Amazon Prime, like many services, is a DRM hell. It won’t go to over 480p on Firefox on Linux at my end. However, instead of a rant, I am interested in why this is happening. Say, I rented the same film from YouTube Movies(Yes, such a service exists) and the quality can toggle all the upto 1080p but the same title on Prime Video is stuck at 480p. Is it because both services use two DIFFERENT kinds of DRM?
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I think they’re using Widevine DRM. And with DRM they can enforce whatever arbitrary policies they like. They set special restrictions for Linux. I think Amazon set 480p as max, Netflix 720p and YouTube 4k or sth like that. AFAIK it has little to do with technology. It’s just a number that the specific company sets in their configuration.
But… Why? Why would they get different restrictions on the basis of operating system?
Because they are assholes.
It’s whether the OS has hardware to make the platform “trusted.” Android does by default with Widevine, Windows does by default with TPM and Widevine, Linux does not by default.
“Trusted” here of course means, trusted by the company, not by the user. If it’s a trusted platform, it has a cryptographic key exchange space that the user does not have access to. This prevents a spoofed DRM certificate or other interception of the HD stream, which in theory prevents a stream from leaking.
“In theory” of course, because every piece of content is ripped and available DRM-free as soon as it’s released.
Because you could use the Linux one to save the file unencrypted because it’s not locked down.
I could do that on Windows, too. Piracy os equally possible on both
That’s just one of the reasons why I completely killed my Amazon subscription, same with Disney and Netflix. Fuck that DRM BS.
Just get your stuff on the high seas and enjoy. I do subscribe to Max, and can play it all at 4K HDR in all my devices. I’ll pay for services as long as they’re worth it.
Companies put weird restrictions on quality to encourage pirating… company logic in nutshell…
Louis Rossman made a whole 20 min or something video on this. He payed for a netflix 4k subscription and wanted to see it in his firefox browser on a laptop connected via HDMI (because fuck smart TVs spying on you in the background) and ended up with 720p. He ended up pirating :)
Pirate, learn to back up, own forever.
I mean, the correct answer is just to pirate it, but you could probably fool it into thinking you’re on windows by changing the user agent string of your browser to Chrome Windows x86_64
That doesn’t work. You used to be able to run the windows version of google chrome in wine to watch amazon videos in 1080p, but that hasn’t worked in years. Just pirate it. It’s easier than messing with their stupid DRM.
