tobias_platen's blog
Tobias Alexandra Platen's software freedom blog
No Netflix on my Smart TV
When I went to the Conrad store in Altona, I saw that new Sony Smart TVs come with a Netflix button on the remote.
Since I oppose DRM, I would never buy such a thing. I would only buy a Smart TV that Respects My Freedom, but such a thing does not exist.
Instead I use a ThinkPad T400 as an external TV tuner and harddisk recorder, since my old TV set does not support DVB-C. As a DVB-C tuner I use the
FRITZ!WLAN Repeater DVB‑C which works well with the free VLC player. Since it lacks a CI+ slot, it cannot decode DRM encumbered streams.
When Netflix was founded in 1998 they initially only offered rental DVDs only. Today most DVDs can be played on GNU/Linux using libdvdcss.
Even if most DVDs that Netflix offers do not contain strong DRM, Netflix is still a surveillance system that requires proprietary JavaScript.
When I buy DVDs, I go to a store where I can pay using cash.
The Thinkpad T400 has no HDMI port and “management engine” back door is removed by installing Libreboot. Most modern Intel systems come with a HDMI port.
HDMI comes with some kind of DRM called HDCP which was developed by Intel. On newer hardware the “management engine” is used to implement video DRM.
Netflix in 4K only works on Kaby-Lake processors, which implement the latest version of Intels hardware DRM.