this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Privacy
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As far as I can tell there are two separate worlds, with close to no overlap.
On the one hand the mainstream stuff, proprietary, DRM compatibile, interner dependet, non moddable, no privacy, no way to own your content, tracking you from asshole to appetite, often ad-infested.
Best you can hope for is some Android TV streaming box, but the moment you start to do stuff like root it or unlock the bootloader some streaming apps might decide to stop working, or degrade your quality. DRM-protected streaming services will completely refuse streaming high-quality content to any hardware you really control.
On the other you have self-hosted, often open source, tweakable, local, customisable, technology, compatible with all codecs you want, but functionally blocked from DRM. There is essentially no way to legally acquire video content for the second one. You could get a libredrive compatible BD reader and rip your own movies, but that's still illegal in many countries, certainly the US, and is a ton of work.
If you have sufficiently powerful hardware, you might be able to stream low-bitrate 720p with software decoding. They won't serve you better stuff. Anything better than that, you should consider it accidental and likely to stop soon.
Yeah, it's kinda telling, if you look at my prime subscription for example. I can either:
Hook into the web-service with Kodi, breaking TOS and theoretically risking the account. While Google, missing their widevine tax, limits the quality.
Pirate the same content without an account, at full 4K.
It's truly a service problem.
Not quite. The Kodi plugin still uses Widevine. You just don't get higher quality content unless your hardware is "certified" with some key burnt in at the factory, or some such nonsense.
Yes, that's what I meant by "widevine tax", the certification is done by Google for a fee.