Netflix To Come To Linux Via HTML5
thechromesource.com
thechromesource.com
At some point, even they have to realize that if someone really wants to get a pirated version of the content, they probably will, and probably much faster than bothering to setup buffer capture from Netflix.
Another thing they could do is to apply (or at least convince the users) that they applied a user-identifying watermark so if the video is leaked, they would know the source....? I've heard academy award disks have that.
The work on streaming for HTML5 is already being done, for example: http://goo.gl/9OJSc.
Wait, what's the point of DRM again? I can already get every movie ever made for free in HD on the Internet.
People have asked us to implement DRM in VLC since a long time, over and over. At the end it is impossible, because when an code interface is know, you can always switch one part and dump the stream; the part being a filter, a video renderer or just a video driver.
This is why HDCP was implemented (and failed, btw) to have a chain of trust.
Similarly, people don't pirate movies by having a close friend rip Netflix streams. They go on The Pirate Bay and download the torrent. Preventing piracy means you need to prevent people from ripping the disks or streams in the first place... but the people who do that aren't "casual hackers", they are as hardcore as priates get. And if just one person figures out how to do it, it's broken forever. (I assume there are plenty of programs available to rip Blu-Ray disks now, since the key for each disk is known and publicly available. It only takes one person to do that, and then the DRM is nothing but a waste of CPU cycles and engineering talent.)
To your point about the security of DRM, that's an overly idealistic view of things. It's simply not true that the one person with expertise to break an almost-perfect DRM is going to rip every movie and torrent it. Hell it's trivial to rip any DVD and that's more than Netflix quality already. The studios are not the blundering idiots that the hacker community would like to believe; they realize all this, but they're not just going to roll over and go DRM-free just because of an absolutist argument. Instead they're going to keep pushing the envelope (and paying!) for ever-improved DRM to cut down on piracy as much as they can. It may be a losing battle, but if it is it's lose-lose for them so they'll keep fighting it.
For movies that are newly in the theater, the movie is captured with a video camera. This varies in quality from some guy pointing a cam-corder at the screen with a microphone (worst quality) goes up when they hook the audio directly in using the system for the hard-of hearing (often called a telesync, though it's a bit of a misnomer) and is even better when done from a tripod in the projection room.
Something that is still done, but is more rare, is to take the film and run it through a piece of dedicated equipment for converting from film to video, caled a telecine.
Then you just need one leak of a movie to have it on all pirates website. Most people don't rip, but only watch what's been ripped by other... And doing so, those days, is just a matter of having a rogue HDMI dongle :D
So long as Netflix is putting limits on its accounts -- one stream at a time, maybe X hours of streaming per day -- what's the problem again?
I'm just hoping that this article is accurate and Netflix is rolling out a true HTML5 platform.
You don't need Silverlight to implement the DRM stack for PlayReady. Once you license it, you can implement the DRM stack any way you want, be it hardware, software, etc... otherwise this wouldn't work on iPhone either.
Hopefully the quality will be better in HTML5 than Netflix's current offering. While the price is right, dark scenes are pixelated in NF movies over cable internet.
I have recently watched a few movies over Google's Youtube movie service, and Amazon's. Both use flash, and both have much better quality, at least on my laptop. As I watch a movie on flash I wonder why NF can't figure out how to get equivalent quality.
And there's also Silverlight, which freezes up my laptop on about 10-20% of attempts to watch a NF movie. Be good to have that gone.
Still would be looking forward to this though.
On my linux desktop, flash in full screen is even worse than my netbook.
I read in the past that they chose Silverlight because it allows them to dynamically control video quality based on fluctuating connection speed. Has Adobe not built that into flash yet?