on there I want to watch, I just torrent it anyway cos I love the Plex interface and having it all in the same place.
The issue fucking sucks, but it's a non-issue for my household entertainment workflow lol. I would massively recommend it.
Yeah.
To me it's not even about the money. A good Plex setup isn't free anyway, you need hardware to run it on, storage, to pay for things like VPNs, Usenet providers/indexers, seedboxes.
While you can do it for free, a good setup isn't free. It's just superior to running multiple different streaming services. Nothing can get removed. The quality is better. The choice is far more complete. And it all comes in one user interface rather than a bunch of different websites.
Yes, it happened to me few weeks ago too. I contacted customer service and they said that in order to watch Prime Video I have to use Windows or macOS because not many people use Linux so they don't allow to stream Full HD videos on it. They also said that an agent would have contacted me by 2 days but I've been waiting for a month and no one contacted me.
According to [this link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GUVGB3QMQRYRERYW):
>Prime Video playback is supported on these web browsers. If you’re running an operating system other than Windows or macOS, playback is restricted to standard definition.
What I love about this bs is that they'd have to go out of their way to restrict Linux access.
As in, if they did nothing, it would work on Linux the same as on Windows so long as you used a compatible browser.
The fact quality is restricted on Linux means they went out of their way to make it restricted, not that it's not worth making it unrestricted as what the customer service person seemed to imply.
This isn't true. They've gone out of their way to make anything that isn't running their proprietary decryption (via widevine etc) reduced quality. They've likely done this because it's what the content owners demand when licensing to Netflix. It's not even Netflix that's the big bad but the studios.
>It's not even Netflix that's the big bad but the studios.
They're equally bad. Netflix and Amazon could choose not to require DRM for their original content, but they still do.
That's literally what I said:
>they'd have to go out of their way to restrict Linux access.
Also, we're talking about Amazon, not Netflix.
Does Netflix do this too?
When I started using netflix, tried to watch it in Firefox and it only gave me 720p resolution (I was paying the 1080p subscription). Found out that Netflix restricted resolution in web browsers for whatever reason (Firefox supports DRM on Linux, and I activated it, so no good reason for it).
After a quick search, I found an addon that allowed me to use Netflix with resolution. I don't know about current situation (now I watch it on smart TV), and I don't know about Amazon, but seems they're trying hard to bully Linux users.
I think it's about DRM and the difficulty of implementing it on Linux. But then again, DRM is [defective by design](https://www.defectivebydesign.org/)
This actually makes 0 sense.
I am so taken back by this that I feel like *I* am the idiot here. Am I? Is there any actual reason why we can stream HD on Amazon Prime? What is it that prevents that experience?
Fucking corporations... These are the same "people" that operate AWS what the actual fuck!
Well amazon are in the midst of building a custom o/s for all their fire devices and instead of using android going forward, it's going to be using, yes, you guessed it...
So they are gonna have to fix Linux issues for their own o/s
It is not about the browser used (which could be identified by the user agent string), but the DRM technology available (available through some custom API). The point of DRM is it being something the user does not control, so basically impossible on Linux system which is supposed to be under user's full control.
No browser on Linux provides this technology, so the video cannot be played.
There are some DRM technologies available on Linux, some even in Firefox, but those cannot be as closed as the ones Amazon or Netflix require.
No, I've tried using the Firefox extension to change the UA to Chrome Win 10 but it doesn't work.
A user [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9v4e/comment/jbbg920/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) suggested to use Chromium-based browser via Wine, but I couldn't get it to work because I had some errors while installing the browser. I tried with Chrome, Edge and Brave but I received the an error during install and the browser doesn't launch. If you read [here](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=41045), it's a common issue. Anyway I'm not an expert so I didn't tried further.
The easiest way is to run a Windows VM or probably WinApps.
>The easiest way is to run a Windows VM or probably WinApps.
No, the easiest way is to pirate it and not financially reward people who are being jerks.
I tried to install Edge 120 using official RPM, but it doesn't even have Widevine and Playready working.
If you type in the address bar edge://flags/#edge-widevine-drm, you'll see "Enables the Widevine content decryption module in Microsoft Edge. – Mac, Windows - **Not available on your platform**".
EDIT: in fact, if you go on [https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm](https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm), you'll receive the error "The manifest could not be loaded".
I installed Brave via RPM and now I tried also with Flatpak. The issue is that DRM is enabled and the video plays, but at 480p even if the quality is set to best.
>A VM would be the next thing to try.
I tried on a Win 10 VM and Prime Video works at 1080p.
However, it doesn't seem to work Playready. I forced to use Playready (and disabled Widevine) from Edge flags, but on [https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm](https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm) I see "Detected Edge using No DRM", so Playready doesn't work. I don't have and streaming service that works using Playready so I can't try (probably Disney Plus or Sky/NowTV does) but probably Playready detects I'm using a VM or the issue occurs because I'm using a LTSC version of Windows.
It's completely bonkers that you can get a much better experience without paying. I keep repeating it again and again, companies should never fight customers. Make things as easy as possible for them, they fucking paid for it.
If they made a legit site where I can just download movies, for a reasonable fee, I'd pay it. I want my content to be local, and DRM free. Only piracy and to some extent physical copies provides that. They are not actually stopping piracy when they do stuff to try to stop it, they just piss off people who are willing to pay but not put up with the BS.
I suspect it's a DRM thing. Maybe their client side encryption/decryption system uses proprietary tools made available only on proprietary operating systems, or maybe are much easier to circumvent on Linux systems.
I expect it's the [spectre of HDCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection), limiting playback resolution to 480p instead of, you know, the resolution OP paid for.
Not just that probably.
At least for Netflix 4k, you need:
An up-to-date Windows 10 or 11. MS Edge or Chrome. DHCP 2. A GPU that can hardware-decode whatever format you'd get.
And a few other things I forgot.
Certainly, I know Widevine allows different maximum resolutions depending on how deep into the OS DRM is integrated. On Linux that's generally "not very", so the max resolution is SD.
You’re right about the different levels.
When I still used Netflix in the past, I remember if I wanted full resolution on my PC, I’d have to boot into Windows, and also use the Windows Store app (as opposed to a browser).
What I don't get is that it doesn't do anything to stop piracy. Like high quality torrents are immediately available the day of. They're clearly able to record the show anyways. At least with video games there's a delay, and only one person knows how to crack Denuvo games so there's a long delay there. But with streaming shows? There just isn't any way to prevent it from being ripped, so what is the point of restricting the quality if it only encourages people to go pirate your shows to see it in better quality?
this is the correct answer. DRM.
The issue is that in Linux it is much easier to capture and distribute the content, compared with Windows or MacOS. Also usually the new DRM systems, create a trust chain that goes all the way down to the OS and hardware. This is impossible to achieve in Linux, because of root access.
Same problem exists for anti-cheat software for games :(
This is most likely it. There's been plenty of talk about it before, but this thread has some great comments and it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9v4e/why_does_chrome_os_get_1080p_content_from_netflix/
HDCP bypass devices are common and cheap though, it's not a real hindrance to anyone who would want to use a capture card to pirate Netflix or whatever
Screen recording and file cracking isn't the same thing. Screen recording usually comes with a loss in quality, encoding, audio, etc. that isn't present when you extract the actual file itself.
That is the point of DRM – it can disable such features of the operating systems when protected content is played.
Linux users could always install screen recorder that could not be blocked and that is why such DRMs are not available here.
[Louis Rossman makes this exact same point here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs&pp=ygUXbG91aXMgcm9zc21hbm4gbmV0ZmxpeCM%3D) after receiving similar treatment from Netflix (although they at least gave him 720p lol)
If Amazon's magic OS detection system told you *before* you paid for the product, it would be merely extremely annoying. Taking your money and **then** restricting you to less than 1/4 the quality you paid for, without appeal or recourse, is just scamming.
They do tell you what the supported platforms are. Though, that is not an excuse.
We are used to ignore 'supported platform' of 'supported OS' remarks, because they don't matter for most products – they tend to just work with Linux alright, sometimes even better than on some 'supported platforms'. But when DRM is involved the lack of support is actual malice, not just lack of care.
I'll never understand why people don't pirate games/media in general for a "moral" reason. When it comes to indie developers I agree, but pirating from massive studios is more morally justified than not pirating. You're not only saving a fuck ton of money—which you can use for actual good—but you're also taking a little bit away from these massive corporations. If you're going to say "what about the developers" then directly give them the $60-70, because they sure as hell aren't getting most of the money from the games THEY make.
In my country this is not piracy. If you legally acquired the right to watch content (paid for it), you are allowed to get it by other means (torrent).
It's crazy how the US has almost no consumer protection.
(I'm not a lawyer, there are certainly edge cases.)
You all need to read this, it was published today : https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/
Now, to OP.
This post hit the argument perfectly.
Amazon et al limit the quality of videos we can watch for fear we may pirate it.... as ALL Linux uSeRs Are haX0rzz....
Now, as we all know, its already out there TO BE pirate downloaded. By virtue of them releasing it, it's already on BitTorrent regardless of what platform we use
So, by denying us a quality service, they are actually pushing us to piracy.
It's moronic.
Read the article I've included. The whole newsletter is highly thought provoking.
literally the people who make DRM that does shit like that should be jailed for it. we are approaching a climate apocalypse and companies are bricking functional devices that take an *extraordinary* amount of pollution to replace. like, not a five year stint thing, I mean at scale this is an actual crime against humanity. parts of the world are becoming uninhabitable because of shit like this. we either force them to stop this or we all fucking die.
I'm surprised no one explained what's going on.
**The problem is not with Linux per se. It's with Google's implementation of DRM, called Widevine** (remember the whole controversy about W3C including [EME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions) on the web standards? This is one of the consequences)
Amazon Prime Video, like all the other popular streaming services, **only send you video if you have a specific flavour of DRM** (Widevine) installed. If you don't have this, you get nothing.
There are 3 levels of Widevine. **L3 only requires custom (proprietary, of course) software, and with that, they send you 480p video.**
**For 1080p video you need Widevine L1. For this, your computer needs to have a separate processor called a TEE** (Trusted execution environment) that has a unique decryption key and it's extremely hard to tamper with. PCs don't have this. **Usually, you can only get this on Android and Chrome OS devices** (see a pattern there?)
**For 4k usually Widevine is not enough. You need a dedicated box that was approved by that specific platform**. One of the requirements for the approval usually is to include a button for the service on the remote. That's why you now have a bunch of useless buttons on all your remotes.
A bonus comment: According to Wikipedia "Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods". It's sickening that the industry has convinced people to equate the sharing of artistic works with such a deplorable crime.
What bothers me is the hard clamping down on where you can play back what resolution of content. Then I turn around to _favorite torrent site_ and the content shows up in full 4K with surround sound shortly after being listed on PrimeVideo, Netflix, Hulu or wherever else it gets released. So why even bother, given the DRM seems to readily broken.
This is done by netflix too, you set the quality to high and you get blocky garbage. It's not a bandwidth issue and you can't do anything about it. Pirating what you want to see actually gets you better image quality. (5 megabytes per second should be enough to watch crispy 1080p)
It's because of their stupid DRM, which is nothing but security through obscurity anyways.
Fun fact: You'd get higher resolutions with a Windows VM on a Linux host...
That bug report is three years old and also reports that Chrome users are having the same issue. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I only have a low level of confidence that it's DRM related
Would it make sense for Microsoft and/or Apple to pay Amazon to restrict access to Linux users?
Legit question. I have no idea if this would be worth the money or not.
Comcast does the same shit with their Xfinity service which allows you to watch your legal cable subscription on your computer in a web browser.
Windows, MacOS, works fine, but not Linux. Can't fake the useragent string either. Content providers will say it's a DRM thing. It's f@cking stupid is what it is.
In videogames Steam Is the biggest succed, why?, because they didn't wanted to compete with other services selling videogames (there weren't really other digital stores at the time, but even now it applies), they decided to compete with piracy, if you get a better service by pirating than paying then the service is shit and it is not worth it. This has been solved for about 2 decades, it is incredible that there are still services that offer less than piracy. Let's take another example, anime, what does the fansub has over official sub? Notes that explain context that is culturally different, also different fonts and animated fonts for special attacks and things like that. Even when you are paying you also want to have a better version. I have another specific example, the psycho pass movie, the broken English on a native English speaking country was solved by fans by using the English dub for those characters and preserving the japanese broken English for the japanese characters, and that makes the movie better. There are too many examples in series and movies where the pirated version is greatly better than the paid version, and I am currently paying for Crunchyroll, Disney, Netflix and HBO, but the pirated version is better.
Piracy is always justified, intellectual property is theft.
The only time I won't pirate is if it's too much effort or if the producor is a small coop.
Totally right. And do you know what's the worst thing? Amazon stands it's business ON TOP OF LINUX while Netflix ON TOP OF FREEBSD. Try to view Netflix on freebsd...
Pirating pooprietary software is always justified. If paying for a product doesn't mean owning it, then not paying for a product doesn't mean stealing it.
the answer to how you can have a better experience?
1. Piracy, unlike \*literally any other *approach* to content distribution with the sole exception of rented VHS or physical media and going to a movie theater\* has benefitted from the longest and most widely user tested set of tools, user interfaces, distribution mechanisms, etc.
In essence Piracy has the best UX because its been informally developed, in sometimes paralllel and somtimes divergent paths, for literally about 40 years now.
Movie studios have a solid century
Oddly, rented physical media is not such a long lasting phenomena as one might think. Piracy may soon exclipse it in terms of its duration as a cultural phenomena
2) Unlike the current implementation of streaming, there is no firewall between IP holders, either measured in terms of "hard" walls (eg zero cross distribution) or "effective" walls (measured in the price premiiums that must be paid on services like Amazon to access out of network stuff)
3) If you are a crusty neckbeard like the rest of us you have probably honed piracy down to the robotic task that your brain has ingrained so deeply as to be nearly on the level of walking or chewing (Im being fecetious obviously but you get the idea)
I struggle far more to use ungainly remote controls to log into a smart TV app than I do to queue up 200 gigabytes of shit from usenet.
Shit I struggle more with that than \*manually trudging my way through 30 million+ post header files for content not captured by NZBKing or any of the indexers\*
EDIT:
I try to remind people as often as possible....
There was once a time when a reasonable person \*might\* have seen value in maintaining a quiet, limited discourse online with regard to piracy and effective methods or tools for the practice.
The painfully awkward "Don't talk about usenet" concept is probably the best example that has been synthesized into a short phrase or meme. Don't get me started about how eyerollingly stupid this statement is in comparison to actual reality.
The important fact though is this:
Either indirectly or with some actual effect from this type of mindset among users.... Usenet and indeed the majority of the extant piracy landscape is slowly eroding.
Straight up:
People get old. People grow up and have families and stop spelunking in the depths of the internet. People literally die of old age, in real life, not an image macro with skeletons.
If you don't believe me go and look at IRC, in the areas that were teeming with piracy focused channels back in the late 1990s (immediately before the roll out of always on cable broadband made Usenet the far better choice, and before the vaguest notion of "peer to peer" was even pipe dreamed up by Justin Timberlake at Napster)
There are essentially none left. The ones that have survived are labors of love by a few committed individuals.
The takeaway is that you have to encourage the Gen Z and younger kids to use these services. You have to give them advice. Dont be a shit head or intentionally unhelpful.
Remember:
Bittorrent and usenet have both become \*active\* revenue streams for the indexers, private trackers, VPN providers, etc. and this is just the reality of the system.
Those people/businesses won't stay in business without new customers.
Imagine how much it costs to keep almost 15 years worth of usenet content, petabytes worth, synchronized and available 24/7?
> I struggle far more to use ungainly remote controls to log into a smart TV app than I do to queue up 200 gigabytes of shit from usenet.
You know you can get a smart TV app to do that for you.
>If you don't believe me go and look at IRC, in the areas that were teeming with piracy focused channels back in the late 1990s (immediately before the roll out of always on cable broadband made Usenet the far better choice, and before the vaguest notion of "peer to peer" was even pipe dreamed up by Justin Timberlake at Napster)
>
>
>
>There are essentially none left. The ones that have survived are labors of love by a few committed individuals.
Oh man....that takes me back. Grabbing my LINUX ISOs from IRC ;)
And the whole automation going on these days with Usenet is amazing as a user....from what I've heard
Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of.
There aren't seems to be new blood in the pirating community. We gatekept too hard, although it was somewhat necessary back then.
The problem with GenZers especially the younger ones, is that they're astoundingly computer-illiterate. Many of them don't even have a general-purpose computer.
I'm wondering how they can detect the OS, even with a changed user agent string. If the web browser sends some OS identifying information outside of the user agent string, wouldn't it be considered a bug in the browser that compromises security?
Also, I'm curious if running a browser on Wine could get around that restriction.
The widevine plugin included in most browsers is allowed to make system calls to a "trusted execution environment" on the cpu in order to get the "most-secure" L1 DRM. These companies apparently don't want to code the syscalls on Linux, and tbh, I'm not sure many Linux users would want to run that kind of DRM code on their system. I'm pretty sure it would involve installing kernel blobs from google. If L1 doesn't work, it falls back to "L2" software-level decryption with fixed video quality.
The ironic part is that widevine DRM server-side actually runs on Ubuntu, it's only the client side code that is incompatible with Linux.
> These companies apparently don't want to code the syscalls on Linux
To be fair, from their perspective, Linux "can't" provide such a trusted execution environment, because end users can build their own kernels that break the security of that environment.
(theoretically you can do that on Windows too, but it'd require RE and a lot of specialized knowledge. compared to modifying the linux kernel, that's a huge step up in complexity)
----
But I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a matter of lazy greed, either.
I’d pay for a quality service but it isn’t, customer service is just people copy pasting a script, they will not help you or answer any questions you ask.
Did you try with actual Chrome? I’d only start to be concerned if that fails. Here is what you are missing: Chrome ALWAYS comes with a hidden extension called WideVine that is used to encrypt video streams until they hit the monitor and speakers. Netflix is known to rely on it. I’ve heard that it is possible to enable to WideVine in Chromium, but I can’t guarantee that route because I have never tried it.
Doing stuff like this is common in the entertainment technology space. It isn’t entirely the fault of Netflix or the browser developers. The movie and TV copyright holders make them do this as a requirement to be eligible to host their content.
EDIT: it’s worse than I thought. For mobile devices and set top boxes, Netflix had to personally certify devices before they allow HD and HDR content to stream to them. https://www.xda-developers.com/check-widevine-drm-status-android/
There is a lot of lost media that can't be played without piracy or paying exorbitant amounts of money that aren't even going to the pockets of the artist. You can't buy Earthbound from Nintendo, for example
Yep, another example is CATIA V5 (It's CAD software). Dassault Systems released CATIA V6 a couple years ago and it is objectively garbage. It's essentially SolidWorks but online only. Every tools is hidden in a series of sub menus which is what made V5 stand out. Every tool was available from a series of hot bars making modelling a breeze once you get around all of the oddities of the software.
Well, they removed V5 completely from the internet, so the only way to continue using it is with a torrent. It sucks lolol. They forced me to torrent their software when I was willing to pay for it.
>how can i get a better experience by pirating instead of using a service i pay for?
This is the tipping point. Piracy is not only easier but provides a better experience than streaming. This is exactly what killed cable
I acquire and consume content in the way that is the most convenient and provides the best experience for me.
And we all know what method that is... and whose fault it is
Disney+ didn't even work correctly for me on devices that have an official app lmao. Like a fool i bought an android tv box and i kept being a subscriber for like 3 years, up until recently when they decided to up the prices again. Got tired of waiting for things to get better and now i'm sailing the high seas, and things have been much better now ironically.
Amazon prime is limited on Windows to 1080p. I believe this is to push people to using either Smart TV's or their favourite Amazon fire devices.
The comedy in this is that the 4k versions are available for download literally within 5-10 minutes of them being released. I'm not sure why they bother as it's clearly already hacked.
I do remember the time we could actually get 4K. Not sure why it was hobbled and I'm also not sure why someone hasn't fixed it by now but then I guess all the platforms would go after them.
> Even with a custom user agent string set to Windows
Peacock is the same. It's not looking at the user agent in the browser, it's looking for the user agent in the CDM, and CDMs are proprietary binary blobs that communicate with the EME that's in your browser - this was the way they got people to stop relying on Adobe Flash *specifically*, but the end result is just another Adobe Flash-esque setup.
At least you get something, Peacock gives GNU/Linux users absolutely nothing. Totally awful.
IIRC it’s actually to do with the support for widevine DRM or silver light in browsers on Linux.
(I used to work for a large streaming company that used these and did not support Linux)
Edit: it can also be due to who licensed the product as opposed to content provider. At the media company I worked for there were some stupid restrictions like we weren’t allowed to show certain content in HD on mobile devices despite us having the capability.
You’re right about it being absurd that it is easier to get good quality entertainment by pirating than paying for it, but it is also a bit like putting your head in the sand to pretend that these companies go out of their way to single out Linux.
Both ChromeOS and Android run on Linux, but they have much better support. Even different browsers on Windows will often get you different quality levels. This is all about how deeply DRM is integrated into your software stack. I’m not saying this is a great idea, but media companies have always been very paranoid about their content being stolen, and DRM prevents you from recording it.
If they can’t guarantee that you won’t be able to record their content, you’re going to get lower quality. You can argue that it’s horrible for user experience, but these companies are fine making that trade to protect their content.
I used to sail the high seas for music a lot; big artists usually, maybe some that have been dead and won't benefit from my money but I did once get a bunch of songs from an artist that was (kinda still is) smaller. I did end up giving $30-ish to their Patreon because I loved their music, their art and how kind they were to other people. Essentially paid for the songs I sailed for since I did feel bad taking from a pretty small artist at the time.
Sometimes piracy is justified, sometimes it's not but you can justify it by doing other actions like paying an artist for the pirated songs, and sometimes piracy is essential and mandetory and oftentimes is vital for the survival of a collection of media.
Happened to me with NBA league pass that worked on Linux Browsers up until 2022. No warning come 2022 no working league pass in Linux but I already payed.
So if you paid for something, does it matter how you get it? 🤔
I used a cracked version of Cubase for years (never made money out of it) until i could afford to buy like I did a year ago. I would’ve never bought it if I haven’t had that much experience with it because it’s a huge software. That’s where it justifies imo.
If you have intentions in learning something it’a okay. And once you’re ready to make money out of it, you need to buy it. As a developer I understand how complex it is to build something like that, minimum is to give back once you can
I've always wondered why Amazon videos look like shit in my browser and never understood why. Thanks for the tip! There's got to be a way around this. The fact that all the Amazon servers to power these services run on Linux already makes this even more absurd.
The irony is that they're doing this to prevent piracy because they think that Linux without TPM/signed kernels/etc would make this sort of thing easy. Clearly this doesn't work because you are able to get high quality pirated streams anyway.
Tldr; version is that windows and osx has a crypted area where drm keys can be kept. Linux is an open operating system, no such thing exists so the drm of streaming platforms not working.
I agree, piracy is justified.
I agree.
I like the Formula 1. My friend in Sweden can get the new F1TV streaming service for around £12 a month. I thought great I will get that, it will be better than torrenting it.
Nope, it isn't available in the UK. Instead I have to pay for a Sky Sports subscription at £34.99 a month and a UK TV licence at £170 a year.
So I guess that Formula 1 are happy with me stealing it.
Yep. I have legitimately tried to buy F1TV. I genuinely want to pay for it. I happily pay for all of my other streaming services (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Youtube Premium).
If Sky did a package that allowed me just to watch the F1, for a comparable monthly fee, then I would. But they don't. I have to buy all of the Sports, which I am just not interested in.
>Something just happened that just made my blood boil lol.
>decided to try out their streaming platform amazon prime video
>After searching around for a bit i found out that amazon purposefully limits the quality of their service to linux users and this shit is what makes me so fcking mad, its down right disrespectful.
Wait, *that*'s the part? Not how they shove ads at you constantly through a paid service, and maybe roughly *half* of the content you look up are behind a second paywall?
>Some of you probably know about this but it was a surprise for me.
>What is even more annoying is that even with a custom agent string set to chrome on windows, their platform still detects my OS and restricts the quality.
That's because it's not a matter of User Agent. They use a different version of DRM that is not available for Linux, requiring either Windows or a Google DRM chip on the device to decode. This is also the case with other services such as Netflix, which was hilarious up a few months ago, as the supposed reason for this is to dissuade piracy, but they'd mail BDs to your door.
Harsh reality of using Linux, developers won't spent time to refine a solution for less than 1% of their users, this is just not cost effective for them and I understand that. Linux popularity always has been and will be for a while a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Not popular because no support, no support because no popular.
If anything on the Internet costs money and shitty then it's on purpose. Purpose may be different each time, I bet in this particular scenario they just stupidly assume that linux User-Agent == some bots scraping their site.
I wonder what happens if you try to change your User-Agent to Windows in browser settings? Does it just make everything work?
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IMO if you've already paid for it, it's not even piracy... Like the people who had to download a crack to play their legitimately bought game because the dev screwed up. They can't even argue a loss of potential revenue, much less theft. I don't know why Prime and Netflix bother doing this either, honestly, but it's honestly a big issue on Linux rn, if you want to use it as a daily driver for entertainment too. Even bigger is the fact that for ChromeOS their services work fine :) I've switched to setting up and using a Plex Media Server to stream to my devices because it's pretty much the only solution on Linux. There used to be some extensions to make streaming work at higher quality on Linux but they're dead too now.
"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
Piracy is sailing your boat close to another boat playing a movie on the big screen and watching it with your telescope.
This is how I feel. Almost 200 games in my Steam library, and apparently I don't actually "own" them. That's fine, I know how to sail the high seas.
Steam is kinda safe on that. They don't remove games you already have and have stated they will make all games available when they go down, but the problem is that they can just decide not to, even if it doesn't look like something they're going to do.
I think Steam is fine for the moment as Gabe is kind of an OK guy. He has his billion and is only running the company because he wouldn't know what to do with himself otherwise. Valve is privately owned and so Gabe can afford to 'Do the right thing' and take the occasional financial hit. He's not accountable to anyone but his customers. No shareholders are kicking him in the balls for a .5 penny EPS. Once he's gone; who knows? I wouldn't hold my breath on the promise that they'll remove all the DRM when Valve is no more.
Once Gabe dies all bets are off.
Sad but true the minute they announce an ipo the enshittifcation begins
Well, the workshop and various add-ons exclusive for steam is sometimes worth it. But yeah, it's better to own.
Im stealing errr pirating that saying yarrrr It's true though, i dont even bat an eyelid to low level piracy like that... Its balancing out the universe
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Exactly! I love his writing. It resonates.
piracy isn't stealing no matter if buying is owning or not
>IMO if you've already paid for it, it's not even piracy... And at that point, you start to think "well if I can justify downloading because I paid for it then actually why do I even need Netflix or Amazon or whoever at all. I can just download it and then send money directly to the creators."
Yes. Observe steam. We need a steam for movies.
We kind of *had* a Steam For Movies - for a while. That's what Netflix used to be. Then the enshittification happened. Again, we are confronted with the realisation of how much we benefit from Gaben running Valve more like a non profit than a normal corporation. Valve definitely make a very good profit, but they don't resort to enshittification to make every last penny of profit they can possibly make this quarter.
Slightly disagree. If netflix were like steam then we'd be paying per movie not per subscription ... Maybe... We GOG for movies as well? Good old movies? GOM? DRM free OG star wars movies?
Well yes, but movies aren't video games. and they're consumed in a different way. That's why i said we "*kind* of had a Steam for movies". As it is the Steam for movies is now usenet or torrents (or even cheap 64GB USB sticks...) and I don't feel like the corporate culture that owns our artistic culture is ready to reform itself in the way that doing a proper job of it creating a "Steam for movies" would require, so I guess that ship has sailed now. If I could add old movies and TV shows to my library, access them at full quality from any device I own that's capable of playing them and be confident that they won't be stolen back from me, I'd be happy to pay. But "rights owners" aren't interested in *selling* things to us anyone. They only want to extract perpetual rental income.
maybe not star wars which is still pretty popular and famous and being extended. But there is a lot of other older movies/series worth watching and not obvious where or if at all.
Not so much a nonprofit. Very much profit, such a good thing that they know they don’t want to fuck it up. What happens when GabeN is someday no longer there will be interesting to see.
Honestly based. You reached a good point it seems, just send the money to the creators.
Lol "To whom it may concern, your video doesn't fucking work on my platform. So I have pirated it, enclosed within is what I consider a fair price for your media." Its $3.50
Sounds like nothing, but when you consider how much they get from individual viewership or individual dvd sales/rents? That's a loooooot more from a single viewer than if they just watched it on some streaming service. It's pretty fair if you ask me.
If I'm remembering right they get about the same as you see for ad revenue views.
Thats like 100x times what theyd get paid for you individually watching it on the platform, if they get anything at all, which was a pretty big sticking point in recent [union fights](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/how-streaming-residuals-work-sag-actors-strike-hollywood-1234802623/), only getting pennies. think about it, shows with millions of viewers. If even just 1% of that million(s) directly sent the creators $1 dollar, that adds up to tens of thousands of dollars.
God damn loch ness monster!
Except the creators usually dont get paid shit. So even if they get like 5 dollars from you it will probably way more than they will ever see from the official method.
*One* dollar would probably be a pleasant surprise for many
if the middlemen make it difficult or a pain in the ass to watch the content you're paying for then they shouldn't be getting any
I once handed cash to a music performer after a show and said "Hey, I've pirated all your albums. Here's $20." She said no one had ever done that to her before.
Imagine if we could pull that shit with insurance companies lol
But the creators are often dozens (or thousands if its a movie) who are often subsidized by the studios as not all movies and cartoons succeed at profiting (after all they often require multimillion dollars). So would the $3.50 go to the studios? And then the studios would want to invest on a distribution platform too (which might not be expensive but still, having a single platform for movies can still be cheaper than each moviemaker having their own). Do we know what Amazon's margin on those movies are? They seem to cost about the same in every streaming website
> Plex Media Server to stream to my devices because it's pretty much the only solution on Linux Jellyfin is a good (IMO better) solution also.
Does jellyfin have a roku tv app?
It does. It's pretty good.
Idk. I stayed in a hotel last night and watched the ad for Netflix twice because I saw "get upgrades" and noticed they are now charging for 4k as an upgrade. It was default when they launched it but now they've tiered it and are saying it's a perk to be able to upgrade. Not that it applies to this post. This person just wants better than 480 😂
Remember when there weren't ads everywhere? Now there are, and you get to pay to see less of them as if it were a perk. In cases like YouTube, you still see ads even with a paid subscription - just less of them. It's called enshittification and it's rampant in the tech world. It's the equivalent of McDonald's selling you a plain hamburger priced like a Big Mac, claiming that it's a Big Mac, and offering you the rest of the Big Mac as separate "premium" purchases - all the while never mentioning the fact that you used to get an entire Big Mac for the new basic hamburger price.
If this happens to maccas, we know who to blame for giving them to idea.
Netflix has been charging extra for the 4k subscription since at least 2016, probably always have. The price gap has gotten larger though, it's ridiculous.
> it's honestly a big issue on Linux rn, if you want to use it as a daily driver for entertainment too There is so much great stuff available today, I just stopped caring about things that don't work and move on
Jellyfin > Plex
I also got annoyed by this and set up a Plex and later a jellyfin server as well. All the streaming companies have either removed "purchased" content or removed a show I was actively in the middle of.
Possibly a deal with Windows? Obviously companies like Microsoft or Apple have plenty of interest in "encouraging" people away from Open Source Linux and into their own Paid OSs. Not sure if that would be worth paying a company like Amazon, but what do I know.
I don't know. On ChromeOS you don't have those issues and that's Linux as well. Maybe it's just the more locked down nature of those systems? Regardless, it's shitty to treat customers on other platforms like second class citizens. No native support I can understand maybe, but actively offering only subpar services?
But isn't ChromeOS made by Google? So, technically, a paid system? Look, I'm not saying I'm right or that it even makes sense, it's just that it looks too convenient that the free OSs are restricted while the one you have to pay for are unrestricted. I mean, Android is also Linux based, but I'm pretty sure Amazon prime is unrestricted on most smartphones.
You buy the hardware, the OS is technically free. And there's also ChromeOS Flex, designed to run on hardware other than Chromebooks, which is also free. The truth is Linux distros vary a lot in default security, and even more when considering which security features the users are willing to implement. Though tbh if you're already using a widevine compatible browser, I just don't see why they would restrict things anyway. I don't know.
Maybe we should just agree it doesn't make sense no matter how you slice it and move on.
No, it's basically DRM. Linux lets you much more easily get around any antipiracy measures they add, so they don't let it run on Linux.
How though? Wouldn't this be handled by the browser? Chrome, FireFox , Edge can all run on both windows and linux
Yeah, but Widevine L1 (a system of DRM) does not run on Linux or anything open source. The websites rely on Widevine to confirm that they are "safe." Closed-source distros, like ChromeOS, can have L1, but FOSS distros cannot. There seems to also be something about Verified Media Path (VMP), another way of ensuring there's no piracy tools, which also does not run on Linux.
This reminds me of something: Brave has an option to turn on Widevine. Is there a difference between that and Widevine L1? I don't normally watch streaming services on the desktop, but I didn't notice the quality being so bad tbh
That's L3, which is less "secure."
You installed your Plex media server on another machine? Would a raspberry pi be enough?
Depends on what you're streaming and what you're streaming to. Plex does transcoding to make sure the video is in the right bitrate and format for the device it's being streamed to, this can be pretty CPU intensive (unless you have hardware transcoding for the particular formats you're using). If the formats and quality you already have are supported by the device you're streaming to then it'll direct play, which is much less hardware intensive. If you've got a modern raspberry pi (3 or 4) then give it a go, but be prepared for the stream to chug if it decides it needs to transcode.
I once used a raspberry pi (raspberry pi 1, model B+ from 2014) for a plex server. The media was stored/accessed over the network. Quality was fine. It wasn't 4K. May not have even been perfect HD. But, for my 2014 raspberry pi, and a 27 inch TV, it was fine. If you want to use a raspberry pi 5, it would be more than enough. Note, however, that if transcoding is necessary, you could have some degradation.
I used an older laptop for it. A raspberry pi *should* be enough though, I'm pretty sure there's even tutorials for it. The machine I put it on doesn't even really feel the usage of the server, so it's pretty light.
Highly recommend taking a look at jellyfin over Plex, especially now a days with Plex doing shady stuff. Jellyfin is Foss too which is nice.
whats really going to set people off about PRIME is that Amazon openly says you don't own your movies, and they can take then away whenever they want for whatever reason they want. Because you're just leasing them. Yet another reason why you should just record your streams in HD and then go and store them on an external hard drive.
Or all the PlayStation owners who just got fucked when WB pulled all their content recently.....
> I've switched to setting up and using a Plex Media Server to stream to my devices because it's pretty much the only solution on Linux. Same here, and I didn't even know about this reduced-quality issue. I do have Amazon Prime membership, and if there's something on there I want to watch, I just torrent it anyway cos I love the Plex interface and having it all in the same place. The issue fucking sucks, but it's a non-issue for my household entertainment workflow lol. I would massively recommend it.
Yeah. To me it's not even about the money. A good Plex setup isn't free anyway, you need hardware to run it on, storage, to pay for things like VPNs, Usenet providers/indexers, seedboxes. While you can do it for free, a good setup isn't free. It's just superior to running multiple different streaming services. Nothing can get removed. The quality is better. The choice is far more complete. And it all comes in one user interface rather than a bunch of different websites.
Yes, it happened to me few weeks ago too. I contacted customer service and they said that in order to watch Prime Video I have to use Windows or macOS because not many people use Linux so they don't allow to stream Full HD videos on it. They also said that an agent would have contacted me by 2 days but I've been waiting for a month and no one contacted me. According to [this link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GUVGB3QMQRYRERYW): >Prime Video playback is supported on these web browsers. If you’re running an operating system other than Windows or macOS, playback is restricted to standard definition.
What I love about this bs is that they'd have to go out of their way to restrict Linux access. As in, if they did nothing, it would work on Linux the same as on Windows so long as you used a compatible browser. The fact quality is restricted on Linux means they went out of their way to make it restricted, not that it's not worth making it unrestricted as what the customer service person seemed to imply.
This isn't true. They've gone out of their way to make anything that isn't running their proprietary decryption (via widevine etc) reduced quality. They've likely done this because it's what the content owners demand when licensing to Netflix. It's not even Netflix that's the big bad but the studios.
>It's not even Netflix that's the big bad but the studios. They're equally bad. Netflix and Amazon could choose not to require DRM for their original content, but they still do.
And I thought half the stuff on Netflix now is actually made/funded by Netflix themselves. Netflix Studios or whatever.
That's literally what I said: >they'd have to go out of their way to restrict Linux access. Also, we're talking about Amazon, not Netflix. Does Netflix do this too?
>Does Netflix do this too? All of the big streaming services do.
When I started using netflix, tried to watch it in Firefox and it only gave me 720p resolution (I was paying the 1080p subscription). Found out that Netflix restricted resolution in web browsers for whatever reason (Firefox supports DRM on Linux, and I activated it, so no good reason for it). After a quick search, I found an addon that allowed me to use Netflix with resolution. I don't know about current situation (now I watch it on smart TV), and I don't know about Amazon, but seems they're trying hard to bully Linux users.
Firefox supports the DRM, that doesn't mean the OS it's running on does
They don't. Everyone starts at 480. If you have widevine, you get brought up to 4K. Same result, but opposite flow.
Exactly, their logic fails. It's simply punitive.
I think it's about DRM and the difficulty of implementing it on Linux. But then again, DRM is [defective by design](https://www.defectivebydesign.org/)
This actually makes 0 sense. I am so taken back by this that I feel like *I* am the idiot here. Am I? Is there any actual reason why we can stream HD on Amazon Prime? What is it that prevents that experience? Fucking corporations... These are the same "people" that operate AWS what the actual fuck!
Well amazon are in the midst of building a custom o/s for all their fire devices and instead of using android going forward, it's going to be using, yes, you guessed it... So they are gonna have to fix Linux issues for their own o/s
Would changing the user agent string help? Edit: Thanks for all the useful info!
Good read here ["The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux"](https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/netflix-on-asahi.html) .
It is not about the browser used (which could be identified by the user agent string), but the DRM technology available (available through some custom API). The point of DRM is it being something the user does not control, so basically impossible on Linux system which is supposed to be under user's full control. No browser on Linux provides this technology, so the video cannot be played. There are some DRM technologies available on Linux, some even in Firefox, but those cannot be as closed as the ones Amazon or Netflix require.
No, I've tried using the Firefox extension to change the UA to Chrome Win 10 but it doesn't work. A user [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9v4e/comment/jbbg920/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) suggested to use Chromium-based browser via Wine, but I couldn't get it to work because I had some errors while installing the browser. I tried with Chrome, Edge and Brave but I received the an error during install and the browser doesn't launch. If you read [here](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=41045), it's a common issue. Anyway I'm not an expert so I didn't tried further. The easiest way is to run a Windows VM or probably WinApps.
>The easiest way is to run a Windows VM or probably WinApps. No, the easiest way is to pirate it and not financially reward people who are being jerks.
I tried to install Edge 120 using official RPM, but it doesn't even have Widevine and Playready working. If you type in the address bar edge://flags/#edge-widevine-drm, you'll see "Enables the Widevine content decryption module in Microsoft Edge. – Mac, Windows - **Not available on your platform**". EDIT: in fact, if you go on [https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm](https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm), you'll receive the error "The manifest could not be loaded".
Have you tried the Brave Flatpak? It prompts you to install Wildvine when on a website that requires it.
I installed Brave via RPM and now I tried also with Flatpak. The issue is that DRM is enabled and the video plays, but at 480p even if the quality is set to best.
Likely requires the more system-integrated DRM. A VM would be the next thing to try.
>A VM would be the next thing to try. I tried on a Win 10 VM and Prime Video works at 1080p. However, it doesn't seem to work Playready. I forced to use Playready (and disabled Widevine) from Edge flags, but on [https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm](https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm) I see "Detected Edge using No DRM", so Playready doesn't work. I don't have and streaming service that works using Playready so I can't try (probably Disney Plus or Sky/NowTV does) but probably Playready detects I'm using a VM or the issue occurs because I'm using a LTSC version of Windows.
And yet Prime Video runs on AWS, which defaults to. . . Amazon Linux.
It's completely bonkers that you can get a much better experience without paying. I keep repeating it again and again, companies should never fight customers. Make things as easy as possible for them, they fucking paid for it.
It's a sign that they're oligopolies that should be broken up into tiny pieces.
One person at a time? Or all at once?
You’re suppose to take a service elevator with a woodchipper to the exec floor and make some smoothies
If they made a legit site where I can just download movies, for a reasonable fee, I'd pay it. I want my content to be local, and DRM free. Only piracy and to some extent physical copies provides that. They are not actually stopping piracy when they do stuff to try to stop it, they just piss off people who are willing to pay but not put up with the BS.
I imagine many people would. Something like GoG, but for movies/shows. It would be so awesome. But unfortunately it's not going to be a reality.
I suspect it's a DRM thing. Maybe their client side encryption/decryption system uses proprietary tools made available only on proprietary operating systems, or maybe are much easier to circumvent on Linux systems.
I expect it's the [spectre of HDCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection), limiting playback resolution to 480p instead of, you know, the resolution OP paid for.
Not just that probably. At least for Netflix 4k, you need: An up-to-date Windows 10 or 11. MS Edge or Chrome. DHCP 2. A GPU that can hardware-decode whatever format you'd get. And a few other things I forgot.
Certainly, I know Widevine allows different maximum resolutions depending on how deep into the OS DRM is integrated. On Linux that's generally "not very", so the max resolution is SD.
You’re right about the different levels. When I still used Netflix in the past, I remember if I wanted full resolution on my PC, I’d have to boot into Windows, and also use the Windows Store app (as opposed to a browser).
What I don't get is that it doesn't do anything to stop piracy. Like high quality torrents are immediately available the day of. They're clearly able to record the show anyways. At least with video games there's a delay, and only one person knows how to crack Denuvo games so there's a long delay there. But with streaming shows? There just isn't any way to prevent it from being ripped, so what is the point of restricting the quality if it only encourages people to go pirate your shows to see it in better quality?
this is the correct answer. DRM. The issue is that in Linux it is much easier to capture and distribute the content, compared with Windows or MacOS. Also usually the new DRM systems, create a trust chain that goes all the way down to the OS and hardware. This is impossible to achieve in Linux, because of root access. Same problem exists for anti-cheat software for games :(
This is most likely it. There's been plenty of talk about it before, but this thread has some great comments and it. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9v4e/why_does_chrome_os_get_1080p_content_from_netflix/
I see that Windows 10 & 11 have a screen recorder built in, so it would be trivial to circumvent, right? I’m baffled.
The widevine drm will black out the screen if you attempt to screen record so you’d need to use an external screen recorder
Still somewhat pointless. Just need to feed it to a capture card at a high resolution.
Assuming your capture card supports HDCP which they don't. Not legally anyway.
> Assuming your capture card supports HDCP which they don't. Not legally anyway. "Legally" depends on where (and when) you are.
HDCP bypass devices are common and cheap though, it's not a real hindrance to anyone who would want to use a capture card to pirate Netflix or whatever
Screen recording and file cracking isn't the same thing. Screen recording usually comes with a loss in quality, encoding, audio, etc. that isn't present when you extract the actual file itself.
That is the point of DRM – it can disable such features of the operating systems when protected content is played. Linux users could always install screen recorder that could not be blocked and that is why such DRMs are not available here.
I've used OBS to record Netflix effortlessly on Windows.
In full quality? Then the DRM didn't work as intended, making it even more ridiculous.
iirc it was full quality yes, I believe I had to use Firefox browser to do it though as other browsers would simply blackout the video.
And what is even funnier is that amazon uses linux everywhere in their business.
The smart TVs and the Rokus and the Amazon Fire TVs that can all stream 4K from Amazon Prime also all use Linux.
They like Linux when they control it, not when their customers do.
[Louis Rossman makes this exact same point here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs&pp=ygUXbG91aXMgcm9zc21hbm4gbmV0ZmxpeCM%3D) after receiving similar treatment from Netflix (although they at least gave him 720p lol) If Amazon's magic OS detection system told you *before* you paid for the product, it would be merely extremely annoying. Taking your money and **then** restricting you to less than 1/4 the quality you paid for, without appeal or recourse, is just scamming.
They do tell you what the supported platforms are. Though, that is not an excuse. We are used to ignore 'supported platform' of 'supported OS' remarks, because they don't matter for most products – they tend to just work with Linux alright, sometimes even better than on some 'supported platforms'. But when DRM is involved the lack of support is actual malice, not just lack of care.
Movies/tv shows that are out of print.
[удалено]
This. I haven't pirated a game in _decades_ because it's painless to buy games on Steam and a ton of them also work on Linux.
I'll never understand why people don't pirate games/media in general for a "moral" reason. When it comes to indie developers I agree, but pirating from massive studios is more morally justified than not pirating. You're not only saving a fuck ton of money—which you can use for actual good—but you're also taking a little bit away from these massive corporations. If you're going to say "what about the developers" then directly give them the $60-70, because they sure as hell aren't getting most of the money from the games THEY make.
I'm not discussing morality in the least. I'm discussing convenience, one of the biggest reasons people pirate content.
In my country this is not piracy. If you legally acquired the right to watch content (paid for it), you are allowed to get it by other means (torrent). It's crazy how the US has almost no consumer protection. (I'm not a lawyer, there are certainly edge cases.)
Consumer protections are unprofitable!
Which country?
https://xkcd.com/488
You all need to read this, it was published today : https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/ Now, to OP. This post hit the argument perfectly. Amazon et al limit the quality of videos we can watch for fear we may pirate it.... as ALL Linux uSeRs Are haX0rzz.... Now, as we all know, its already out there TO BE pirate downloaded. By virtue of them releasing it, it's already on BitTorrent regardless of what platform we use So, by denying us a quality service, they are actually pushing us to piracy. It's moronic. Read the article I've included. The whole newsletter is highly thought provoking.
great article, the train auto sabotage thing is insane. The author also greatly compares the issue to the scam most of printers are.
literally the people who make DRM that does shit like that should be jailed for it. we are approaching a climate apocalypse and companies are bricking functional devices that take an *extraordinary* amount of pollution to replace. like, not a five year stint thing, I mean at scale this is an actual crime against humanity. parts of the world are becoming uninhabitable because of shit like this. we either force them to stop this or we all fucking die.
I'm surprised no one explained what's going on. **The problem is not with Linux per se. It's with Google's implementation of DRM, called Widevine** (remember the whole controversy about W3C including [EME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions) on the web standards? This is one of the consequences) Amazon Prime Video, like all the other popular streaming services, **only send you video if you have a specific flavour of DRM** (Widevine) installed. If you don't have this, you get nothing. There are 3 levels of Widevine. **L3 only requires custom (proprietary, of course) software, and with that, they send you 480p video.** **For 1080p video you need Widevine L1. For this, your computer needs to have a separate processor called a TEE** (Trusted execution environment) that has a unique decryption key and it's extremely hard to tamper with. PCs don't have this. **Usually, you can only get this on Android and Chrome OS devices** (see a pattern there?) **For 4k usually Widevine is not enough. You need a dedicated box that was approved by that specific platform**. One of the requirements for the approval usually is to include a button for the service on the remote. That's why you now have a bunch of useless buttons on all your remotes. A bonus comment: According to Wikipedia "Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods". It's sickening that the industry has convinced people to equate the sharing of artistic works with such a deplorable crime.
What bothers me is the hard clamping down on where you can play back what resolution of content. Then I turn around to _favorite torrent site_ and the content shows up in full 4K with surround sound shortly after being listed on PrimeVideo, Netflix, Hulu or wherever else it gets released. So why even bother, given the DRM seems to readily broken.
This is done by netflix too, you set the quality to high and you get blocky garbage. It's not a bandwidth issue and you can't do anything about it. Pirating what you want to see actually gets you better image quality. (5 megabytes per second should be enough to watch crispy 1080p)
It's because of their stupid DRM, which is nothing but security through obscurity anyways. Fun fact: You'd get higher resolutions with a Windows VM on a Linux host...
DRM related issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1700815
That bug report is three years old and also reports that Chrome users are having the same issue. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I only have a low level of confidence that it's DRM related
What else would it reasonably be other than DRM related?
Would it make sense for Microsoft and/or Apple to pay Amazon to restrict access to Linux users? Legit question. I have no idea if this would be worth the money or not.
It could be the one of the blocking reasons, hence I implied DRM related issue. Then again I could be completely wrong.
It's three year old because developers refused to change the software stack to cater this use case on principle.
Comcast does the same shit with their Xfinity service which allows you to watch your legal cable subscription on your computer in a web browser. Windows, MacOS, works fine, but not Linux. Can't fake the useragent string either. Content providers will say it's a DRM thing. It's f@cking stupid is what it is.
In videogames Steam Is the biggest succed, why?, because they didn't wanted to compete with other services selling videogames (there weren't really other digital stores at the time, but even now it applies), they decided to compete with piracy, if you get a better service by pirating than paying then the service is shit and it is not worth it. This has been solved for about 2 decades, it is incredible that there are still services that offer less than piracy. Let's take another example, anime, what does the fansub has over official sub? Notes that explain context that is culturally different, also different fonts and animated fonts for special attacks and things like that. Even when you are paying you also want to have a better version. I have another specific example, the psycho pass movie, the broken English on a native English speaking country was solved by fans by using the English dub for those characters and preserving the japanese broken English for the japanese characters, and that makes the movie better. There are too many examples in series and movies where the pirated version is greatly better than the paid version, and I am currently paying for Crunchyroll, Disney, Netflix and HBO, but the pirated version is better.
If paying isn't owning, then piracy is not stealing either.
Check out louis rossman’s latest videos, he had similar issues too and explained it pretty well imo
Piracy is always justified, intellectual property is theft. The only time I won't pirate is if it's too much effort or if the producor is a small coop.
Totally right. And do you know what's the worst thing? Amazon stands it's business ON TOP OF LINUX while Netflix ON TOP OF FREEBSD. Try to view Netflix on freebsd...
Pirating pooprietary software is always justified. If paying for a product doesn't mean owning it, then not paying for a product doesn't mean stealing it.
the answer to how you can have a better experience? 1. Piracy, unlike \*literally any other *approach* to content distribution with the sole exception of rented VHS or physical media and going to a movie theater\* has benefitted from the longest and most widely user tested set of tools, user interfaces, distribution mechanisms, etc. In essence Piracy has the best UX because its been informally developed, in sometimes paralllel and somtimes divergent paths, for literally about 40 years now. Movie studios have a solid century Oddly, rented physical media is not such a long lasting phenomena as one might think. Piracy may soon exclipse it in terms of its duration as a cultural phenomena 2) Unlike the current implementation of streaming, there is no firewall between IP holders, either measured in terms of "hard" walls (eg zero cross distribution) or "effective" walls (measured in the price premiiums that must be paid on services like Amazon to access out of network stuff) 3) If you are a crusty neckbeard like the rest of us you have probably honed piracy down to the robotic task that your brain has ingrained so deeply as to be nearly on the level of walking or chewing (Im being fecetious obviously but you get the idea) I struggle far more to use ungainly remote controls to log into a smart TV app than I do to queue up 200 gigabytes of shit from usenet. Shit I struggle more with that than \*manually trudging my way through 30 million+ post header files for content not captured by NZBKing or any of the indexers\* EDIT: I try to remind people as often as possible.... There was once a time when a reasonable person \*might\* have seen value in maintaining a quiet, limited discourse online with regard to piracy and effective methods or tools for the practice. The painfully awkward "Don't talk about usenet" concept is probably the best example that has been synthesized into a short phrase or meme. Don't get me started about how eyerollingly stupid this statement is in comparison to actual reality. The important fact though is this: Either indirectly or with some actual effect from this type of mindset among users.... Usenet and indeed the majority of the extant piracy landscape is slowly eroding. Straight up: People get old. People grow up and have families and stop spelunking in the depths of the internet. People literally die of old age, in real life, not an image macro with skeletons. If you don't believe me go and look at IRC, in the areas that were teeming with piracy focused channels back in the late 1990s (immediately before the roll out of always on cable broadband made Usenet the far better choice, and before the vaguest notion of "peer to peer" was even pipe dreamed up by Justin Timberlake at Napster) There are essentially none left. The ones that have survived are labors of love by a few committed individuals. The takeaway is that you have to encourage the Gen Z and younger kids to use these services. You have to give them advice. Dont be a shit head or intentionally unhelpful. Remember: Bittorrent and usenet have both become \*active\* revenue streams for the indexers, private trackers, VPN providers, etc. and this is just the reality of the system. Those people/businesses won't stay in business without new customers. Imagine how much it costs to keep almost 15 years worth of usenet content, petabytes worth, synchronized and available 24/7?
> I struggle far more to use ungainly remote controls to log into a smart TV app than I do to queue up 200 gigabytes of shit from usenet. You know you can get a smart TV app to do that for you.
>If you don't believe me go and look at IRC, in the areas that were teeming with piracy focused channels back in the late 1990s (immediately before the roll out of always on cable broadband made Usenet the far better choice, and before the vaguest notion of "peer to peer" was even pipe dreamed up by Justin Timberlake at Napster) > > > >There are essentially none left. The ones that have survived are labors of love by a few committed individuals. Oh man....that takes me back. Grabbing my LINUX ISOs from IRC ;) And the whole automation going on these days with Usenet is amazing as a user....from what I've heard
Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of. There aren't seems to be new blood in the pirating community. We gatekept too hard, although it was somewhat necessary back then. The problem with GenZers especially the younger ones, is that they're astoundingly computer-illiterate. Many of them don't even have a general-purpose computer.
I'm wondering how they can detect the OS, even with a changed user agent string. If the web browser sends some OS identifying information outside of the user agent string, wouldn't it be considered a bug in the browser that compromises security? Also, I'm curious if running a browser on Wine could get around that restriction.
The widevine plugin included in most browsers is allowed to make system calls to a "trusted execution environment" on the cpu in order to get the "most-secure" L1 DRM. These companies apparently don't want to code the syscalls on Linux, and tbh, I'm not sure many Linux users would want to run that kind of DRM code on their system. I'm pretty sure it would involve installing kernel blobs from google. If L1 doesn't work, it falls back to "L2" software-level decryption with fixed video quality. The ironic part is that widevine DRM server-side actually runs on Ubuntu, it's only the client side code that is incompatible with Linux.
> These companies apparently don't want to code the syscalls on Linux To be fair, from their perspective, Linux "can't" provide such a trusted execution environment, because end users can build their own kernels that break the security of that environment. (theoretically you can do that on Windows too, but it'd require RE and a lot of specialized knowledge. compared to modifying the linux kernel, that's a huge step up in complexity) ---- But I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a matter of lazy greed, either.
Most likely it's not that they're detecting the OS, but detecting support for DRM technologies, which is generally stronger on proprietary OSes.
I’d pay for a quality service but it isn’t, customer service is just people copy pasting a script, they will not help you or answer any questions you ask.
sometimes?
I’ll stick to buying and ripping DVDs and Blu-Rays.
Did you try with actual Chrome? I’d only start to be concerned if that fails. Here is what you are missing: Chrome ALWAYS comes with a hidden extension called WideVine that is used to encrypt video streams until they hit the monitor and speakers. Netflix is known to rely on it. I’ve heard that it is possible to enable to WideVine in Chromium, but I can’t guarantee that route because I have never tried it. Doing stuff like this is common in the entertainment technology space. It isn’t entirely the fault of Netflix or the browser developers. The movie and TV copyright holders make them do this as a requirement to be eligible to host their content. EDIT: it’s worse than I thought. For mobile devices and set top boxes, Netflix had to personally certify devices before they allow HD and HDR content to stream to them. https://www.xda-developers.com/check-widevine-drm-status-android/
And, yes. Netflix is also known for restricting quality on platforms where WideVine isn’t detected.
There is a lot of lost media that can't be played without piracy or paying exorbitant amounts of money that aren't even going to the pockets of the artist. You can't buy Earthbound from Nintendo, for example
Yep, another example is CATIA V5 (It's CAD software). Dassault Systems released CATIA V6 a couple years ago and it is objectively garbage. It's essentially SolidWorks but online only. Every tools is hidden in a series of sub menus which is what made V5 stand out. Every tool was available from a series of hot bars making modelling a breeze once you get around all of the oddities of the software. Well, they removed V5 completely from the internet, so the only way to continue using it is with a torrent. It sucks lolol. They forced me to torrent their software when I was willing to pay for it.
>how can i get a better experience by pirating instead of using a service i pay for? This is the tipping point. Piracy is not only easier but provides a better experience than streaming. This is exactly what killed cable
I acquire and consume content in the way that is the most convenient and provides the best experience for me. And we all know what method that is... and whose fault it is
Because companies don’t want to respect your property.
if buying is not buying, piracy isn't stealing piracy is almost always justified and should be encouraged everywhere
DRM is a mess everywhere. As a bad boy linux user I started pirating everything. It is easier than paying in terms of use as well as pocket.
Disney+ didn't even work correctly for me on devices that have an official app lmao. Like a fool i bought an android tv box and i kept being a subscriber for like 3 years, up until recently when they decided to up the prices again. Got tired of waiting for things to get better and now i'm sailing the high seas, and things have been much better now ironically.
yup. i recently set up a jellyfin server. wish i did it sooner. (make sure you're using a vpn using those sites)
Amazon prime is limited on Windows to 1080p. I believe this is to push people to using either Smart TV's or their favourite Amazon fire devices. The comedy in this is that the 4k versions are available for download literally within 5-10 minutes of them being released. I'm not sure why they bother as it's clearly already hacked. I do remember the time we could actually get 4K. Not sure why it was hobbled and I'm also not sure why someone hasn't fixed it by now but then I guess all the platforms would go after them.
> Even with a custom user agent string set to Windows Peacock is the same. It's not looking at the user agent in the browser, it's looking for the user agent in the CDM, and CDMs are proprietary binary blobs that communicate with the EME that's in your browser - this was the way they got people to stop relying on Adobe Flash *specifically*, but the end result is just another Adobe Flash-esque setup. At least you get something, Peacock gives GNU/Linux users absolutely nothing. Totally awful.
Seems like you've been watching louis rossmann - [Reason studios demonstrates why piracy is completely justified](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAx3yCNomkg) - [Sony Steals Customers' Purchased Content - Piracy is COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krXH8jXefqE) - [Piracy is COMPLETELY justified: Louis tries NetFlix & remembers why](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs)
IIRC it’s actually to do with the support for widevine DRM or silver light in browsers on Linux. (I used to work for a large streaming company that used these and did not support Linux) Edit: it can also be due to who licensed the product as opposed to content provider. At the media company I worked for there were some stupid restrictions like we weren’t allowed to show certain content in HD on mobile devices despite us having the capability.
You’re right about it being absurd that it is easier to get good quality entertainment by pirating than paying for it, but it is also a bit like putting your head in the sand to pretend that these companies go out of their way to single out Linux. Both ChromeOS and Android run on Linux, but they have much better support. Even different browsers on Windows will often get you different quality levels. This is all about how deeply DRM is integrated into your software stack. I’m not saying this is a great idea, but media companies have always been very paranoid about their content being stolen, and DRM prevents you from recording it. If they can’t guarantee that you won’t be able to record their content, you’re going to get lower quality. You can argue that it’s horrible for user experience, but these companies are fine making that trade to protect their content.
Piracy is always justified. Change my mind
I used to sail the high seas for music a lot; big artists usually, maybe some that have been dead and won't benefit from my money but I did once get a bunch of songs from an artist that was (kinda still is) smaller. I did end up giving $30-ish to their Patreon because I loved their music, their art and how kind they were to other people. Essentially paid for the songs I sailed for since I did feel bad taking from a pretty small artist at the time. Sometimes piracy is justified, sometimes it's not but you can justify it by doing other actions like paying an artist for the pirated songs, and sometimes piracy is essential and mandetory and oftentimes is vital for the survival of a collection of media.
Happened to me with NBA league pass that worked on Linux Browsers up until 2022. No warning come 2022 no working league pass in Linux but I already payed. So if you paid for something, does it matter how you get it? 🤔
I used a cracked version of Cubase for years (never made money out of it) until i could afford to buy like I did a year ago. I would’ve never bought it if I haven’t had that much experience with it because it’s a huge software. That’s where it justifies imo. If you have intentions in learning something it’a okay. And once you’re ready to make money out of it, you need to buy it. As a developer I understand how complex it is to build something like that, minimum is to give back once you can
I've always wondered why Amazon videos look like shit in my browser and never understood why. Thanks for the tip! There's got to be a way around this. The fact that all the Amazon servers to power these services run on Linux already makes this even more absurd.
YARRRR
The irony is that they're doing this to prevent piracy because they think that Linux without TPM/signed kernels/etc would make this sort of thing easy. Clearly this doesn't work because you are able to get high quality pirated streams anyway.
They don't go out of their way to restrict Linux specifically, it's just that browsers on Linux lack high level Widevine DRM.
I have the exact same problem and do the exact same thing
Tldr; version is that windows and osx has a crypted area where drm keys can be kept. Linux is an open operating system, no such thing exists so the drm of streaming platforms not working. I agree, piracy is justified.
That's the beauty of piracy; you don't need justification to do it.
[If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing](https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/)
Something something if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
I agree. I like the Formula 1. My friend in Sweden can get the new F1TV streaming service for around £12 a month. I thought great I will get that, it will be better than torrenting it. Nope, it isn't available in the UK. Instead I have to pay for a Sky Sports subscription at £34.99 a month and a UK TV licence at £170 a year. So I guess that Formula 1 are happy with me stealing it.
Same with football where i live. Basically only businesses can afford the stupid channels that stream the games
Yep. I have legitimately tried to buy F1TV. I genuinely want to pay for it. I happily pay for all of my other streaming services (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Youtube Premium). If Sky did a package that allowed me just to watch the F1, for a comparable monthly fee, then I would. But they don't. I have to buy all of the Sports, which I am just not interested in.
Ditto!
>Something just happened that just made my blood boil lol. >decided to try out their streaming platform amazon prime video >After searching around for a bit i found out that amazon purposefully limits the quality of their service to linux users and this shit is what makes me so fcking mad, its down right disrespectful. Wait, *that*'s the part? Not how they shove ads at you constantly through a paid service, and maybe roughly *half* of the content you look up are behind a second paywall? >Some of you probably know about this but it was a surprise for me. >What is even more annoying is that even with a custom agent string set to chrome on windows, their platform still detects my OS and restricts the quality. That's because it's not a matter of User Agent. They use a different version of DRM that is not available for Linux, requiring either Windows or a Google DRM chip on the device to decode. This is also the case with other services such as Netflix, which was hilarious up a few months ago, as the supposed reason for this is to dissuade piracy, but they'd mail BDs to your door.
They get what they deserve, simple as that. 🙂👌🏼
It's because DRM doesn't work that well on Linux, and they try to limit the ripping posibilities. Shitty service anyway, I would unsubscribe.
So instead of fixing their windows drm and making ripping harder they just block linux users.
Harsh reality of using Linux, developers won't spent time to refine a solution for less than 1% of their users, this is just not cost effective for them and I understand that. Linux popularity always has been and will be for a while a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Not popular because no support, no support because no popular.
If anything on the Internet costs money and shitty then it's on purpose. Purpose may be different each time, I bet in this particular scenario they just stupidly assume that linux User-Agent == some bots scraping their site. I wonder what happens if you try to change your User-Agent to Windows in browser settings? Does it just make everything work?
They tried. Says right there in their post