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The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

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Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#131

Post by phh »

reisse wrote: post #63

The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done. They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

> The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all?

Well that investment is pretty low since Widevine is quite easy to integrate and the licensing cost is 0 for Netflix.

The thing is, you do need some Digital Rights Management somewhere. If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just share that mp4 url, and you could watch movies directly off Netflix servers (so it would cost even more than torrenting).

You could include temporary tokens in your URLs, but then you need your CDN to be a bit dynamic.

Or you could have a completely static CDN, but the files are encrypted, and you download the encryption key off a server dedicated to DRM that will check you're properly authed. And well, here you've re-created Widevine. Widevine do provide more protections than just that, but that's just free for Netflix, they literally just have to switch some booleans.

> They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

Yeah I mostly agree. As I mentioned before, there are some usages of DRM that are not completely non-sense. What kills me is the HDCP requirement. Many TVs have HDCP compatibility issues (for instance my Samsung TV has the two 4k60p yuv444 hdcp 1 ports and one 4k60p yuv420 hdcp2 port, so I need to chose between 4k content and true 4k resolution), while HDCP2 is utterly broken: you can find decrypting dongles for 20€ directly from Amazon.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#132

Post by spookie »

shadowgovt wrote: post #89
gpm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so. Evidence does appear to point to you being right, but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people? A significant investment of time and money, from highly a highly skilled individual, for... bragging rights? Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?

> but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people? Content owners really seem to underestimate how far people are willing to go for kudos alone on setup cost if the reproduction cost is zero. Also for some people it's a point of philosophy / concern about future-proofing. Guy I knew back in the day was the biggest torrenter around... He was stuffing a hard drive full of '80s c…

This, I've friends of mine who do this for a myriad of media. And I absolutely understand their philosophy.

Looking at video games today, riddled with DRM reliant on the server infrastructure of a finite life company makes me sad.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#133

Post by nl »

reisse wrote: post #63

The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done. They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

The point is to make the Netflix experience better for the average person than the experience of using a pirated source.

And - IMHO - it works.

I used to use Bittorrent quite a lot. There was a bunch of US shows I watched that were unavailable in Australia and so I had a pretty decent setup where things would automatically download when torrents were posted.

Life happened, I stopped using it and haven't really tried torrents for maybe 10 years.

I tried to get a show recently that isn't available here. Wow, that's a pretty bad experience - try to find the correct show, work out what client you need, find one that has seeders, downlaod one and the codec is wrong for my device etc

I just gave up.

I can get NVidia software working on non-standard Linux builds (which I think is a pretty high level of technical competency) but for most people getting pirated content isn't worth the effort.

By putting DRM on the content, they limit distribution to people who know how to remove it and then to people who are experienced at finding what they want on pirate sites.

TL;DR: The user experience is much better for most people. Pirated content has such a bad user experience, but people who use it have invested a lot of time working out what works and don't realize the effort it takes.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#134

Post by barneygale »

gpm wrote: post #82
stefan_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know we had that, they called it HDCP. It continues to frustrate users of beamers and what not today, despite the root key being leaked for many years now. Even before the key leak, it never did anything to stop shows appearing as torrents on day one. It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so.

> It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so. Evidence does appear to point to you being right, but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people? A significant investment of time and money, from highly a highly skilled individual, for... bragging rights? Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?

> Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?

Precisely the opposite. We do it for free because other people do it for money.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#135

Post by gray_-_wolf »

shp0ngle wrote: post #103
gray_-_wolf wrote: post #48

> The only officially supported way to use Widevine on Linux is using Chrome on an x86_64 CPU. To be precise it is "The only officially supported way to use Widevine on Linux is using Chrome on an x86_64 CPU using glibc." In other words, even though I have x86_64 cpu, since I'm on alpine, I'm fucked anyway.

If you are using alpine as a desktop distro, don’t you have bigger problems than Netflix not playing? (also how are you even using alpine for desktop. I tried to look it up once and gave up soon)

Not really, honestly these days it works pretty much fine. Basically only issue I have is the DRM and I can live without it.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#136

Post by [deleted] »

aidenn0 wrote: post #23
jasoneckert wrote: post #10

Excellent writeup. Asahi is my daily driver, but I've never had the need for either Spotify or Netflix. I guess the gospel of RMS and the FSF over the past few decades has steered me away from anything DRM-related.

In terms of freedom of using compute devices, RMS has a point. In terms of freedom of using media, I'm less annoyed by Spotify or Netflix than I am by "purchases" of media that have DRM. It's clear that one is renting with the streaming services, but Amazon can revoke permission for me to read books I have purchased or Valve can revoke permission for me to play games I have purchased, we are truly living in a dystopi…

[deleted]

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#137

Post by the8472 »

klodolph wrote: post #21
no_time wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the same goes for L1 and L2. But the obscurity is provided by the silicon packaging process. Would be nice to crowdfund a lab to break these hardware backed treachery schemes.

When you say “security through obscurity” there’s a certain understanding that we’re drawing a line between implementation secrecy (obscurity / obfuscation) and key secrecy. If we extend the word “obscurity” to include the notion of physical security, I think we’ve gone too far—even if physical security is just the physical security of a secret embedded in silicon that you have physical access to (because it is super…

With DRM the user who owns the machine is the "attacker". The keys have already been handed to the user, he only needs to get them out. This is like hiding an API key in a public website's javascript with rot13. Very much security by obscurity.

Proper security means that the attacker should never be in possession of the key.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#139

Post by mholt »

phh wrote: post #131
reisse wrote: post #63

The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done. They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.

> The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? Well that investment is pretty low since Widevine is quite easy to integrate and the licensing cost is 0 for Netflix. The thing is, you do need some Digital Rights Management somewhere. If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just share that mp4 url, and you could watch movies directly off Netfli…

> If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth,

I don't think anyone's suggesting that there's NO authentication. Authentication is a relatively trivial, commonly-accepted necessary nuissance that is distinct from DRM.

Re: The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

#140

Post by torified »

redeeman wrote: post #117
Longhanks wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they want to. Who doesn’t want to protect his or her intellectual property? There are probably millions of people subscribed to Netflix merely because pirating Netflix content is inconvenient enough to make people rather pay. How many would reconsider this if the user experience of pirating was exactly as convenient as a paid Netflix account? Most probably enough so that enacting DRM is the smaller price to…

netflix content is pirated the moment it gets released, so them employing DRM changes nothing

It was actually interesting to me the latest Chris Rock special which was on Netflix live recently. The first live event I've heard of Netflix doing.

It took a day to get onto the torrent sites.

So that was the first instance I've seen where buying was better than pirating.

I did see comments on the torrent sites from people who were there because their legitimate paid setup was deemed incompatible with live streams by Netflix though... Not a great incentive to keep paying.

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