Image comes from the monstrous work the Asahi Linux team did to get Netflix working on Linux on ARM Macbooks: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/
The only platform not yet supported is the Mac Pro, although there probably isn’t much left to do. No, not the “MacBook Pro”, but the “Mac Pro” – the one that looks like a cheese grater and costs thrice as much.
I’ve always wondered what sort of look they were going for.
The Mac Pro only costs three times as much as a cheese grater???
Apparently they make it up on the wheels. Apple is a strange company.
I think the wheels and stuff are just for marketing at this point.
Wait, what wheels?
look it up on apple store, if it’s still on there
I just looked at the product page and every single image makes me dislike this product more than the last. The goddamn thing probably weighs 10 pounds and comes with fucking wheels.
Edit: Apparently it weighs 37 pounds. I don’t know how they crammed that much bullshit into a 18 by 9 by 20 box, but they did and then they slapped wheels on it. The wheels are probably considered a two thousand dollar “value” by Apple, though.
bullshit doesn’t end here. There’s a $1k monitor stand, that needs a $200 extension to be vesa compatible, and is no better then some free stands that u get with (dare I say) normal monitors.
Gotta respect a quality use of the word “thrice”
Ignoring its existence is spitting in the mouth of pragmatism, and not in a good way
What comes after thrice? Quadrice? Tetrice?
Whatever you want, man, that’s the trick
I remember seeing it and thinking “No, this can’t be real. No way Apple actually did this.”
Edit: I just checked and if you apply all upgrades, the total hardware cost is $12,348. That’s 3.5th the price of the future Vision Pro
Have fun with your seven thousand dollar cheese grater.
Might’ve been a marketing move to connect to the apple pie with cheese demographic.
Did they just forget to crop the whole thing? It looks even more hideous with the grey background on the black background.
My browser is forcing dark mode on it and the picture is not transparent.
That’s what i’m saying. I looked for a CPU cooler lastly and Noctua & co. (all with dark webpage) all neatly cut their product image on transparent. But Apple can’t bother for their overpriced cheesegrater.
When did they give up on the trash can? I miss the trash can. It was easier to call it overpriced garbage when it looked like an actual garbage receptical.
I’ve seen poorer documentation than this I suppose.
I hate how true that is…
I’ve written poorer documentation than this.
“Here is a work around to fix [weird bug in production]:”
“Edit: Disregard the above. It fixes [weird bug in production] but causes [bad thing] to happen.”
“Edit 2: Apparently the first edit is wrong. It doesn’t cause [bad thing] to happen. Bad thing just happened to occur simultaneously the first time I did the workaround.”
“Edit 3: [weird bug in production] has been fixed. This workaround is no longer needed.”
“Edit 4: Turns out [weird bug in production] we fixed is what allowed our systems to communicate with one another. Had to rollback change. Work around is now considered ‘the fix’ going forward.”
“Edit 5: Turns out it DOES cause [bad thing] to happen, but [bad thing happening] is a core component of our system’s design and also PAYROLL NEEDS IT TO FUNCTION?!”
Did you read the Documentation?
Yes and I followed it exactly by running the Feldisprut command with the 8 parameters
What are your parameters?
Feldisprut -i -p -87 -256 -codecreplace -codeccopy -withsound -biflwop
Why are you using biflwop?
MY GUY I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT IS I’M JUST FOLLOWING THE DOCUMENTATION. Tried it without biflwop and it says I’m missing a parameter, so what do I put there?
use “nobiflwop”
No changes
Oh, right we don’t support 256 on the beta, it only goes up to 128.
Fuck you.
Problem isn’t just on Linux’s side for a change. Louis Rossmann did a video on Netflix’s bullshit some weeks ago. Seems it’s far from uncommon to not get what you’re paying for with those shitbags
when we’ve had netflix (off and on a couple months at a time, last was about a year and a half ago), we often encountered 540p max playback on “hd” titles that should have (legitimately) been streaming at 1080p; and we rarely were able to use all the simultaneous connections of the plan (usually only limit-1)
When it’s like that I’m happy we only have the cheapest netflix, and then 🏴☠️ when they eventually remove what you were watching.
They even removed One Punch Man 🙄
I’m still on the old cheapest 720p plan that they no longer offer (waiting to see if they jack the price up or silently move us to a different plan). I stream on too many devices that would require way too much fuckery to get a higher resolution anyways plus we’ve really only encountered the number of screens limit once
Yeah, I fell for this once a year ago and was dumbfounded to only get 480p when I paid for “UHD”. Never paying again. Great job, bean counters.
This team surprises me every time😁
Asahi Linux devs go hard.
Super interesting read. We get to experience apple’s incredible engineering, but we don’t often get the chance to see how things work under the hood. This was probably the most interesting article I’ve read in the past month.
That Fedora Spin just works. This afternoon I fired up mine to a colleague, he was blown away: I’ve got the Spinning Cube! And the Wobbly Windows! Dzoinggg!
But seriously (tho I love my Cube), kdenlive, Ardour, the works, and all on modern pipewire - just works. It’s what I need, it is indeed fantastic work, both from the Asahi team and the Fedora people.
(Yes, I had to do all those things to get Netflix, yikes)
JellyFin likes my new 20 TB HDD very much. That’s all I’m saying.
Link for the hdd? I’ve got like five 5tb drives all wired to a usb hub and need to bite the bullet and get some real storage solutions.
https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&capacity=20-&disk_types=internal_hdd
Good place to find what’s a good deal. I think my search string there is specifically 20+tb drives.
deleted by creator
If you want to read the gritty-nitty of how exactly was the Widevine blob patched and worked around specifically to not violate the DMCA, here’s the specific article
Sad that Android TV boxes have better playback than PCs costing 20 times as much.
Android TV is not free though.
You pay with yourself,
your interests / watch habits,
all being collected and sold to the best bidder for “personalized ads”…What about a raspberry pi with lineageos as a tv box?
It depends on what you’ll run on it.
LineageOS in itself is good/private.
However the GApps/GMS are not.I’d recommend replacing GMS with MicroG if you need that for the apps you use,
which still talks to Google,
but in a minimal way.YouTube isn’t private either,
but Grayjay/NewPipe are.
You can put LineageOS on some of the Amlogic boxes and just don’t install Google apps and stick to FOSS.
Ofc the most private way to view content is to sail the high seas, though.
Good, I don’t care about ads anyway, barely an inconvenience
Depends on the launcher you use.
That’s… Not at all how it works.
Don’t worry, you’re one of today’s lucky 10000!
Launcher on android is just that - an app to launch other apps. Other apps can and do run in the background, without ever being explicitly launched. Think play services, location provider, wifi connection manager, etc. Since google runs its stuff at the highest level - nothing can hide from it. Other apps, like netflix, utilise internal telemetry. Assholes like facebook push the boundaries to the limit and collect literally every input of every sensor to have as much data about your environment as possible.
TL;DR - custom launcher cool, but no cure.
[Some apps] push the boundaries to the limit and collect literally every input of every sensor to have as much data about your environment as possible.
Scary. Recommend any further reading?
I don’t have something specific to read, my statement comes from questioning the declared permissions by apps. Why would, say, facebook - an app that, essentially, downloads and uploads content via http, need access to location, gyro, contacts, texts, call history, making calls, microphone, etc? Also, while I can’t prove it, as someone who works in computing I can guarantee there are undocumented/buggy/testing APIs and just straight up bugs that companies with enough resources can and do find and abuse. Cambridge analytica has only strengthened my view on this.
Take a look for yourself with a rooted phone.
Blocker will show you all the recievers/services/activities/providers the app uses,
and will allow you to block them.https://github.com/lihenggui/blocker
Apps often still work correctly with about 80-90% of their recievers/services/providers blocked, since they’re spyware, which doesn’t add functionality to the app.
XPrivacyLua will allow you to lie to apps when they request sensitive data.
Aditionally it will show you timestamps of what it lied about, to which apps, reveiling what they try to collect on you.
https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua
ClassyShark3xodus allows you to decompile and scan apps on the fly,
to check which well known trackers are embedded into it.https://bitbucket.org/oF2pks/fdroid-classyshark3xodus
Idk if these apps still do it,
since I have not used them for years,
but that’s how I learned about many things like:- 9GAG contained a face detector service at some point.
- Facebook Messenger requests access to your microphone, even when you are not calling with it.
Not a cure, but does stop me seeing ads. And frankly of you don’t want anyone to know what you’re watching, you wouldn’t be on Netflix either.
But my point remains that Android TV is still a better legal media player than a PC.
I regret convincing my parents to subscribe to Netflix instead of using Torrent or Emule. Fuck these fucking companies that now cost more than bluerays and broadcast content with crappy quality if you don’t have a platform that knows how much you’re shitting yourself
You can always setup a nice Plex server and give them all the movies they want.
It’s not like you can’t unsubscribe from Netflix
I have to find the time to do it, I had seen jellyfin as a solution, but I also have to find something that acts as a server, my raspberry pi 3B+ is not powerful enough for 1080p+ streaming
If you parents have a standard TV stick or Apple TV their devices support a variety of codecs.
This means that you can “direct stream” content from Plex / Jellyfin with minimal CPU impact.
At 1080p it should at least support ~4 direct streams when it doesn’t have to “transcode”.
That said, even if it is weak by today’s standards it’s a good platform to learn the setup on. Then you can move to something else more powerful (but still cheap) once you understand it all.
At least that’s how I did it, 3b+ -> Pentium J5040
Personally I bought a used office PC (with 8 GB of RAM and Intel i5 6th generation) on eBay for less than 100 €. It works really great!
yes, but singleboard computers take up less space, make less noise and have almost non-existent energy consumption
I find this to be an option with Movies/TV Shows but a struggle with Music. At least once my kids were older and listening to stuff. They were constantly asking for stuff to be downloaded, my mom and wife were asking for stuff, my brother, etc. Had a subsonic server set up and just got tired of actively managing it. Spotify isn’t great but it works and it saves a headache. I just wish there was better options because I don’t like the Spotify app. YouTube Music is even worse, especially since it subscribes to everything on YouTube too so all my subscriptions got jacked up.
if you want DRM-free, bandcamp is the best way, but for “exploring” subscribing to spotify is the best way in terms of quantity, and it doesn’t pay much less than other DRMs even if it has a monopoly, and is not from the USA or China
Here you can compare other services if you are interested in how much money goes to the creators: https://streamingcalculator.com/ or https://www.musicgateway.com/royalties-calculator
otherwise if you don’t want to pay, youtube + soundcloud with adblock is the best solution. or if you really have a lot of time you can make your own self-hosted pod on funkwhale: https://docs.funkwhale.audio/administrator/index.html
Give them a search tool as a web app (for said music server and scraper setup) and allow them to ask it for the music. When they’re over their limit, have it return a temp unspec error. Dust your hands and walk away proud.
I don’t have access to my music torrent site anymore due to the first one shutting down (W.CD) and then going idle on the other one for years. Don’t feel like re-downloading everything either since I lost all my music in a hard drive crash. Could probably recover it from my Cowon X7 but don’t know where the cable is for that anymore.
Ah, good ol’ w.cd ⚰️🌹😢
https://bestforandroid.com/apk/spotify-premium-mod-apk/
Just create a fake account with 10 minute mail or something similar. On my desktop i use the web-app with ad muting extension. Works rather well.
xManager Spotify.
Holy fuck, emule?! At this point, just use usenet.
It’s used by my father for some old porn and the colourful progressbars.
I still have nightmares from the porn I’ve found on emule decades ago. Apparently some people have fetishes that involve brutally killing animals…
i am against paying for DRM streaming services, and i boycott apple products, but i must say this is an impressive hacking effort and a well-executed meme about it. 🥂
How I sleep knowing that I have never having watched any Widevine content ever in my life: 😴😴😴
If I could easily do this on my desktop/laptop I legitimately might stop pirating media. I would also stop if the streaming companies just let me watch full quality and didn’t take away what I purchased because the rights holder decided they want you to buy it again on another platform.
I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.
If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.
Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combustsAnyone who has worked in retail will tell you this is absolutely, concretely, and vehemently something corporate would expect their employees to actually say to customers, so don’t go giving them any ideas…
“If buying it isn’t owning it, that means pirating it isn’t stealing it”
Digital goods in the 20s be like
The irony of this article being able to quote those comments for us, the humble readers, while the fucking movie studios can’t do the same in a court of law is just… so delicious.
I’m so glad that I subscribed to netflixs DVD rental service. I would get stuff in the mail, rip the disks with handbrake, and send back. Repeat. Torrents where a no go with a 5gb a month satellite ISP.
genius idea, i should have done that but i was only a child
Still remember having to patch widevine L1 on my Poco F1 just to get HD working on Netflix.
Weirdly my totally legally obtained DRMless video files never had this issue.
Im kinda mad cuz i removed netflix from my phone plan cuz they kept increasing prices. now Netflix is apparently something i get in my package (its in my base plan somehow and not something i can uncheck anymore. It’s not something i can remove, (something i want because fuck Netflix yarrr) and the base phone plan price keeps ticking up. Fucking phone plan pricing grrr that’s a whole other thing…
Change carriers
Neat. Chromebook image is useful for blobs when installing coreboot also.
