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Just pirate or I guess spoof your user agent, but just pirate instead: Don’t give Amazon money.
or I guess spoof your user agent
That won’t help. The issue is Widevine DRM protection level. It’s the same issue everywhere.
Piracy it is! The system fails again!
Nothing like being pushed into piracy by anti piracy measures, gj corporations
Streaming services like netflix and prime helped reduce piracy to all time lows. But then corps started getting stupid again and making their own exclusive streaming services, requiring you to have 20 subscriptions just get all the same shit you had with 2. Now drm enforcement on top of that and piracy is back on the rise…
As is tradition.
Guys, relax. Cancel your amazon and Netflix subscription and download streamio and use it with torrentio or real-debrid add-in.
Would you mind elaborating on what stremio is?
It’s an app that can integrate with a lot of streaming services(officially) and has a built-in torrent client(that does nothing). (You know, all of this so that they can be accessible on all platforms, etc. torrenting isn’t viewed kindly by platform makers) With the help of third party plugins (such as Torrentio) stremio now has access to systems where you can integrate with torrent sources so that when you browse for your movie, you can also see torrent sources and with the help of the built in torrent client, you can also stream them. Stremio has casting support and apps for all devices, even TV. It makes it really easy to watch movies easier and in better quality than any streaming service. It also keeps track where you last were in your movie so you can resume, the same thing for shows, also has many other useful extensions that streaming services don’t support, such as Trakt.tv integration, or browsing curated lists of movies and shows from anywhere, as well as integrating with other sources outside of torrents such as providers holding archived materials.
YouTube purchases also don’t work beyond 480p on any desktop except for Mac Safari. These companies are fucking insane.
And if you purchased movies from Sony instead, they will just remove them all from your account.
Jellyfin streams all my shit at whatever resolution I went out of my way to download.
whatever resolution I went out of my way to download.
Addon Radarr, Sonarr, and Ombi and you won’t even have to do that.
Users make requests via Ombi, those get sent to Radarr/Sonarr to search for and download. Most stuff is ready to watch ~15min after requesting, with no interaction from the servers admin needed. (optionally, requests can require approval before downloading, that’s disabled for the users I trust)
Alternative to ombi is overseer which imo has the best interface. Just throwing it out there as an option.
Jellyseer is also an option.
We need some mad genius to crack Widevine and make a plugin that works for Linux.
It’s going to have to be restricted-source, but hey, honestly we need to break Google’s stranglehold anyways.
Repeat after me OP: Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
This is why even though I pay for prime, I pirate everything. It’s amusing to pay for a service that your experience is better pirating than using the service you pay for.
dude uses linux but pays for prime you cant make this shit up
I pay for prime for the shipping advantages. I barely ever watch it, no way could I justify having it for just the streaming services.
Primes shipping advantages are 100% hit or miss. They no longer honor delivery estimates. In tgier efforts to save a buck, they implement private shipping companies that send your shit half way around the world and back, when your item started 100 miles away. I’d say about ~50% of my prime orders take 8-10 days when they advertise 2 days. I bitch, and they keep moving the goalpost, changing thier promises. Over and over. And, prices now are on par with so many other sellers. There is very little reason to continue using Amazon.
What happens if you change the useragent? It stops working at all?
No, changing the user agent doesn’t change anything. I believe it’s the Widevine DRM level or rather the lack of support for L1. The whole point of DRM is to make it not easily circumventable, so the best solution is piracy.
So the “problem” is hardcoded where? changing the useragent will make the server give both Linux and Windows the same exact data I think, am I wrong? So it’s the browsers fault? Or there’s something I’m missing?
The user agent tells the web server what browser requests the website. It’s up to the server whether they ignore the user agent.
DRM protected content isn’t just a http connection away, it’s encrypted content loaded after the initial website is displayed. The video is then decrypted by a proprietary DRM library called Widevine.
Widevine has multiple security levels and Linux only supports the most basic one. This results in low bitrate/resolution with no way around it. The reason Linux only support L3 is that copyright holders don’t think Linux graphics stack gives them the same DRM guarantees that Windows/macOS/Android gives them.
Got it, thanks! Wouldn’t be possible to run widevine under wine?
Unlikely, because Widevine works quite well at protecting it’s content. If the solution was as simple as using wine it’d be great though.
It doesn’t matter how much DRM you put into the service. someone can just spin up a Virtual Machine and install chrome, windows in it and then record the stream from the host system.
i wouldn’t count it as impossible for really cool and well-meaning businesses like the amazon fun factory to somehow detect and ban/restrict use on VMs
Sure, but the thing is: only a single person needs to break it temporarily in some way and this person can then leak the DRM free copy for everyone to consume.
That’s why DRM is such bullshit. It only ever punishes legitimate users. All others are unaffected.
I wonder if a user agent switcher would be enough to fool them, or if they’re actually using an exclusive library or something.
In-browser DRM usually uses a library called Widevine, which is a closed-source library created by Google that’s usually only used on Windows or MacOS.
On Linux, you can use Google Chrome to get Widevine working. You can also extract the library from Google Chrome to use it with Chromium (e.g. see https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine). The version of Chromium shipped with Linux distros doesn’t include it since you need a license and permission from Google to distribute it. Lots of Linux users would also (understandably) really not want to run a DRM binary on their system. It’s intentionally obfuscated to try and prevent people from breaking it.
I don’t know what other Linux browsers do - I haven’t used Linux desktop for a while (going to switch back soon though). On other OSes, browsers like Firefox and Brave prompt you the first time you try to watch DRM’d content, asking if you’d like to download the plugin. I assume they license it from Google.
Also as far as I know, Widevine doesn’t allow the same security/compliance levels on Linux as it does on Windows and MacOS, as the OS is less locked down. This could mean that a 4K video streaming service works fine on Windows but won’t allow you to stream in 4K on Linux. Isn’t DRM great???
that’s why stallman rightly calls it digital restrictions management.
Louis Rossman has done a couple videos about this and I tend to agree - Paying customers get a worse experience.
You use the official apps and real accounts and you are still subject to artificial bandwidth restrictions. You use the official YouTube app on your smart TV and you get 10+ midroll ads at unnatural places during a 12 minute video. You “own” purchased content in one platform and it can still be taken away from you or made inaccessible when a service gets collapsed into another platform or rebranded etc. I’m not going to re-buy the same fucking movie I already owned on one streaming platform and have already owned on 2 different formats of physical release.
Curating your own digital copies, regardless of how you obtain them, is the only way to guarantee quality and availability anymore.
And yet their servers are using Linux to host a subpar experience for Linux clients.
Hey Amazon, use Windows and MacOS servers (lolz) instead for HD/UHD stream hosting!
Yo ho ho, a pirate’s life for me.
Seems like there is no legitimate way for you to get that content. I guess youre forced to be a pirate!
That’s the case for pretty much all systems that use widevine - you can blame google for it, as they are the one that built the widevine DRM that all streaming services use
I’m in no way a Google fan boy (rather the opposite), but IMHO this is backwards.
We have a (at some levels) shits DRM because of Google providing a semi-secute DRM stack.
If you want to go full DRM, there is no way around a key store, so for most (user) linux installations unachievable.
Without widevine nobody would give a fuck about Linux DRM anyway and Netflix, Amazon and friends would be out of reach for “normal” Linux users.
That said: fuck DRM, fucking cancer.
Not just key store, since you can quite easily use a secure enclave on Linux just as on any other platform.
The key issue is the render stack. On Windows and MacOS, providers can get certain assurances that the parts of the stack that take their decoded DRM’ed content and draw it into a window, get composited with other windows, have various transforms applied, and actually get things out to an HDCP-supporting monitor are all unmodified and (at least to a certain extent) immune to screen captures and other methods of getting the plain un-encrypted media stream. Linux on the desktop almost never provides those assurances. The only ones that really do are ChromeOS and Android–and both of those provide relatively high trust DRM as a result.
DRM doesn’t work in practice to prevent piracy, but if you drink that cool-aid and assume for a moment that DRM actually worked, then Linux is basically impossible to provide verified DRM content to with the current landscape in the way that Windows, MacOS, CrOS and Android/iOS do
You have no idea how insane i went trying to figure out why clarkson farm was playing at extremely low quality, pixelated 320p on my PC before I realized Amazon just hated Linux.
It’s not just Amazon, but any streaming platform that uses Widevine.
