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Comment by naner | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't make any sense. Netflix will not (cannot) stream anything without DRM protection due to licensing agreements. The video element from HTML5 obviously doesn't have any mechanisms for content protection. Perhaps Netflix is producing a NPAPI video player plugin for Linux browsers but that would mean they are not using the HTML5 video element.

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Agreed. I'm guessing they are using the term HTML5 rather loosely here. They may have incorporated some other aspects of HTML5, but I don't see how <video> could be part of what they are planning to deliver.

Couldn't they be developing a plugin that adds support for whatever DRM/Video solution they are using, so that the browser can play the video via the <video> element?

Might not be that easy. The DRM should essentially provide protection from the content distributor all they way to the hardware. If they are just play it via the <video> element, users can just scrape that content. With Silverlight or other proprietary drivers on proprietary OSes, they can have an agreement with those company to guarantee the DRM protection gets enforced. Now with open sourced drivers, that is not going to happen easily, as users can just recompile the driver with the DRM check commented out.

Meh, there are commercial products out there that will rip the video from netflix on windows, so that level of DRM is really a myth anyway.

That's essentially Flash / ActiveX / Silverlight.

What's the point of the DRM? Every movie they have has already been pirated. I can't imagine anyone bothering to capture the stream when they could get it so much easier in many other ways.

What if they downgrade the quality enough? Say the stream it at 486 lines + degraded sound. Perhaps OK for many customers (since it might be equivalent to a degraded quality due to network throughput and latency) but if they can guarantee the quality is low, the owners of the content won't mind relaxing their distribution agreements.

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.

They're competing against full-HD Blu-ray rips on torrents. Cutting off their nose to spite their face (by degrading quality) isn't going to be to their own advantage.

This is most likely the same idea as the PS3 Netflix player -- the entire UI is done in HTML5, but the actual playback is handled through proprietary software. Requiring a "plugin" suggests this will be the case.

The justification for doing the work mentioned in the article doesn't make any sense, either. They make it sound like users had to go and download a "Netflix Plugin" with their current system and then deal with updates, when in fact Silverlight already works exactly like they describe in the article, with the control getting retrieved from their servers each time (unless it's cached and there's no newer version available).

They may have developed a plugin/extension that wraps HTML5 video element and gives them streaming capabilities, probably with no data accessible as plaintext.

The work on streaming for HTML5 is already being done, for example: http://goo.gl/9OJSc.

I wonder if it's feasible (legally and technically) to encrypt the stream between their servers and the plugin, but have the plugin send a local, unencrypted version to the built-in HTML5 plumbing.

That is no more secure than just sendimg a plain stream, as a sufficiently inclined user could man-in-the-middle that stream.

No, it's too easy to extract media content from audio/video elements.

obviously they've written a DRM system in Javascript :) j/k

NativeClient probably

Why could the NPAPI not expose a stream that could be consumed by the HTML5 video tag? What if it's part of the new AV proposal Google released?

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