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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain this tweet to me?

> But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.

I don't understand. I can just open a web browser on a little media center PC, connect it by HDMI, point it to Netflix and play a movie, right? (Admittedly I haven't tried because our Panasonic has Netflix and no ads or spy apps that I've noticed)

But what exactly does Netflix forbid that @buro9 is referring to? And does anyone know what their reasoning is for doing so?

I ask because I'm rather interested in the concept of buying a dumb TV once this one breaks (hopefully long from now), but I do like me my Netflix. Lots of people in this thread suggest buying a dumb TV but I don't understand why Netflix and friends would disallow customers using that.

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Content owners dictate in contractual terms the availability of their content in high definition (UHD, 4k, etc) be determined by the app securing access to the content.

The result is that the higher quality content is only available on apps on closed platforms.

So if you got a dumb panel and wanted high definition content, you'd still need to hook up something like the Nvidia Shield... essentially a closed platform (Android again in this instance).

Right! Ok this makes sense. Any clue on why content owners do this? It seems a bit arbitrary.

Fortunately I'm the opposite of a videophile - I don't even know how High the Definition of our TV is. But I see your point, so indeed, a 4k dumb TV won't be able to show most Netflix content in 4k, correct? That's a major shame and pretty ridiculous.

edit: I just noticed that Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge[0]. So running Windows on the media center PC appears to be a practical option.

[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

> Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge

Still a closed platform :)

It's the DRM problem. They insist on these limitations as an anti-piracy measure. Fundamentally the only way to decode 4k in real time is to pass it fairly-unmodified to the video hardware, and at that point in a non-closed system a driver could steal it. Or just record it off the screen from the inside.

> Still a closed platform :)

Sure, but not a smart TV and that's the part I personally care the most about. I doubt Microsoft, even with all their telemetry nonsense, will ever include something as ridiculous as samba.tv. Also, they employ more than 0 UI designers.

Thanks for the explanation btw. So it's basically the 4k video version of copy-protected CD's. And that was a great idea that totally worked!

> will ever include something as ridiculous as samba.tv

Pleasant surprise:

Microsoft Store -> "..." button -> My Library.

Sadly it just drives people to piracy instead when they cannot watch what they paid for.

The 4K quality is tied to some pretty specific hardware and drivers as far as I remember. And 1080p is also different in my experience in the Windows 10 App and in Edge. I was able to get 1080p for some content in Edge, but not everything. The only way to consistently get 1080p quality was to use the rather crappy App. The search and filter features were worse than the website in my experience, and I ran into quite a few bugs when I used it.

Drifting off topic, but fwiw their Windows app got a bit better lately. I think there's finally a team on it again.

The Windows 10 Netflix "app" is utterly abysmal

I had it running on my second monitor as background noise while I was working on a project

Every time I'd use Alt+Tab, the entire window would go black. Presumably as part of its inane DRM

Unfortunately, the only way to get it to work again was to close and relaunch the entire app!

>a 4k dumb TV

Is there even such a thing ? Honest question, because i looked for a "dumb" 4K with HDR10 support TV and i haven't found anything.

There's a lot of projectors that support 4K (see http://www.projectorcentral.com ) You can usually turn a smart TV into a dumb TV by not setting up the internet.

Right, but a HDCP 2.2 capable graphics device is required which currently is only nVidia GTX 10 series and newer Intel graphics.

Which the insane video card prices recently getting 4K output is an expensive issue.

This is totally subjective but I find UHD/4K to be painful to look at on a large screen. The contrast is too high, everything is too focused. I don't need to see skin pores from across the room.

1080p is by far "good enough" to watch anything on TV, IMO.

I don’t have much experience with 4K but I’ve had to disable some motion enhancing features on 120hz screens because the movements seemed too fast and it was weird.

> The contrast is too high, everything is too focused. I don't need to see skin pores from across the room.

I re-watched a couple of episodes of "Friends" recently (apparently the series is now available on Netflix) at a couple of friends' house, on a huge tv set, and I had a totally different experience compared to what I remembered from last watching the episodes ~15 years ago because I could only focus on looking at the actresses' faces, asking myself: "Did Monica's face really looked like that? Did Phoebe's?". I'll stick with 1080 or even with 780 from now on.

You can definitely watch netflix on a computer connected via hdmi, running either windows or macos. You can watch netflix with a chromecast, with nvidia shield, there are endless choices. I like these external devices because i feel they are less likely to spy on me than crapware in a tv.

But netflix is tracking the same exact information that this Samba app is tracking

Take a look at the Samba patents.

Samba have patents for how to communicate and track across the boundaries of security sandboxes for example.

Whereas Netflix on my Android that has NetGuard really is just talking to netflix.com and apparently not doing anything else bad.

I have zero expectations that an app won't track in-app use for that app... but Samba is (with the consent of the hardware provider who owns the local instance of Android) tracking everything it can across apps.

You have just hit upon why HDMI is stupid.

If you used a DVI cable you could indeed do that. But HDMI was pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed despite no real benefit (having sound and video separate is an ADVANTAGE if you want to easily handle sound with different hardware..)

and now, well, you can't.

Huh? If you're coming from a PC you can definitely direct the audio separate the video. If you're using a set-top/streaming box you typically just send the audio back out the TV.

The number of people with dedicated audio equipment is too great for any TV manufacturer to break this.

Fortunately, there are 4K torrents.

Netflix uses DRM so they control the hardware and software it runs on.

I'm specifying hardware too because of HDCP - you can't just connect it to some random monitor because it might not support 'DRM for monitors'.

High-quality streaming doesn't really work outside of their dedicated apps, IIRC

So run tbe app on whatever device you want and play it on the TV. The web browser wasn't really a hard requirement.

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