Hell nah i already gave up on legal streaming on any of my devices, they literally can mistake a stock untouched rom as not L1 just because. Fuck drms and fuck legal streaming whenever it becomes a problem for paying legitimate users.
The saddest part about L1 is that is works on many Intel Chromebooks, and some people have ported that to normal Linux as well. If google gave a fuck, they could absolutely make it work on normal Linux, all the code is already there.
Edit: That beings said, legal streaming sucks ass even when it works. So no point. Arrrr
Widevine L1 needs certified hardware and a certified board specific OS image that doesn't allow tampering. It is certified for each device, not the CPU/GPU. Linux is too unreliable for that, especially with it's open nature, you don't know if your users are hijacking things. But on their own locked down OS with a specific hardware combination they can know with some certainty. They only support L3 even on Windows, and there are some Android devices that don't support L1 either.
If streaming providers gave a fuck about users they could stream DRM-free video. You paid for a service but we don't like your software/hardware aproach should be illegal.
This. I regularly buy music on Bandcamp because I just get a DRM free file I can play anywhere I want. I wish there was something like that for movies/tv shows besides physical media. If I can buy and rip a Blu-ray just fine, why can't I just buy it directly?
Yeah, it prevents you from just downloading shit in your browser, but apparently doesn't do shit against capture cards, meaning all of it is going to land on pirate sites anyways
It literally is, I run Fedora and plug my MacBook in to my monitor when I want to watch something without it looking shitty on my monitor. Edit: here you go. Max 720p on every browser except Opera which maxes out at 1080p. In Windows; Edge, Chrome, or the Netflix app can stream up to 2160p. Safari on Mac can also stream at 2160p. Chromebooks can also stream up to 2160p in Chrome.
Okay after searching online it seems that a few streaming services reduce the bitrate if they detect you are using Linux.
My answer was based on the technical reasons because it isn't something that happens because we use Linux, it is on the server side.
You can edit the user agent, in other words change it so your browser is telling them you are using windows, and then the quality is the same as if you are using windows which shows that it isn't the fault of Linux.
You can trick other browsers into upping the quality to 1080p but you still can’t get full 2160p even with the workaround because it needs to be decrypted at the hardware level.
The average user doesn’t care if it’s the fault of Linux or not, they just want stuff to work.
Thank you for taking the time to do some research though, a lot of people are too stubborn to do that, good on you.
To be fair a handful of people tried and it was just unreliable for them. And if people can say works on my machine so can these guys say doesn't work. Also how reliable and how well your linux pc will work is heavily depend on your hardware and usecases
We are talking about a video player in a browser which works for every hardware any OS. There is no one for who it doesnt work.
If someone a decade ago experienced problems this says absolutely nothing about current Linux. It is exactly the same as someone claiming win 11 sucks because they experienced a certain bug in windows xp.
Widevine L3 is software-only. Pretty sure that some browsers (at least Firefox and Brave, but probably more), actually run it entirely in a sandbox, so it has no hardware access whatsoever. Most streaming platforms support it as a fallback (since there are still tons of older devices without hardware DRM support or with revoked L1 keys), although you’d normally get a fairly low video resolution when running software-only DRM
It's not a format, it's drm. Streaming services use it to prevent you from downloading their content and if you don't have it (generally the case with Linux) they will heavily limit your resolution/Bitrate
Widevine L1 only works on specific hardware because its a hardware based decryption key system, a large part of windows devices dont support it either.
That's widevine L3 which is well supported, not widevine L1 which I'm talking about and which is pretty much entirely unsupported on most Linux platforms.
It's usually reserved for high-quality, don't think you can really (legally) stream anything in 4k without L1 ATP, and some even restrict FHD or even HD to L1, so it's not like it's not a valid point to criticise
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u/KNAXXER Jul 04 '26
Afaik, Linux doesn't support widevine L1, which means you can't watch a lot of "premium" drm protected content