Netflix bad... Shocker, I know

Part of the resolution issue is probably caused by Netflix silly requirements. You can use hardware that is perfectly capable of handling 4k@60 or even higher, in whatever codec they deliver. But if your hardware is not considered as supported, good bad. An argument can be made for ease of use and general consumer base, but these things shouldn't punish everyone else for that.

It's ludicrous that the original pirate-killer service has become such a bad deal. 13 years ago it was such a good deal that it didn't really make sense to pirate anymore. Now it's triple the price, 1/3 the quality content, and a worse experience.

I would have had less issues had I pirated

This right here is the problem. Consumers are being punished for paying for their service. I would be more than happy to hand over my hard earned money for products and services that are good value. I'm not trying to get something from nothing here. It's absurd that we could get better than they're promising, let alone actually delivering on, and it could cost us nothing.

Yesterday, I learned that several titles on Netflix are locked out from the ad-supported tier "due to licensing restrictions". Inexcusable. Pay, still sit through ads, get a fraction of the library. I think I'm gonna start building a NAS and home library this year. BDs and DVDs can be snatched up for cheap from pawn shops and eBay. I'll do it legally just so I can tell any FBI pricks to go fuck themselves if they should ever decide to check on my shit.

Does anyone else read comments that self-censor swearwords in a squeaky voice? Like the commenter is 12 or so?

Heckin heck!

4k thing may not be Netflix itself. There's a ton of DRM that has to be working just right built into a lot of hardware and software. Many things can cause it to have issues and it's designed to break if there is anything it considers abnormal. Problem is that it's kinda, sorta new and hardware can't be updated. Same issues happened with 1080p at the time. My PS3 HDMI port broke multiple times during warranty and then I gave up after it expired. Just the slight distortion caused by the defect made the TV and all the other devices decide it was being used to pirate content and so they refused to work. These days the devices are more stable and the media industry has stopped aggressively enforcing the DRM to be so aggressive. But they still are doing it with 4K. Any little bug in a driver, software, or hardware firmware and it falls back to 720p or 1080p if you're lucky.

I canceled Netflix several years ago after having used it as my primary source of media almost since they first started their streaming service.

The problem I had is that the quality of their content decreased so dramatically that even though it worked fine from a technical perspective, there was nothing I wanted to watch. They used to have extensive back-catelogues of shows from all sorts of different national cable networks, tons of interesting foreign shows, documentaries, obscure indie films, etc.

Slowly but surely this all disappeared. Networks stopped licensing content to Netflix. As soon as they realized that streaming was the way of the future, they wanted to capitalize on it with their own streaming services. In a way, Netflix was a victim of their own success.

Now they're essentially just a TV network of their own and not the aggregator of media that they used it me. The few decent originals that they have were just not justification enough for me to pay for a service I might use a few times a year.

AIUI Netflix will limit stuff if it sees anything at all creative going on because they are afraid of you screen recording.

I know I may come off bad with this question but I ran into it a while back and felt like a fool.

What show were you trying to watch, and does that show come in UHD.

When I had it I would stream to the TV so it may be different but not all shows and movies Netflix has comes in 4K.

It may all not give you that option because the resolution of the M3 MacBook Air is 2560x1664 and not actually 4k (3840 x 2160) I understand the pixel density changes things but the native resolution is what I am referencing. Unfortunately Netflix is not going to stream a higher resolution than the display natively supports from my understanding. May not hurt to hit up support with Netflix to see they can do anything to get it to stream 4K. Maybe they’ll even refund your money.

Wrong community. You should join !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ;)

Edit:

reinstalled edge to my debloated VM... Well that was a waste of time, the bit rate was a bit better but it was still 1080p... I tried extensions, changing flags, nope, Netflix just did not wanna stream at 4k... DESPITE ME FUCKING PAYING FOR IT... Ok, I thought, I have one last option, Netflix has an official windows app, except it's only on the Microsoft store which just sat there for 5 minutes and then threw an error "unable to apply update" when trying to install the app...

Sounds less like a Microsoft/Windows rooted issue but rather your debloating process fucked with the fragile internals of Windows.
It's the same as fucking with the permissions on /sbin (don't have a better example) and being surprised why you can't access binaries in there anymore.

Buy physical media and read it into Jellyfin.

Yesterday I was watching Netflix on my phone and tried to switch to my iPad. Because my wife was also watching downstairs, I got the “you are already streaming on two devices” block screen. It even told me that one of them was my phone. So I went to my phone and quit the app. But nothing would convince Netflix that I was no longer streaming on my phone. It took about half an hour for this to naturally clear on its own. Being unable to switch devices is a major technical failing, and should be totally avoidable.

Have you tried an actual TV?

https://fmhy.pages.dev/

I'm not sure if this will fulfill your needs entirely, or how you feel regarding piracy to obtain source material, however I've been running Jellyfin for a while with an overall good experience. Subtitles are found and automatically applied, and it's rather snappy.
I use it to watch an episode or two when I'm at the gym.

Stremio with the torrent plugin. Entire web at your fingertips.

Sort of a tangent, but I’m curious what advantage Uxplay has over the built in macOS AirPlay server. I’m unfamiliar with it

Big corps like Netflix only care about supporting the 90% of users to who operate in a bog-standard configuration. They really couldn't care less about supporting things like reverse engineered AirPlay, debloated Windows, Linux running on a Mac, or anything else that's not damn near configured exactly as it was when it was first removed from the box.

It is not worth the engineering investment to make it work. They would spend more money maintaining these features than they would earn from it.

You can have whatever opinions you want about that reality, but that's just how it is. Blame capitalism.

all paid streaming is not worth it,

Not sure about the Mac environment, but I had the black screen issue when screen mirroring through Chromecast. It's fixed by disabling hardware acceleration in the browser.

Know how to stream Netflix in 4k on a PC? Install the Winstore Netflix app. It's legit that easy.