Why is Hulu video streaming quality poor on Ubuntu 22.04?

Question

Poor quality streaming seems to be exclusive to Hulu as the Netflix stream is clearly HD quality.

Hulu streaming quality is blocky and pixelated. The stream was tested in the Firefox browser with DRM controlled content enabled as well as ElectronPlayer beta 2.0.8 installed via Snap. I can’t get high definition video in either Firefox nor ElectronPlayer.

When I say “high definition” I’m just looking for the standard 720p high-definition (HD) display resolution of 1280x720 pixels that some of these streaming services are capped at for DRM reasons.

Answer 1

I found the following: Why is my Hulu such bad quality?

Streaming in 720p depends on the configuration of the device you are using. Contractual restrictions and digital rights management policies prevent Hulu from streaming in 720p unless the device as configured is HDCP compliant.

This led me to find support for DRM that was preventing HD streaming via High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)

The Intel(R) unified HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) is a user space implementation to prevent copying of digital audio & video content across digital display interfaces. It provides Linux user space implementation to enable the HDCP1.4 and HDCP2.2 protection for external digital display interfaces (HDMI/DP).

Solution

I installed the package intel-hdcp via apt with:

sudo apt -y install intel-hdcp

This seems to have been enough to make my device "HDCP compliant". Hulu is now streaming at an acceptable quality.

Hopefully all of this helps. It is certainly known that there are occasions when HDCP ends up disrupting the streaming experience for paying Hulu customers and this is not always something the user has any control over.