Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I've had similar issues with HD not being available on Amazon Prime when I watch (certain) shows on Linux. My "fix" was rather crude: install Chrome inside wine.

A silly fix for a problem designed to get in the way of their customers. And then these companies dare to get mad at piracy.

View on HN

Maybe it's because my system has wine-devel, but running Chrome or Firefox under Wine has always been really buggy for me.

It was janky as hell and definitely not usable for regular browsing, but it worked to play the single show I needed it to play so I'm content enough.

I had that working for the last year or so, for the exact same reason. But for a few weeks now my wine'd Chrome can no longer access any page, as if it can't access the network or something. Tried reinstalling it, but that didn't help either. Any ideas?

No idea, it just worked for me. Then again, I did use Lutris to get the wine env set up so maybe that's doing something to work around bugs? I basically threw the latest version of Wine staging at it. I remember having issues running the installer, but after a couple of tries it just started working.

Bah, this is genius! Any obvious gotchas? Did you try it with Netflix?

Netflix doesn’t block HD on Linux

I guess that depends on what "HD" means. As far as I know, unless you are running a dedicated streaming device (Chromecast, Roku, etc), Windows in IE, or the Windows Netflix app, you can only watch in 720p.

You're correct, but Netflix seems to block it on the client-side. Lots of extensions fix this, and I seem to have had those installed for quite a while, so never had to think about it. Prime on the other hand, blocks it server-side, so no way to upgrade.

I'm hoping that with SteamDeck these issues get sorted, as more people use it as a docked media player.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-1080p...

>I'm hoping that with SteamDeck these issues get sorted, as more people use it as a docked media player.

Why won't it be the same deal as ChromeOS or Android ? It'll work with some blessed config of widewine L1, and not if you do your own thing on the device.

SteamDeck runs archlinux, so higher chance of the blessed configuration working elsewhere? Can’t really say, since Steam hasn’t elaborated on their plans yet.

Widevine L1 requires hardware backed support and keys baked into the device, which the SteamDeck does not have.

It won't be happening on the current hardware.

It's not just client side, but it's easy enough to lie to them, and the lie is very little and white

720p is literally HD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720p

Yeah but the point is that other devices get the 1080p and higher resolutions

Haven't tried Netflix, that seems to do 720p (bad but watchable for cartoons and old shows) rather than the 560p I was getting from Amazon (recent live action shows).

I pirate Netflix content that I want to see in high quality, which isn't all that much to be honest. I don't really understand the point of restriction Linux when every pirate site has 4K dumps of Netflix shows mere days after launch, but I don't care enough to try to work around their restrictions when I can just wait for Sonarr to kick in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com