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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

Device restrictions are even worse than there being too many services. Netflix is still limited to 720p even when used with Chrome on Windows. When running Linux there's no option to get even 1080p let alone 4K. These companies build their backends on these platforms, try to drum up popular support for net neutrality, and then screw everyone on device neutrality. No wonder downloading an actual file usable everywhere becomes popular again.

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They also refuse to buffer properly. Tiny latency spike or brief packet loss? Enjoy 480p video for the next minute or so because it downgraded automatically and there is no way to force it back.

That's the beauty of HLS/DASH. Rather than just flat out stopping a la RealPlayer, they allow the video to continue until your network gets its act together. How is it the provider's fault if your network takes a dump for a bit?

This would make sense for a live stream. But we are talking Netflix movies here.

If my network can maintain more bandwidth than needed for 1080p/4k most of the time (which it can) then there is no reason it should ever fall back to lower quality due to a short blip because you can keep several seconds (or minutes) of buffer.

For example I never have this problem on Youtube. Only Netflix.

MY network is plenty fast. I have 1gb down.

If they can't make it work with 1/10th of that, that is their problem, not mine.

We know that having bandwidth does not mean you get full use of that bandwidth. Even using AWS CLI to download large content from an S3 bucket does not saturate my 1Gbps line. There are all sorts of places in a network to prevent you from using the full bandwidth, namely your ISP. To that point, I would not be shocked one bit to find that your ISP is playing with data from Netflix. Hell, mobile carriers tell you they are doing it.

Just another reason why people might prefer bittorrent then if it can saturate the line and the netflix player can't.

I would prefer it would stop rather then downgrade to something unwatchable.

I would more prefer it would buffer more so it doesn't need to do either.

Providers know that networks take dumps.

Netflix's 4k is also so bad. I swear, 1080p Google Play looks better. I don't know what it is with their compression, but it really really hates dark scenes, causing blocks and ghosting.

Supporting 4K to a limited list of known hardware like AppleTV 4K, Roku, etc is much easier than trying to imagine the endless possibilities of what ever frankenputer you've assembled running whatever distro you've chosen while using whatever excuse of a driver you've managed to install for your hardware. Now mutltiply that across the larger number of windows users.

I can't imagine why they've chosen the path they have /s

Limiting 4K to specific configurations is a DRM decision, not a video quality decision. There's nothing special about 4K video: it's typically encoded in the same codecs as videos in lower resolutions (H264, H265, VP9) and basically any modern device can play it without a problem. I never had any issues with 4K YouTube videos on Linux or Windows, regardless of configuration/driver.

I think what they're trying to avoid is people capturing/copying the 4K stream, that's high quality enough to be considered a "master", and distributing it. IMO it's a pointless thing to do because dedicated piracy groups will quickly figure out ways to do that anyway, and it makes the average user experience worse. However, they are probably contractually obligated to do so.

Given that they're also applying it to Netflix Originals, I don't buy the "contractually obligated" argument. At least for those, it's on them.

And just like I don't buy that argument, I don't buy their service either. I'm not going to pay for an intentionally crippled experience.

Supporting every hardware under the sun is as simple as dumping an mp4/avi/... file.

The reason they don't support high resolution is just DRM. They will happily deliver 4k video to your underpowered Windows machine which will lag and not play it properly, as long as it uses Widevine L1 or similar.

You can argue if this makes sense or not [1], but let's not pretend they are doing this for some difficult engineering reasons.

[1] This doesn't seem to stop pirates in any way so I can't see how it does.

how is that significantly different from someone downloading several segmented 4k\1080 "clips" and running them? Youtube seems to be able to do it just fine.

That's funny because 4K Youtube works on all of my frankenputers! Actually the browser handles all the cross-platform complexity.

As I understand it, it has nothing to do with "will your hardware support it", it has to do with preventing people from saving the high quality stream to disk. Hence the reason they don't allow 1080p except on certain, locked down platforms. Pretty much every device/player in existence supports 1080p at this point, Netflix just won't allow it.

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