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dan

@dan@upvote.au

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
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dan, (edited )
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In-browser DRM usually uses a library called Widevine, which is a closed-source library created by Google that’s usually only used on Windows or MacOS.

On Linux, you can use Google Chrome to get Widevine working. You can also extract the library from Google Chrome to use it with Chromium (e.g. see github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine). The version of Chromium shipped with Linux distros doesn’t include it since you need a license and permission from Google to distribute it. Lots of Linux users would also (understandably) really not want to run a DRM binary on their system. It’s intentionally obfuscated to try and prevent people from breaking it.

I don’t know what other Linux browsers do - I haven’t used Linux desktop for a while (going to switch back soon though). On other OSes, browsers like Firefox and Brave prompt you the first time you try to watch DRM’d content, asking if you’d like to download the plugin. I assume they license it from Google.

Also as far as I know, Widevine doesn’t allow the same security/compliance levels on Linux as it does on Windows and MacOS, as the OS is less locked down. This could mean that a 4K video streaming service works fine on Windows but won’t allow you to stream in 4K on Linux. Isn’t DRM great???

dan, (edited )
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just spoof your browser fingerprint

That won’t help if your platform or browser doesn’t support Widevine. It’s possible Amazon only support the Widevine implementation on Windows and MacOS, and no amount of browser spoofing is going to help you if your browser just doesn’t have the right closed-source binary DRM blob.

dan,
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dan,
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There are many other places where DVCS repositories can be hosted

I mean… Everyone that’s cloned the repo has a full copy of it. You could clone it directly off someone else if you wanted to.

dan,
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How many people use Github for discovery though? I usually find interesting projects through a search engine, through word of mouth, through posts on here, etc. at which point it doesn’t really matter where the repo is hosted. A lot of the useful projects I use aren’t even on Github.

As far as I know, Gitea is current working on federation support, which will be great. It’d be like Lemmy where you can browse repos, submit issues, etc from one instance even if the repo is hosted at a different one. Git was really designed for a model like that, not for a centralized one.

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