What the Fuck Amazon?!

Just pirate or I guess spoof your user agent, but just pirate instead: Don't give Amazon money.

Jellyfin streams all my shit at whatever resolution I went out of my way to download.

YouTube purchases also don't work beyond 480p on any desktop except for Mac Safari. These companies are fucking insane.

Guys, relax. Cancel your amazon and Netflix subscription and download streamio and use it with torrentio or real-debrid add-in.

how to setup guide here

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.

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.

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

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"

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

User agent spoofing ftw

idk why but i thought this would be amazon sending you a picture of goatse

At this point they're just begging us to go high seas

Time to sail the high seas!

Piracy is your friend

And this kind of shenanigans are why I don't use any kind of paid streaming service... This and the crap that Sony pulled on buyers of content. Fuck 'em.

bflix dot tee oh

fmovies dot tea oooh

join the open seas my friend

obligatory short story.

I feel weird every time seeing such news - they make those rules as if they hold me by the balls, only I haven't ever used Netflix, and why would they go in the direction opposite of attracting me?

Just like Netflix!

Fuck em all i ain't paying shit

🏴‍☠️

Easy fix for that, just spoof your browser fingerprint + use anti DPI
and if you still feel paranoid, install GhostNET & activate it

Repeat after me OP: Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.

This restriction is meant to protect high definition content from being ripped by pirates. Open systems don't offer the same DRM guarantees as the locked ones.

What happens if you change the useragent? It stops working at all?

At this point they don't deserve your money.

I'm pretty sure people grabbing the HD streams don't care about that restriction, because they know how to circumvent it.

But normal viewers who don't have time to deep dive into TOS are getting scammed subscribing to HD tier plans.

I do keep seeing the argument that you can vote with your wallet but I mentioned this in another thread I think a week ago.

I think voting with your wallet doesn't quite work here because you're not going to a competitor, you're simply opting out. What happens is then they don't see your platform of choice as the issue. All secretly gathered data points like your platform of choice often present a survivorship bias in the usage data.

With that being said, piracy has always been "... An issue of service not price" (GabeN) and I wholly support piracy as the alternative. I just don't think these services like Amazon are going to ever get the memo.

I do have a weird Tin Foil hat feeling that they're losing something Linux platform that's more than support or DRM. What if it's harder to monitor your usage on Linux platforms and they think that they can encourage you to leave the platform by forcing you to see lower quality so they can get those usage metrics back? (Again, tinfoil hat hypothesis)

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.

so in my country (I’m European, specifically Romanian) we have this streaming service called SkyShowtime. guess what? its DRM is so bad that SkyShowtime just won’t work beyond being on the website. it won’t play anything to you.

that is because either Peacock or Paramount+ are also DRM-blocked, because all there is to it is Peacock and Paramount+ with the Commonwealth Sky and Showtime brands that NBCUniversal and Paramount are respectively owning, and they combined it together and sell it to countries with lesser purchasing power parity, such as Romania.

The King and his men stole the queen from her bed And bound her in her bones The seas be ours and by the powers Where we will, we'll roam

Yo, ho, haul together Hoist the colors high Heave-ho, thieves and beggars Never shall we die

does spoofing user agent fix this?

Peacock won't even work on Linux and it drives me crazy. I sail frequently, but my friends and I do a podcast where we watch old pro wrestling. WWE moved all their content over to Peacock. A lot of that old Mid South or Mid Atlantic wrestling isn't on the high seas, so... Somebody has to screen share through my log in when we record. It's just so dumb like just let me watch what I pay for.

I wonder if you can install their android app using WayDroid and then run 1080p/4k streams.

Prolly not worth the effort considering they're treating linux users like shit, they don't deserve our money.

My understanding is that there's some DRM stuff that can't really be implemented in open source stuff. Not sure how accurate that is, or which sites use it, but I guess it's a technical reason. Still very scummy and annoying how poorly they treat paying customers.

interesting - is chromeOS not carrying the modified glibc that allows higher widevine compliance since it moved to running its chrome as a separate process from the windowing system?

I know that Amazon says that, but I regularly watch stuff in full HD (1080p) on linux in Brave.

I'm assuming this is widevine related?

What about using User Agent Switcher?