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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

"We will remove this last remaining browser plugin as soon as WebCrypto is available directly in the Chrome browser. At that point, we can begin testing our new HTML5 video player on Windows and OS X." - What do they have against linux?

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"...and we've just started using this technology on the Samsung ARM-Based Chromebook. Our player on this Chromebook device uses the Media Source Extensions and Encrypted Media Extensions to adaptively stream protected content."

I'm not an expert on Chrome OS internals but it seems to me that being a GNU/Linux derivative with an X Server, it's not much of a jump to say the Linux version is being developed and tested first.

Edit to clarify: I'm guessing the development is being done on a Linux machine rather than directly on a Chromebook.

chromebook has hardware based drm.

ChromeOS does not use X, though X can run on the devices.

Chromium is actually providing it's own compositor and windowing system.

The plugin they are getting rid of the is the Chrome-only Pepper API based plugin that for some reason is unavailable on the current Samsung ARM Chromebook.

The blob that you compile against the pepper api is native code. So they would need to recompile the blob for ARM as well as x86.

Whether or not this is actually hard for their codebase, I have no idea.

This is incorrect: the default UI runs on X.

Probably nothing, except statistically nobody uses Linux on the desktop, so it's not a priority.

Maybe not on the desktop, but there are plenty of people using it as a media center OS. Enough that someone went to the trouble of rolling a custom Wine distribution to get Silverlight + Firefox accessing Netflix.

At this point it's just kind of silly to exclude Linux, especially when all the heavy lifting is already done; Chrome OS _is_ Linux, and I believe the Roku devices are Linux-based as well.

The reasons Netflix might have to exclude Linux are not unique to Netflix, but somehow Amazon and Hulu - both Flash-based, of course - manage to support these customers.

I think in the short term Chrome will be a prereq to watch Netflix (fallback to Silverlight in other browsers). In the long term DRM requirements are going to change and hardware-level DRM is going to be mandatory. Speculation.

From Valve's Steam stats Linux has been between 2-2.5% in its first opening few months where as OSX is only 3.5%. If a Mac port is assumed, one might wonder if that should be extended to Linux. and it's not impossible we'll see Linux over take Mac on Steam this year as it stabilizes, gets more games and more people sign up.

You should try xbmcbuntu on a htpc sometime.

The cardinality of the intersection of the set of people running Linux on a desktop/media center and the that of people dying to watch DRM'd content is likely small enough to be easily ignored.

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