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by dfajgljsldkjag 144 days ago
Hello HN, I have an important thing to point out:

THIS EXTENSION DOES NOT WORK!

let me put it another way:

THIS EXTENSION DOES NOTHING USEFUL!

The author did not reverse engineer anything. He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

The author did not check if the extension actually works. He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

Other commenters in this thread have noted that this extension cannot do what it claims. [1] The author simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

Thanks for listening to my ted talk.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803836

5 comments

> The author did not check if the extension actually works.

The author said the extension did not work in Chrome.[1] But they did not respect other people to say this where everyone would see it and plainly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803459

Thank you for your warning. I checked the code and I don't see how this could possibly work. If not for your warning at the top of the comments, I would have assumed it worked as intended, and congratulated the author on their successful project of deshittification.
The submission title is indeed correct, but the README there is indeed so bogus. What's the point even discussing environments that don't have Widevine L1?
> He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs

Many such cases

Have you tested it? I have no doubt that it was vibecoded, and there's a lot of bogus stuff in the readme, but there's also a good chance it's at least slightly functional.
WTF does "slightly functional" mean in this context.
There are a bunch of factors that affect whether Netflix will give you the highest resolution available for your hardware. Some of them are "soft" constraints, like the user agent, the pixel resolution of your screen, and what profiles the client requests from the server. Then there's hard constraints like the DRM version, HDCP level, and what codecs your hardware actually supports.

This extension tries to spoof HDCP status and codec support which is stupid and will not provide any benefit, since it is ultimately enforced by hardware.

But it also patches Cadmium to request a custom set of profiles which is useful and can improve compatibility: https://github.com/Pickle-Pixel/netflix-force-4k/blob/72e179...

For example, here's a set of profiles that makes 1080p work on Linux, as opposed to a mere 720p: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/Turbo-Recadmiumator/blob... (or at least it used to, I haven't tested it in ages)