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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I will believe it when I see it downloadable, I have downloaded it, and used it to watch something, and no sooner. You can't put effectively DRM on Linux; you can binary blob whatever you like, but I own the kernel, graphics drivers, audio drivers, X Server, and everything else on the system except your lil' binary blob, and it doesn't stand a chance.

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It makes it easier when you own everything around it, yes. But being on Windows/OSX doesn't make the DRM unbeatable, just more difficult to break. DRM period doesn't work, but that's not going to stop them from wrapping everything they own in it.

Ah, the old enterprise mindset strikes again. If somebody cracks the DRM on Windows, the movie producers have someone to yell at: Microsoft. Then they can make Microsoft fix it, and everyone rolls out new player software that requires the update to work. We've already been through some iterations of this on consoles, too. If somebody takes five minutes to crack the DRM on Linux... now what do the movie studios do? Go yell at Linus? The net effect of that will "an entertained Linus Torvalds" and not much more.

Of course we all "know" that DRM is fundamentally impossible, but there is a qualitative difference between trying to do DRM on a proprietary platform and on an open platform.

I believe I speak for all Linux users who need to keep Windows around just for Netflix when I say "shhhhh....."

Or you could buy a Roku for $50 and be done with windows.

Edit: $60, my bad.

Interesting -- I didn't know they were that cheap. (BTW the cheapest one is $60 + shipping).

There's also tons of Blu-Ray players with built in streaming capabilities as well that would help justify the cost of investing in a new device.

I don't know about other posters, but the reason I want everything to run through my Linux HTPC is because of the level of integration I can achieve with my custom UI, or with something like XBMC. I don't want to have a semi-reliable system with multiple boxes, IR blasters, etc. when I should be able to integrate everything I want into a single box, with the features, speed, low latency, and UI that I prefer.

Yeah, this is basically true on any other platform as well. While it may be more difficult if everything else is a blob, too, I think the reluctance is more about the audience that uses Linux than the capabilities of Linux itself. People can break the DRM on Windows too.

The reason Moonlight cannot play with Netflix's standard player, by the way, is that Microsoft refuses to license its DRM component for desktop Linux use. Moonlight runs the player on embedded Linux devices just fine, but since Linux is still small enough that MS can get away with slighting it, and since it benefits Windows to keep Linux as incapable as possible, they refuse to allow non-embedded Linux systems to run the module.

Frankly I'm surprised that people haven't cracked the MS DRM just out of spite for this move.

Frankly I'm surprised that people haven't cracked the MS DRM just out of spite for this move.

Because it's not worth it. People that want to pirate simply leech the movie off some torrent, instead of cracking a DRM then still paying for it.

er, I don't think they're worried about you. They might offer you a job.

But the content producers are worried, and they are the ones setting the bar for DRM. So if they nix the DRM on Linux, that's it.

You only really need one guy to hack the DRM and it's game over, since (a) he can share how he did it, and (b) he can freely share the decrypted files. Not that it really matters on Netflix since just about everything is already on DVD (and thus on torrents since CSS is cracked) anyhow.

Exactly. I'm certain the adults in charge know that some level of hacking is inherent to the game at this point. My guess is they're treating the set of all consumers as another corporation: an entity to do battle with in the ongoing pursuit of the best possible ROI.

And since Netflix's a web-based service, even if it were cracked, it could be patched very quickly.

Another thing about Linux: eventually someone will make an easy to use programme that captures the stream and saves it to a file, this open source programme will be useful to people and will be included in the main software repositories. It will then be easy to save the files, and open source developers will proudly promote this software and will not take kindly to netflix telling them to pull it.

Not that I'm complaining about how there would be an offical 'break netflix' programme (I think it would be cool and am an unabashed opponenet to DRM), but I think it would annoy Netflix.

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