My ISP gives a free Peacock TV membership - so WTH - I tried using it.
Haha, jokes on me - every browser I use on my U/M (daily driver) PC was refused by it - I even went so far as to (briefly) install native Chrome - same refusal.
Did some searching only to find endless mentions of how Peacock doesn’t work for Linux OSes.
Thought about it a bit & remembered that I’ve got a hand-me-down Inspiron NB with w11, which I cannot tolerate…BUT…it has Anydesk (free, personal) & several browsers - so I dug it out to test them, and:
Librewolf complained about DRM, which I allowed, and still - nope; Vivaldi - nope; Chromium - nope; so I let it d/l & install native Chrome as a final test.
Well, well, well - that works - sadly it has commercials, but plays just fine via Anydesk on my larger display, so I count this as a win.
Hopefully this info may help someone else to avoid some aggravations.
They do everything to ignore Linux clients because they know the ecosystem has so many tools ready at hand to allow capture and store of streams, which they are desperately trying to prevent.
Harder to do in the Windows environment, but still possible, if you know what you are doing. However, I myself do not.
Last time I tried was about 1 year ago, and was frustrated to the point of walking away. I just did a bit more digging now.
For those who are interested, if you do a Google Search with the following string,
linux is there a way to have firefox respond to "pluto tv" such that it does not know that it is interracting with a linux platform, only a firefox browser
that will give some very workable hints.
Doing a similar search for "Peacock TV" might be offer equally good advice.
Well, can’t say anything about Peacock because it doesn’t work for me as I’m not in the U.S. so they won’t even let me browse their home page.
But I have no issues watching series and movies on Pluto TV, works fine for me on Vivaldi and Firefox, and I’m way down into South America.
So I guess they are setting regional rules, same way Netflix is a global service (and works fine on Linux for me) but a lot of stuff you can watch inside the U.S., you cannot watch as soon as you cross the borders. Paramount Plus does that too.
From all the streaming services I tested, they work fine on Linux and on alternative browsers like Vivaldi. But I cannot even try on U.S. only services such as Peacock.
Free Peacock has little that is free except old junk, it demands a subscription to watch anything good so I have no idea about what works on it and what doesn't.
I have very few problems watching Pluto TV (mostly Perry Mason on-demand streaming). I use Brave browser in incognito mode with every privacy setting enabled, except for blocking scripting. I'm also using Proton VPN, so I essentially have double protection for blocking malware, trackers, and ads. And Brave adds anti-fingerprinting protection. I really don't care about the ad blocking for Pluto, but I'm not about to go changing the VPN and browser settings based on the site I'm visiting. It's all or nothing.
Since I'm watching on-demand streaming, in my opinion/case/personal circumstances, there's really no point in trying to capture the stream. The content is there when I want to watch it.
For Pluto TV, in terms of access, it doesn't make any difference whether my VPN terminates in the U.S. or whether I use Proton's secure core and route the VPN through, say, Iceland. In both cases, Pluto sees an IP address for the U.S. The only difference is in latency; sometimes the secure core latency causes the stream to halt and buffer, but operation with a direct U.S. termination is very smooth. In both cases, though, it takes Pluto TV about 20 seconds to start a program. No idea why.
Update: I just visited amiunique.org to test my browser fingerprint, and it showed a lot of information, but it boiled down to my Brave browser being identified as Chrome: not Brave or Chromium, even though the http headers did identify my OS as linux X86-64. The "masquerade" as Chrome may be why Pluto TV works on my system.
My ISP is providing free Peacock Premium (not plus) and I just became curious when it refused ALL my browsers under U/M; otherwise I was already in fine shape for what little watching as I ever do. (Most of my free times are spent reading ebooks.)
Sometime in the past I did try out Pluto & IIRC, was put off by all the commercials there.
IMO it is a bit disturbing that Peacock discriminates AGAINST Linux users specifically - while allowing Android devices; perhaps it is time for them to accept that the world is not centered upon microslop anymore.
I have never used these providers, but the only way a server could identify your browser as "Linux" is the user agent string, e.g.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:148.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/148.0
You could try a browser extension that changes the user agent to a string that looks like a Windows/Chrome browser, e.g.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
For example, by using User-Agent Switcher for Firefox (not used this extension myself, the DevTools have one for me). Unless, of course, they use some kind of DRM technology that exposes the operating system.
My earlier post, offering the search query to enter, will give the instructions that do spell out, in detail, the steps to make Pluto TV work for Firefox on Linux.
I can confirm that it worked, with that User-Agent Switcher for FIrefox, which again was offered by the Google AI response.
Now I just have to decide what kind of quota I want to impose on myself before starting to use it on a regular basis.
It's a matter of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and they know that Linux facilitates the dissemination of a gamut of tools that enables (encourages?) bypassing of those claimed rights. I would not expect any commercial entity to see things differently, since the commercial licensing obligates them to abide by the content provider's demands.
When User-Agent Switcher is the solution, it is confirmation a specific OS and/or browser is definitely being targeted. A while ago I was forced to use a User-Agent Switcher to use all features offered by my bank. It makes no sense to me unless the goal is to force users into a less secure system that makes data harvesting much easier.
