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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

As an Ubuntu user in Canada, they've both lost their place in my world. Netflix is here, finally - 12 or 13 years later than the USA - but they don't support Ubuntu. And Hulu's still constrained to < 5% of the world's population.

There's so much room in this space to innovate, with Step 1 being LEAVE THE USA! And Step 2: Use the WEB! Why can't we get rid of these proprietary plugins?

Any company that does both 1 and 2 will be immensely successful.

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It would probably cost Netflix more to add Linux support (and test it, and continually support/update/test it for the rest of forever) than they would ever make off of it, at this point.

And that's without the cost of advertising that feature.

I have always thought that if you choose to run Linux, you're smart enough to figure out a way to get things to run on Linux that don't officially support it. (What percentage of Linux users know how to program in at least 1 language, vs. what percentage of Windows users? 98% and <0.5%?)

Us Linux users are used to using unsupported/"use at your own risk" software, so that definitely lowers costs.

Right now what prevents Netflix from running on Linux is Microsoft. They will license PlayReady DRM but won't license it to run on Desktop Linux boxes, citing some sort of bogus "security" issue. I would think that an XP box would be much less secure than a Linux box. It's just a business decision masquerading as a technical decision.

http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/94992.aspx

It'd be much easier on Linux to tap the video stream from the Silverlight player. You could probably do it in userspace, with a modified X server, or even something like Xnest. The only way I can think of for Silverlight to get around it would be to talk to the GPU directly. (Even then, it might be possible, with a virtual machine that installs a special GPU.)

Netflix doesn't use Flash Player, so you can use the "watch instantly" feature anywhere in the world with a simple SSH proxy (Putty+Firefox works nicely for me when I'm traveling).

Do you know which ports need to be forwarded?

it doesn't matter -- in putty, forward your choice of ports (I use 9853 randomly), make sure the type of forwarding in putty is set to "dynamic", and set firefox to use localhost and that port as a socks proxy. works well for skype as well, by the way.

>in Canada

A VPN service at few dollars a month allows perfectly good viewing of Hulu and Netflix (with appropriate hardware/setup).

Have you seen netflix's offerings in Canada?

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