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
As is tradition.
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…
Yep, I paid for a movie and they hit me with this, so they’re never getting another dime from me. What brain dead morons are responsible for restrictions like this? Is it really that hard to see what the only possible outcome is?
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)
I need to get around to setting up the arr stack but I’ve been manually downloading torrents for over a decade now I just forget there are better solutions
I did the manual way for years as well.
One of the issues these solve is the shear capacity to look through thousands of results from dozens of indexers all at once to choose the best match, in the sense of actually being what you wanted to watch, being in the quality you were looking for, and being readily available to download (has many seeds/is available on usenet, was recently uploaded, etc). As humans, we can only process so much before we just say ‘fuck it’ and pick something.
The other is keeping your library(s) up to date. Often when I searched for something, maybe recently released, maybe older but just uncommon; I can’t find a copy at all, the ones I do find aren’t downloading (no seeds), or maybe they’re just in lower quality than I’d have liked.
The arr stack will monitor each piece of media in your library that you tell them too; they will then ingest the rss feeds from your indexers, as well as perform occasional searches directly, looking for new uploads that match media you are looking for. If you don’t already have a copy, or the newly found one is better than what you already have, it’ll automatically download it and replace the older copy if it does indeed turn out to be better once acquired and verified.
This is fantastic for monitoring shows that are actively airing new episodes, or adding movies/shows that haven’t actually released yet, to be grabbed automatically once available. You can also choose whether it allows cam-rips/telesyncs or if it should wait for a digital release (ie wait till its out of theaters). There’s quite a lot of control over quality settings and what should/should not be accepted. (there’s also recycling bin settings for keeping things they delete until you manually permanently delete them)
Genuinely a life changing experience. Ombi and its request interface is just a cherry on top :)
This is such a helpful comment.
I run my own unraid server with Plex, and have seen for what must be years people talk about the -arr stack to people who know the -arr stack, and none of it answers “what actually makes it worth all the trouble to understand and set up?” The features you describe are probably bullet points in a list somewhere, but it’s great to hear how they combine to actually save time and attention.
Is it possible to use all the arr services on windows? I couldn’t find a way and I won’t be able to switch to a dedicated Linux server for a while.
Yup, that’s where mine are running.
https://radarr.video/#downloads-v3-windows
(indexer manager) https://prowlarr.com/#download
Absolutely, I run Radarr, Sonarr and Overseerr on a Windows box. Same machine runs Plex. It works seamlessly.
Man same here. That scenario above sure does sound enticing.
Not sure how to tag users on lemmy…
Commenting here to point out my other reply to the comment you’ve replied to.
It’s @user@server.tld
Nice, appreciate it, and thanks for taking the time to write out such a helpful response!
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.
Truly the only right answer
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 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.
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
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.
What’s the catch? A free app on the play store that has acceess to all premium Netflix or Amazon content would be banned directly into purgatory.
The app doesn’t have access to any of that, it can show you where you can legally access it
But if you run 3rd party plugins then you can access some illegal content
I don’t really see the point of it vs traditional piracy
People still want the streaming service experience of scrolling for 30 minutes before giving up and watching something they’ve already seen.
I strongly advocate this and if anyone needs help feel free to message me. Been using this for years.
Yo ho ho, a pirate’s life for me.
Probably some DRM shit. This basically reads like “don’t use the software specified here if you want to rip it, because we can only prevent it on these”
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.
Agreed
Maybe if you fake your user agent it would think you’re on Windows.
Did you mark this as NSFW because Amazon fucks those running Linux?
It’s not even really better on Windows. (Nearly) all streaming services restrict resolution to 720p if you watch on a PC, mobile phone or tablet. With the exception of Netflix if you watch with Microsoft Edge or Chrome, I believe.
Netflix plays 4k on my Mac, android and ipad. I don’t use prime enough but it does the same I believe.
yeah I don’t run into this issue on my mac at work or at home, but i do with every windows and linux machine i try them on. I can do whateevr the fuck i want on my plex server though…if i could only get my wife to adapt to the plex UI and the ombi requester…
You’re sure Netflix plays 4k on Android? I have Widevine L1 reported in my Android Netflix app (on my rooted Android phone thanks to Magisk and the various spoofing/root-hiding tools). But even at L1 the video is limited to 1080p. I think it may be an app platform limitation, but would love to be proven wrong.
Don‘t GPUs also include hardware for DRM stuff like that?
Yes, still then there are only very limited software configurations that are allowed.
Netflix limits you to 720p even on windows, unless you are using Edge: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 (expand HTML5 browsers and scroll down).
This limitation doesn’t apply to all content - it’s the worst case scenario if copyright holder really put their foot down.
But it should work fine with the Netflix app in the microsoft store. Not that this makes it any better.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
User agent spoofing ftw
This doesn’t change the fact that they are blocking us, sadly.
I gave up on prime video long ago for this bullshit, they’re also not the only streaming to serve crap quality on linux.
We really get much better content, quality, experience, and for a cheaper price just by navigating high seas these days.