It doesn't work on Firefox. It appears not to work on Chrome. The suggestion is to use Edge, which on Windows already gets 4K support in Netflix anyway.
Here's a 4K enabler that only enables 4K where it's already enabled.
The problem here is requiring hardware-attested DRM: Widevine L1 on Edge on Windows, and Apple FairPlay on Safari on MacOS. The only way to get hardware attested DRM is via browser specific (i.e.: native code) support that interfaces with the OS & GPU drivers. You can't get there through an extension.
I understand it spoofs all of the checks it can, but the only Chromium browser that supports Widevine L1 (a requirement for 4K) is Edge, so even if all of the check spoofing works, it still won't do 4K.
There's even a table in the README that describes this exact scenario.
> If you're paying for 4K but using Chrome, Firefox, or a setup Netflix doesn't "approve," you're stuck at 1080p or lower. This extension fixes that.
It appears to only be useful on Edge on Windows.
Does Edge currently ship Widevine L1? Last time I checked it was Playready SL3000, but that was a while ago now.
There are sensible-ish technical reasons why they can't deliver DRM'd 4K on linux, but when browser extensions can upgrade you to 4K there are no excuses on the technical level.
But when I have to fiddle around for 30 Minutes to see a picture (it worked before until it suddenly didn't work anymore), pirating the movie is suddenly the better option. Because I certainly don't see a point in paying and wasting more of my time.
And the piracy cat and mouse game is stupid, as in the End it's always Available illegaly, except for the people developing and selling DRM
Here is a good thread on the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/17ez7mi/how_come_it...
How does Netflix detect "suspicious" activity? Does $NFLX allow 4k streaming over GrapheneOS? If so, could you pin a different certificate and do some HTTP proxy traffic manipulation to obfuscate the device (presumably an Android phone) identity or otherwise work around the DRM?
I want to understand more about this but unfortunately the reddit thread is bits and pieces scattered amongst clueless commentary, making it challenging to wade through.
See AWS offering: (and probably what they use for Prime Video, Netflix has their own)
For large-scale per-viewer, implement a content identification strategy that allows you to trace back to specific clients, such as per-user session-based watermarking. With this approach, media is conditioned during transcoding and the origin serves a uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to the end user. A session to a user-mapping service receives encrypted user ID information in the header or cookies of the request context and uses this information to determine the uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to serve to the viewer. This approach requires multiple distinctly watermarked copies of content to be transcoded, with a minimum of two sets of content for A/B watermarking. Forensic watermarking also requires YUV decompression, so encoding time for 4K feature length content can take upwards of 20 hours. DRM service providers in the AWS Partner Network (APN) are available to aid in the deployment of per-viewer content forensics.
They also use a traitor tracing scheme (Tardos codes) such that if multiple pirates get together to try and remove the watermark they will fail, you would need an unreasonably large number of pirates to succeed for some length of time.
> They also use a traitor tracing scheme (Tardos codes) such that if multiple pirates get together to try and remove the watermark they will fail, you would need an unreasonably large number of pirates to succeed for some length of time.
Why?
They are designed to survive being recorded by a phone at an angle. The embedding is only 1-bit per segment which can be multiple megabytes.
> Why?
Tardos codes scale as the square of the number of traitors times a constant. For example, a movie would typically have 2000 segments -> 2000 bits of encoding. By my calculation, at around 7 traitors some start to skate by detection. And there are ways to make detection additive across leaked content, so with another 2000 all 7 will get caught.
For hardware DRM schemes, the initial key material is typically provisioned during manufacturing.
Since the server-side is able to identify the client device, they can in theory fingerprint the content if they want to. That way if someone cracks and shares the content, they can look at the fingerprint and figure out which device (and which account) leaked it - and then ban them.
I've never seen direct evidence that Netflix fingerprints their 4K content (although I've never properly looked), so I suspect the device-burning thing might be a bit of an urban legend. But it is technically plausible.
What's the deal with Netflix's not-very-good 4k streams? Colour quantization or something? It's not just a one-off, why do 4k netflix shows look like rubbish compared to a moderately encoded whatever from bittorrent?
The other trick some groups use is so-called hybrid releases. This involves combining video and audio from multiple sources to achieve the best possible quality. These are usually explicitly tagged as HYBRID, and afaik mostly applies to 4K remuxes.
I don't want to copy things and distribute them to others. I want to have one copy that keeps working indefinitely and doesn't go away or fail to follow me across systems.
picklepixel•2h ago
Built an extension that spoofs all of these. The interesting discovery: you have to intercept every layer. Miss one and you're back to 1080p.
Here's the catch though. Even with all the JavaScript spoofs working, Chrome still won't get 4K. Netflix requires Widevine L1 (hardware DRM), and Chrome only has L3 (software). The browser literally can't negotiate the security level Netflix wants. Edge on Windows has L1, so the extension actually delivers 4K there.
So what's the point on Chrome? Honestly, not much for 4K specifically. But the reverse-engineering was the interesting part. Understanding how Netflix fingerprints devices and decides what quality to serve. The codebase documents all the APIs they check.
On Edge: works reliably, getting 3840x2160 at 15000+ kbps. On Chrome: spoofs work, DRM negotiation fails, stuck at 1080p.
The repo has detailed documentation on what each spoof does and why. Happy to discuss the technical approach or answer questions.
doctorpangloss•1h ago
but i cannot understand why someone would write comments on hacker news with an LLM. how could you say something was interesting, if you didn't even do it?
michaelt•1h ago
Netflix says "Ultra HD (2160p)" requires Microsoft Edge on Windows [1].
This is a "Netflix 4K Enabler" extension that spoofs being Microsoft Edge on Windows - but unless I'm misunderstanding, the extension only works on Microsoft Edge, on Windows.
Under what circumstances would a user want this extension?
[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081
stevemk14ebr•1h ago
Am I missing something?
arjie•1h ago