Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

linuxuprising.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–35 of 35 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

#31

Post by Dylan16807 »

krageon wrote: post #27
Mindwipe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I mean, it's still not very good at it - you will only get lower resolutions, and at this point a Raspberry Pi and storage/power/cases are not cheaper than buying a Fire Stick or a Chromecast which works better for that use case.

> a Fire Stick or a Chromecast Corporate scrip is essentially fine too if all you care about is buying cheese (and you can exchange it for cheese...), but that doesn't mean that it's good or that regular money isn't objectively better.

When the cheese is higher quality and cheaper with scrip, then regular money isn't "objectively better". It's a tradeoff and suggesting someone use scrip to buy cheese is quite reasonable.

Re: Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

#32

Post by joshstrange »

sxp wrote: post #5

Is there any info on the level of DRM support? Widevine has multiple levels which means watching Netflix, Hulu, etc on a PC with Chrome will limit your video to 480p or 720p. In some cases, Edge will increase the video resolution to 1080p. I haven't found a way to legally access 4k video on a PC. I'm guessing the same limits apply on the RPi. You can test this by going to a video page like https://www.netflix.com/wat…

This is reminiscent, for me, of the days of unskippable DVD ads and generally terrible DVD/Blu-ray experiences. Downloading a movie would give you a clean file with no ads and you could seek wherever without limits but purchasing a legal copy would give you a terrible experience. This kind of DRM and limitations feels so incredibly stupid when you can find high quality 1080p/4K rips of content from every major streaming platforms. So as it stands right now you can bend over backwards to get some support for Widevine to stream low quality OR you can download the full 4K with zero restrictions.

I'm not interested in a discussion on the morality of downloading content, just pointing out how backwards the experience is even when you pay. I'd gladly pay $100+/mo for the experience you can achieve via piracy but it doesn't exist and that's a pretty sad state of things. Spotify(/Amazon/Apple/etc), largely, "solved" piracy by providing a great experience for an affordable price, making it so that it was actually more expensive and more work to pirate music. TV/Movies still doesn't have a spotify-equivalent which sucks.

Even things like Apple TV (The app, not the service or the product, ) and Amazon Channels, that both attempt to tackle this problem by unifying multiple "feeds" into 1 app/experience, both fall short and don't have nearly the breadth of content I'd want.

Re: Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

#34

Post by sitzkrieg »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #33
sitzkrieg wrote: post #19

no 4k but that's ok because the rpi4 would overheat and throttle itself if it even hardware accelerated it anyway

The numbers in google say that 1080p decoding is a quarter watt so 4k would probably be fine.

i reckon it is fine if there is proper hw decoding. i gave up trying and got a different sbc that works flawlessly hw decoding 4k with no heatsinks so far (vim3L)

Re: Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

#35

Post by naikrovek »

anakaine wrote: post #26
Mindwipe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I mean, it's still not very good at it - you will only get lower resolutions, and at this point a Raspberry Pi and storage/power/cases are not cheaper than buying a Fire Stick or a Chromecast which works better for that use case.

Chromecast still requires another device to send the video to it. Using a media serving device like a pi can mean you avoid tying up another device and the whole solution winds up being just like any other media system attached to your TV. Remote control, and interface.

I don't think that's how Chromecast always works (though it can work that way).

Most of the time, your device(s) tell the Chromecast what to play, and the Chromecast plays that on its own. There is integration which tries to sync the UI on the "controlling" device to the playback of the Chromecast but this fails often enough for me that it's clear that (in my case) my phone isn't streaming to the Chromecast directly unless I'm screen mirroring.

Post reply on HN