Comments on: Netflix and Linux Don’t Play Well Together

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:30:00 +0000

This problem may now be solved: http://www.droiddog.com/android-blog/2011/05/google-bringing-netflix-to-chrome-chrome-os-and-linux-via-html5/

By: Mastercactapus

Mastercactapus — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:26:00 +0000

/flag troll

By: synonymouswithanonymous

synonymouswithanonymous — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Problem lies more with MS than Netflix, although Netflix is not entirely off the hook here. MS Playready DRM can be licensed for use in embedded devices (i.e Linux-based Roku and Boxee box), maybe because the hardware manufacturer will pay licensing fee for it, but not on Linux desktops… not sure why, since they offer it up to Mac without a fee… Probably due to some fear that Playready DRM will get cracked on an open system (not-so-unfounded –remember the whole dvd encrypt key fiasco?).

By: synonymouswithanonymous

synonymouswithanonymous — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:00:00 +0000

By: zbowling

zbowling — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 23:51:00 +0000

Statistics are fun. They are also misleading.

You know that only around 15% of Android users download more than one app. Compared to the nearly 92% that download apps on iOS.

You know that the fragmentation is so high that if you counted each device separately (and not count Android as a platform) since it’s what us developers have to test for, the only Android phone to make the 10 selling phones in the last 3 years would be the original Motorola Droid?

Unfortunately I can’t link you since we get this data from market research papers but it should be googlable.

By: Jacob Sommerville

Jacob Sommerville — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 02:42:00 +0000

Do you just throw out random figures off the top of your head? Android’s U.S. market share hit 53% as of first quarter. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/31/npd-android-os-phones-now-outsell-everyone-else-in-us-combined/

By: John Bailo

John Bailo — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:11:00 +0000

Right, I should dump a service that has 2001: A space Odyssey for service whose ‘A’ list film is Kung Pao: Enter the Fist.

By: John Bailo

John Bailo — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:10:00 +0000

Android is one percent of the market? Didn’t know that, Rip Van Winkle.

By: John Bailo

John Bailo — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:09:00 +0000

The two apps that have kept me from being in openSuse Linux on my desktop 100 percent of the time are Netflix and Rhapsody. And now Rhapsody has an Android app which supports downloading to my Optimus V smart phone.

As others have said, there is a linux client for Hulu using Flash. You can also watch DRM’d movies (for free with ads) using Crackle.

So why oh why does Netflix cling to a solution that excludes Android, RedHat, openSuse and every other linux when clearly you can support DRM’d media in Linux.

By: Shannon VanWagner

Shannon VanWagner — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:38:00 +0000

Actually it would all be “possible”, and likely in a much better state than it is today. *.nix does not depend upon windows to exist. Just like we all should not have to pay a tax or be forced to only be able to buy windows. Technology is not just windows.

By: Shannon VanWagner

Shannon VanWagner — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:38:00 +0000

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:19:00 +0000

@Shannon
Wasn’t that suppose to be the whole point of what was said? That we’d be using *nix? No we wouldn’t. Only people who needed computers would. Certain industries still only rely on Unix based systems. Regular people wouldn’t be using anything if it wasn’t DOS. Macs were much too high for the average consumer to purchase. I remember seeing Macs in Sam’s Club for $3000+ and my mother opting to buy a word processor with a monitor instead for college classes for only $200.

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:19:00 +0000

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:19:00 +0000

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:19:00 +0000

By: Shannon VanWagner

Shannon VanWagner — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:10:00 +0000

Who cares? msft’s position from 20 years ago is irrelevant to today’s position. That’s like saying “If Henry Ford didn’t make the Model T, we wouldn’t have the Lamborghini or Ferrari or Porsche cars today”. As you can see, It’s just not a true statement. Technology exists outside of the windows lock-in, it’s true. Consider HTML5 and the entire Internet for one. Does the Internet exist because of windows? I think NOT! And thank your lucky stars!

Once the shroud of “I have to use windows” has been lifted, the sky is the limit. Go for the advancement of technology as a whole.. not for the advancement of a single coercive monopoly of a company.

Technology is for enabling humans not restriction. Put your foot on the neck of the companies that abuse this idea by restricting people with technology.

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:08:00 +0000

If it wasn’t for MS the graphical user interface computer would have likely never went mainstream. Macs were too expensive. Elementary school, we had text based DOS. Before I hit middle school, is the first time I knew you could use appications that had pictures because my cousing had a DOS batman game. Macs in middle school. First computer I my family owned was a free HP computer, given away with a CompuServe contract. 700mhz. lol

Unix didn’t exist to me until Mac OS X.

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:08:00 +0000

Unix didn’t exist to me until Mac OS X.

By: Shannon VanWagner

Shannon VanWagner — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:07:00 +0000

Roku (Linux based device) supports netflix (for if you ever think they will come around and will stop boycotting them), it also shows Amazon, Hulu, MLBTV, and many others…

By: BenManGuy

BenManGuy — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:45:00 +0000

Without MS we would all be running *nix based computers and the world would be better for it.

By: BenManGuy

BenManGuy — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:45:00 +0000

Without MS we would all be running *nix based computers and the world would be better for it.

By: nocain

nocain — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:36:00 +0000

Well that about sucks… Seems like they cheeped out and used the silverlight route in the Software boxee :( wonder if the hardware one can be dissected and have the Netflix yanked out and ported over to a desktop app

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:08:00 +0000

Boxee devices (e.g. Boxee Box) already has Netflix support. The device uses linux. But the software version of boxee does not include Netflix in its Linux version. I don’t think its a matter of the ability to support, its just that Netflix objects open systems.

By: Max

Max — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:47:00 +0000

Duh….I found out about this 2 years ago!

By: DlManiac

DlManiac — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 03:48:00 +0000

Why would Netflix (or anyone for that matter) bother playing well with world 1% market share?

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:54:00 +0000

A) welcome to 3 years ago. B) silverlight works perfectly fine in linux. Heck there are about a dozen or so linux based ‘appliances’ that I know of off the top of my head that stream netflix, so there is no technical issue. This is all about DRM.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:21:00 +0000

Good, more bandwidth for me!!!

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:02:00 +0000

Exactly. Now you get it. Both the Other 60% of developers (whoever they are) and the developers that use it have personal interests. The user/developers being they are building Firefox to what they want it to be. End users benefit as a result.

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:02:00 +0000

By: Gratefully Not Your Father

Gratefully Not Your Father — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:50:00 +0000

Looks like you see just what you want to see Ashiedu. “Firefox was developed in large part by its users–between 30 percent of 40 percent of its code comes from the community…”. Open Source is not a corporate only affair. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/223079/why_firefox_4_is_winning_the_browser_battle.html

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:25:00 +0000

Why else other than to make money? Do you think the major corporate funders of Linux are working on it for altruistic reasons? Controlling standard and even keeping things mutually beneficial are for one’s own gain. Why do you think much of open source moves so slow and doesn’t support the cool things consumers want? Alot of the things that go into any OS most consumers don’t know or don’t couldn’t care less about.

Consumers want: Browsers, games, communication in it’s various form, and some want the magic you can get from computers in the form of applications.

By: Shannon VanWagner

Shannon VanWagner — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:17:00 +0000

You should dump Netflix and use Amazon/Hulu instead. There’s no valid technical reason that Netflix can’t support GNU/Linux and so they are obviously politically biased against the GNU/Linux Desktop users of this fine “Universal” operating system. Send a statement, DUMP NETFLIX!! That’s what I did… see more about it here: http://tinyurl.com/dumpnetflix

By: Shannon VanWagner

Shannon VanWagner — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:17:00 +0000

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:10:00 +0000

I just realize that the penguin have man boobs and a beer belly. My type of operating system.

By: nocain

nocain — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:02:00 +0000

I could have sworn that I could stream prior to the silverlight fiasco just fine… on my computers, which all run linux… My assumption is that Boxee will get Netflix support, Boxee runs on Linux fine, so linux users will get Netflix from boxee.

Basically MS and Netflix made a deal back in 2009 Silverlight was an adopt or bust type of thing Netflix worked hard on it to get it working right, Now I highly doubt it would be in their best interest to change, nor do I, even as a person who only runs linux on all my computers, think they should.

MLB.com had issues with Silverlight also, but had no deal with MS so they dropped it and went to flash rather then work on getting thing working on silverlight.

By: Ashiedu Nwadiei

Ashiedu Nwadiei — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:56:00 +0000

Yeah, I realized this a few years back. Too many thing keeping me from switching full time to Linux. I’ve been trying to switch to Ubuntu since…oh…200…7? Funny, Linux has had the “App store” thing for years, just no distro has tried to make money with it until Ubuntu. They don’t have a large enough install base of average user that would attempt the switch. Hell, many people at the used mac store I used to work at wouldn’t switch to Mac or returned their computers when they came to the realization it ain’t Windows. I talked to a lady dang near 30 minutes one time until she asked enough questions that set off signals that it wasn’t “genuine” windows.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:43:00 +0000

Android and iPad apps are a different thing all together, i would rope PS3 in here as well, as iOS doesn’t run microsoft silverlight, nor does the android, or PS3, but they decode the stream another way. The Android app is not yet available, when it does become available, maybe the more savvy Linux users who can build and run dalvik vm applications on their Linux boxes can run it, but without a native application, there will be few and far in between.Its stupid, i know, but they just don’t care, i guess, so stick to hulu?

By: DMiller

DMiller — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:15:00 +0000

I believe you are incorrect, as it must have some kind if linux compatibility as its been shown streaming on Android at Consumer Electronics shows which is linux based.

By: Your Father

Your Father — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:04:00 +0000

Microsoft thrives by breaking damn near every standard that comes down the pike. You know it, I know, everyone knows it so STFU AH.

By: Your Father

Your Father — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:04:00 +0000

Microsoft thrives by breaking damn near every standard that comes down the pike. You know it, I know, everyone knows it so STFU AH.