Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Newell has the ulterior motive of killing Microsoft's app store, which he clearly sees as a direct threat to Steam. If it takes off, indeed it will be! I remain unconvinced that Linux has passed the tipping point and is on it's way to becoming the home entertainment OS of the future though. I use it on my work laptop and love it, but Win8 runs my HTPC.

1. A home entertainment box does more than play games these days. Windows is still the only OS with acceptable bluray support. OSX is as out in the cold as Linux on this score even though Apple is a member of the bluray consortium! Some may be tempted to scoff at physical media, but it's still alive and well, especially with the audio/video-phile crowd.

2. If games have to be rewritten to operate on Linux, most existing games never will. Most games, once their sales have ceased bringing in cash, are abandoned and never updated again. Legacy gaming support is important. A lot of people have beloved games that are years or decades old that they still occasionally play. If switching to Linux means they have to abandon those, they won't.

If Newell is serious about his Steam boxes succeeding, he needs to support work that will let older games run on Linux without modification and he needs to support development of a bluray support package for Linux, plus any future formats. No open source software will ever legally support bluray. I like open source and I'm sure some fanatics will be tempted to blast me for calling for more closed-source software on Linux, but that's precisely what Newell is doing. He's bringing closed source, non-free software to Linux. If you want to see Steam on Linux succeed, you're demanding something free, open-source software has yet to deliver.

View on HN

I'd hate to tell you that you're in a bit of a minority buying bluray and using bluray medium. The future isn't physical disks that you lose.

Linux runs my media pc and my media server. Valve have already accomplished full platform support for most of their games, Humble indie bundles require full platform support for their games. Linux versions of most games, isn't some far away dream, it's here.

I'm not sure I fully comprehend your linux 'open-source' only argument. Have you seen ubuntu?

Like the OP says, for people serious about audio and video quality, they will buy Blu-ray (or whatever physical media replaces it) for a long time to come. The bandwidth simply isn't there otherwise.

That said, I agree with you that the future is not with physical media - that's very obviously the case. But the future isn't here yet.

> Linux versions of most games, isn't some far away dream, it's here.

That's absurd. There are no AAA titles available on Linux. Newell's prediction might seem more realistic if Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc. jump on board. Maybe it will happen if a viable Linux-based console came around.

> There are no AAA titles available on Linux.

Other than the Valve games Linux will soon get Metro: Last Light and Football Manager 2014. Almost no AAA games so far, but it is to be expected that AAA producers are generally slower and more conservative.

Not to mention that AAA games take 2-3 years to produce, whereas Steam Linux has been out for only 6 months. There's a lot of inertia to overcome.

Exactly. You cannot expect AAA games to come anytime soon on Linux.

AAA games can be ported from Windows to Linux in a matter of days if they already work well in Wine. When they don't, extending Wine to make them work is vastly cheaper than you probably think.

Running in Wine is not porting. It is using a intermediate layer. Porting means native code.

Wine absolutely can be a porting tool; Codeweavers offers porting services using this exact technology: http://www.codeweavers.com/services/

From a technical standpoint, Wine is extended to make the game work, that version of Wine is bundled with the application, and a script is included to run it without further user involvement.

I don't get why people still insist this sort of port somehow doesn't count. If it runs at full speed, shows up as a "Linux game" under Steam, and the user literally can't tell the difference, what does it matter?

Limbo did that and its performance was awful. No thank you.

Why does it matter if that compatibility layer sits in a system-wide library or in application code (as anyone would add if writing a program to target multiple kinds of system)? Wine is not an emulator, it's a free re-implementation of the windows API that runs on Linux.

Using WINE is not porting, it does not run natively, and this is not what Valve recommends to do.

It does run natively. You don't think it runs in an emulator, do you?

You lose a lot of raw performance with wine. Left 4dead ran on wine at probably half the framerate of the windows version. No thank you.

Let's not forget Wargame: European Escalation, which is far from being an indie game. Probably close to a AAA category.

Serious Sam 3 is another game which is not exactly AAA but very close to it.

I would say the Wargame franchise also counts as AAA. Other than that, you are correct :)

People serious about audio and video quality dont run stuff from their all in one pc based player. They have dedicated, high quality bluray player and cd players. And like someone mentioned bluray is not going anywhere for the masses. Too expensive, not practical, in the end convenience trumps all.

I thought bluray was already abandoned. I never see blurays for sell in display ends anymore, Walmart has basically been forced to refocus on third-world-style living in suburban USA.

In Europe they are everywhere.

I still use DVD and am starting to have problems, because the new titles at our library are mostly Blueray.

Where are you? They're as available as DVDs at most big-box, media, and electronics retailers in urban and suburban locations across the midwestern US, at least. Wal-Mart, sure, but also Target, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, Fry's, most independent stores that sell, resell, or rent movies, and Red Box rental kiosks. They're also available from chain drug stores like Walgreens and CVS. Smaller and rural locations tend to have smaller selections, but that's true of most any product type.

Honestly, the only retailers that come immediately to mind selling DVD but not Blu-ray are gas stations and truck stops.

I'd say the bandwidth is easily there for Blu-Ray. I can download a 40-80gb file on BitTorrent pretty easily if its well-seeded. What I can't do is legally buy a Blu-Ray, and have it downloaded at Blu-Ray quality to me from any vendor.

Which is absurd because the first thing I do with all my Blu-Rays is rip them losslessly to MKV files on my server.

easily? Maybe in some really well-off parts of the world. Blu-Ray bandwidth is between 20-30mbps, and where I live you can't get anything higher than 10mbps, and even that is lucky,the highest option most people can get is 4-6mbps. I purchase all of my films on BluRays - the quality is there, the media is forever mine and not bound to any subscription, I mean I am pretty sure we will get there eventually,but until you can get 100mbps fibre connection to everywhere it's impossible to phase out physical media.

Would it plummet if your neighbours did the same?

Where I am its popular for whole villages to decide to lay fibre and they set up little trusts to do just that and they even get grants from the government. And they have really great speeds, but at some point their bundle of fibres meets a switch.

>Maybe it will happen if a viable Linux-based console came around.

Eh, isn't that what Valve's Steambox is: a Linux based console?

I watched a bluray movie last night for the first time and I was shocked. I was so surprised how much higher the definition was vs streamed "hd" content.

I can also definitely detect a significant distinction, but it doesn't feel more "real" to me -- in fact, I experience it as falling into a kind of uncanny valley between video-realistic and near-realistic. Don't much care for it.

Perhaps you watched it on a system with the horrible, high-framerate interpolation switched on? Not everyone is sensitive to 24fps (traditional film) vs. 30fps (looks like Handicam output) and the effects of TV/processor motion enhancement.

A lot of HDTVs have motion interpolation, colour enhancement, and noise reduction; all of which absolutely ruin movies.

I suggest turning these off(In my case, all of them were on by default, and some of them needed to be manually toggled on every start for a month before it magically decided to default correctly).

This is because traditional film cameras had horrible images compared to what your eye can see. This resulted in various techniques such as movie make up and bright lighting.

Now that the camera is much better, all of those compensation techniques are now making the image look fake. The lighting is too bright, the makeup too heavy.

I'm not convinced that's the whole story. Even old movies converted to digital fall into the uncanny valley. Try watching bluray Godfather for example. Looks staged.

You might want to check the settings on your Blu-ray playback system, because the Godfather Blu-ray is one of the more "filmic" transfers I've seen, preserving the grain of the film print rather than attempting to "clean it up" with digital noise reduction, and it should play back at the original 24fps frame rate on any system that supports it.

> The future isn't physical disks that you lose.

No, it's a Netflix subscription, so when they drop your kids' favourite shows you have fun explaining corporate politics as the reason they can't watch Bob the Builder any more.

> Linux versions of most games, isn't some far away dream, it's here.

Very little of my Steam library is available with Linux versions. Almost none, in fact. This would be the norm for most people, unless you're limiting yourself to games that run on Linux in the first place.

> Very little of my Steam library is available with Linux versions. Almost none, in fact

That probably means you don't play any Indie games. Not sure who is the norm here. Indie Games have been booming in digital distribution, in case you did not notice.

Yes, and I love me some indie games, but I'm pretty sure each version of Call of Duty will sell more copies than most (if not all) indie games combined on Steam.

I buy indie games that I already own to support the developers (some of which I know personally), heck, I just bought the Humble Bundle even though only of the games there I didn't have, but Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Skyrim/Bioshock/GTA are the games most of the players want, not Frozen Synapse or Hotline Miami.

You seem to be making the assumption that you'll never see a Call of Duty game on Linux. It wouldn't be the first AAA FPS title to come out for the platform (UT, Quake, etc), and if Valve's console thing sells well enough, they could entice them onto Linux.

I remember that the Windows version of Call of Duty 1 worked perfectly on Linux using WINE.

But you will have a chicken and egg problem. If the steam box sells well, they will port, but except for some early adopters, they won't buy it until the games are ported.

I hope we see more games ported, but having worked in the industry for many years, going the extra lengths to support yet another OS which will most likely be just a small beep in the sales numbers isn't going to happen anytime soon. Heck, look at the franchises that started on the PC (CoD for example) and how the developers still focus more on the console versions then the PC ones.

I have. I play some of them (e.g. Limbo, which is great). I also want to play the Saints Row and Risen series, too.

Unfortunately, the games market as a whole leans more towards the big series, which are much less likely to be cross-platform beyond "several consoles and maybe a PC port."

> No, it's a Netflix subscription, so when they drop your kids' favourite shows you have fun explaining corporate politics as the reason they can't watch Bob the Builder any more.

Mate, the 'future' you're suggesting here and the related straw man argument is one of your choosing. Netflix or some known current company isn't a future to a medium. I'll assume you're suggesting online streaming as a service as opposed to other potential digital medium schemes. Physical disks provide no advantages in this scenario either, what happens when (not if) this favourite disk becomes scratched and unreadable?

> Very little of my Steam library is available with Linux versions.

Very few of mine don't have Linux versions. This might not be the norm for most people of course, because it's linux that is gaining in the field of gaming platforms over windows. Sure, I can't play the same amount of AAA games as if I ran windows. With the Half-Life engine now running on Linux and many indie games having ports, I don't _need_ to run windows to game.

I'd love to throw in some data, but alas many a site related to numbers are classified as 'games' and blocked on this connection.

>what happens when (not if) this favourite disk becomes scratched and unreadable?

Wow, really? I have you know I still own DVDs from 1997! and they work just fine so you might want to dial down the "when not if" argument.

On the flipside, I do have some trouble finding streaming sites that offer their services for that long. Not to mention the fact that these services have recurring payments to use. So excuse me if I and many many others opt to buy our media to own and to be in control of it rather than trusting some company with offering it for god know how little time.

And here is the real kicker: If you own a disk, you have ways to digitize it yourself if you can't be arsed to put a disk in the drive. So it seems to me that I have the better end of the deal compared to someone who just streams everything. Not to mention the fact that not everybody has internet connections that lend itself to stream blu ray quality.

>Wow, really? I have you know I still own DVDs from 1997! and they work just fine

I have you know I still own a horse-drawn cart, and the wheels work just fine!

It really is more of a "Where we are going, we wont need wheels" situation. Sure there are some edge cases for physical media today, but they will slowly fade.

> Mate, the 'future' you're suggesting here and the related straw man argument is one of your choosing.

It's a thing that actually happened. I'm sorry facts don't accord with the world in your head, but there you are.

> Very few of mine don't have Linux versions. This might not be the norm for most people of course, because it's linux that is gaining in the field of gaming platforms over windows.

"You shouldn't want to do that" is rarely a compelling argument to customers.

> It's a thing that actually happened.

Just like HD-DVD is the future? Netflix cannot obviously in the point in time be a future for most citizens on the internet. You may be screaming in an echo chamber if you're located in the US. Netflix certainly isn't a solution elsewhere.

>No, it's a Netflix subscription, so when they drop your kids' favourite shows you have fun explaining corporate politics as the reason they can't watch Bob the Builder any more.

I suppose this is as good a time to ask as any... Why has UltraViolet not taken off, in anyone's reasonable estimation?

Seems smart to me. I buy a UV film, everyone recognizes my purchase. I buy a film once. I own it. Do I have this wrong? I only own a few, mostly with other purchases, but it seems smart to me, and easy.

You don't own it. You have a lease until they shut down the ultraviolet service. You've giving control of all rights to the operator of the service. If they don't want you to have subtitles in your language then you don't get them.

It give up so many freedoms I can't wish for ultraviolet to die more.

I guess UV doesn't offer enough lock-in to its partners. These days if you can't build a Thiel-style "monopoly" you might as well not even bother.

I find so much wrong here. For one you really don't seem familiar with Wine, which despite being run by a ragtag group of developers already has brought legacy support for most Windows games on Linux.

The bluray argument is largely moot. Valve and the game industry at large could care less about it, with consoles as the exception. Gabe and his team only have to present a console with an advantage over existing consoles (modular build is a huge deal) with a distro that is stable. With the impressive bases already in existence, and OpenGL being a fullfledged match for Direct X it's a no-brainer that Valve has what it takes to pull this off.

Lastly I'd like to point out the Linux community is not uniformly against closed source. What makes our veins pop is stuff like hardware OEMs not releasing driver sources, making development and innovation a pain. Who cares if a game is closed source?

Most interesting about Wine (to me) is its use as a pre-packaged porting mechanism; I've seen a few indie games whose "Linux port" is just the Windows binary and a wrapper script that opens that binary with Wine and the correct DLLs.

I think you're right about Wine. For games Circa 2003 and earlier I often have much better luck with Wine than I do on a modern Windows install if I'm using original media.

Not to mention that every game I've ever gotten from GoG has worked pretty smoothly (IE close to effortlessly) with Wine. I've only run into trouble with stuff like installing 3rd party infinity engine mods.

I think in some ways Linux is a better platform than Windows for retroclassic games.

I think most people are missing the point. It is not about replacing your main OS or PC it is about having platform independence. The same reason why Google bought/started Android applies here; protecting/getting the means to sell your services. The Steam Box is going to be an open h/w and s/w platform. If you would like to integrate Steam in your TV? please by all means! You would like to sell your own Steam Box? How may we help?

People that are going to buy a steam box are people that would otherwise buy a ps/4 and/or a XBOX one. Nobody cares that the PS/4 is running BSD nobody is going to buy a PS4 because it runs BSD. Microsoft failed to understand this as well, "we have three OS's running on the X1", yeah that will sell a game system like cupcakes. Almost nobody is going to buy a game/entertainment system based on the OS. It boils down to cost, marketing, what your friends are getting, launch games and exclusives.

If the steam box is going to have similar h/w and price point as the PS4 and X1 and a couple of cool new games like HL3, it will have more games at launch than the PS4 and X1 combined (and as an extra bonus you can play your games on a PC running Windows or Linux). You want to play HL3 on a console? buy a Steam Box.

As for bu-ray support, if it turns out to be a main point of consideration they could make a player that support it. But looking at the PS3 vs X360 it wasn't a main seller for most people.

TL;DR it is not so much about all desktops running Linux but most of everything else

This is a great point and should be modded up. Lots of people use the android-based 'smart tv' functionality in newer TVs. If the TV can have a steam box built into it, I suspect it would see a LOT of use, no matter if the game selection is not 100%.

And of course since Android is Linux, combining the two would seem feasible...

> 2. If games have to be rewritten to operate on Linux, most existing games never will. Most games, once their sales have ceased bringing in cash, are abandoned and never updated again. Legacy gaming support is important. A lot of people have beloved games that are years or decades old that they still occasionally play. If switching to Linux means they have to abandon those, they won't.

I don't see the majority of players care about old games. I certainly do, and so does a non-trivial amount of people, but it's not really anyone's focus I think.

New Windows versions make (edit: in my experience) most old games unplayable, I've had much more success getting Windows 98/XP games running on Wine than on Windows 7, to my surprise (Baldur's Gate is a recent example).

If there's a market for legacy games, someone will step up and port them to or emulate them on modern operating systems. It's already happening, both commercial (gog.com etc.) and non-commercial (console emulators, DOSBox, Wine, ...)

> New Windows versions make most old games unplayable

That is simply not true, the vast majority of games work fine, and most of those that don't only need you to fiddle with the "compatibility" settings.

As for the reason why "old" games are important, it's because they offer a back-catalog, you open your store with a very large selection. Not so much the 10-15 years old, but rather the 2-5 years old games.

> That is simply not true, the vast majority of games work fine, and most of those that don't only need you to fiddle with the "compatibility" settings.

I realise that's just my experience, added a remark above. I've had very little luck getting even stuff that works fine on XP to run on 7. I'm not blaming Microsoft, I know they're going to great lengths for backwards compatibility. But I don't see old games running on new systems as a given, not on Windows, not on any other platform/OS.

> As for the reason why "old" games are important, it's because they offer a back-catalog, you open your store with a very large selection. Not so much the 10-15 years old, but rather the 2-5 years old games.

Maybe I'm old, but 2-5 years old games aren't "old" at all in my book. I'm thinking about >10 year old stuff. Don't recall any trouble getting <5 year old games running on 7, indeed.

In the cases where I got old games to play in windows 7 when they were having problems it had a lot to do with running them as administrator. Which is a shame, as I bet many of the multiplayer games are riddled with security exploits.

the plural of anecdote is not data - some games work, some games don't. i've had both successes and failures with older games.

> the plural of anecdote is not data

Yes it is. Biased, self selected, very hard to exploit. But it's still data. If you know the biases and counter them (for instance by asking people directly), you could even gather something useful.

> If you know the biases..

indeed.

> for instance by asking people directly..

a terrible way of accounting for bias. people are often unaware of the bias they impart on what they say.

Of course. Selective memory would still be a problem, for instance. But you would get rid of self selection. Though if you just ask your friends, you will have another kind of selection bias…

It's a shame gog.com have stated that they don't plan on supporting Linux anytime soon. The main reason being that they won't be able to provide reasonable support for multiple distros and distro versions. Why they can't just officially support Ubuntu like Steam does defies me...

A partnership between gog.com and valve could really, really be something special here.

It'd be nice, but I think gog.com is too anti-drm for this to happen. Not a bad thing I don't think.

Older game compatibility might not be so much of an issue in itself. You have the same thing with Windows to a degree, plenty of DOS / Win95 era titles are not directly compatible with newer versions. Same with older consoles.

What tends to happen is either there is a re-release to cash in on a previously successful game or compatibility tools (WINE/DOSBOX) become good enough over time.

The biggest hurdle is the lack of a killer reason to run a Linux gaming system over a Windows system or a console. AFAIK there is no big title in the works that will be in any way a Linux exclusive.

Here the open nature of Linux actually works against it to a degree, since the underlying stack is open source, dependencies can be (and are) ported to other platforms with less technical and legal issues then proprietary systems like DirectX.

Its not going to be an hurdle but a great opportunity to see many players come up with their own steambox. You basically end up with an open console anyone can make.

1. A home entertainment box does more than play games these days. Windows is still the only OS with acceptable bluray support.

I had a PS3 for years and I think I watched a bluray one or two times. The rest of my full-HD media experience was powered by the internet. Nobody building anything for the future should care about physical, DRM-encumbered formats. Those are clearly the past and will be gone sooner or later.

Using Linux in this regard seems like a good solution. Windows will tax you to hell and back for the privilege of rebooting your hardware all the time to apply software updates, while Linux is free and doesn't require such user-hostile nonsense.

Nothing (of value) is lost and the solution is future-proofed by not walking into licensing-traps.

Considering the paucity of games written for OS X I think its a stretch to see any number of games running on Linux. Even on OS X far too many are ports or wine type encapsulation and the OS X base does tend to spend more than what is normally attributed to Linux users.

On Steam now, there are 289 Linux capable games, versus 809 for OS X, and thousands more for Windows. So they have a lot of ground to make up

To be fair, steam for linux has been out for about 6 months. Steam for OSX more like 3 years. That's some pretty significant progress in that time.

Yeah, support for Indie titles has been very impressive so far. Besides, Newell said "Linux Gaming is the Future", i.e. it's not there yet.

But if they indeed launch a "Steambox" with dedicated Linux support, that's a whole new story in terms of user base and market expansion.

IMO Linux stands a more reasonable chance of being a successful gaming platform than OS X because you can actually get a decent GPU for your Linux PC.

OS X also still have large problems with graphics drivers while on Linux the drivers have gotten way better the last couple of years.

When looking at the tech support forum for Europa Universalis 4 I noticed Mac users had much more performance problems than either Windows or Linux users.

The difference here is that Valve is strongly pushing for Linux, and helping out developers to follow their path. That did not happen with OSX. And they know that serious gamers are not OSX users. The people who play the most are on Windows currently, and even if they convince 1% of Windows users to switch to Linux at some point, it will make a significant impact on the Linux gaming market.

There is nothing wrong with "Wine type encapsulation" ports, especially when we're talking about full screen games that don't need to interact with any sort of desktop metaphor. If it works, the user just doesn't care (or even notice!)

I think they mean Linux will be successful in the gaming space in the same fashion it succeeded in the mobile space. The Steam Box will run Linux, no user will ever know about it, and it will leverage the openness of the OS, coupled with the already existing Steam user base to lure developers.

I think this is a game changer for the console game development industry, and for the console market. In the end, however, it'll be a lot like Android: quiet success.

ha! blu ray support? who cares about blu ray support?

it's a snore-fest vs. dvds: http://www.digital-digest.com/blog/DVDGuy/wp-content/uploads...

whereas streaming passed purchased dvds... last year: http://www.screendigest.com/reports/2012222a/2012_03_online_...

and win8 runs your htpc? nice. other than you, i know no one who even has an htpc anymore (occasionally hooking their laptop to the tv doesn't count) and most of them (my non-geek friends) don't even know what that is.

everyone and their dog has a roku/apple tv/xbox/smart tv tho.

m3mnoch.

I'm not sure how you have such an old account and have never read the HN guidelines, but please don't sign your posts.

prolly because i am not afraid of being hellbanned or whatever hacker news calls it these days. been there before. remind me to tell you about the time i was banned from the quarter-to-three forums sometime.

or maybe i'm more of an austin-game-guy rather than a bay-area-groupthink guy?

or maybe it's because i've only recently bothered to comment? in fact, i think this one may push me over into a double-digit comment count!

shrug

most likely, tho, it's because i've been commenting like that forever and a day (in internet time). a quick google search nets me this example from about 8 years ago: http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/839/something-awful-3...

thanks for pointing it out tho. i'll try to remember going forward that, unlike the rest of the internet, there's a pretentious law here not to sign your posts.

                     <-- look!  no sig!

"everyone and their dog has a roku/apple tv/xbox/smart tv tho." - why do you assume that everyone lives in the US? You do know that most people in the world do NOT have access to those services,right? In my country there is not a single streaming provider, so I buy all of my films on BluRay. Who cares about a market chart? Nowadays I would not even consider buying a DVD film,and streaming is not an option. And all 40 million of other people in my country are in the same situation - no one cares about roku/apple tv/xbox tv/netflix/lovefilm because they simply don't work here. And pretty much in any country to the East and South of German boarders. And don't tell me that's insignificant.

Not to mention not everybody has "Google Fiber" or similar to be able to actually stream something in blu ray quality even if the services were available.

Try to make do with a 3MBit/s connection. Then, people might see that their beloved streaming will not surpass physical media until these kinds of connections are a thing of the past or only exist in the rural-est places of the world.

sorry to hear your country doesn't have solid support for those streaming providers. that sucks.

my country, however, does. as do all (well, most) of my friends' countries. that would be why i used "i know no one" as the qualifier for my comment. shrug

basically, i answered his anecdote with my own. (oh, the delicious irony!) sorry again if you missed the connotation there.

> Who cares about a market chart?

only people who value data over anecdote it appears.

>Windows is still the only OS with acceptable bluray support.

That's like say that Windows is still the only OS which supports Minidisk, PS/2 and 5 1/2 flopies.

It hardly matters going forward, and it probably does it more harm than good.

The problem is that it might matter for HTPC consumers now, which could hinder the potential later of consumer Linux HTPCs.

Who cares! It's about selling a console. I care about having a BluRay player yet I still bought ax Xbox 360 back in the days. That did not prevent any purchase at all.

> Windows is still the only OS which supports Minidisk, PS/2 and 5 1/2 flopies

Liar! ;-) I use a PS/2 keyboard on one of my Linux boxes. Works flawlessly. Linux also supports Jaz and Zip disks/

A bigger problem for using your linux machine as a media PC than bluray is the lack of Netflix. You can make it work with wine and some patches, but it's a non-trivial amount of work and/or disruptive to your normal wine install.

Try netflix-desktop. It's a package available for Ubuntu and Arch (probably more, but those I know of). One click install of everything you need for Netflix, without messing with your current Wine install. Worked for me!

When last I looked at it, it actually can't be installed alongside the official wine package from the ubuntu PPA. I'm sure it's possible to do it manually and have it alongside, but that's a fair amount of work.

Until the patches are all in upstream it's basically an alpha capability. And having to use wine at all for it makes it second-class compared to using a normal windows install.

Even better is pipelight: http://fds-team.de/cms/articles/2013-08/pipelight-using-silv...

> lack of Netflix

Why does Netflix matter? I've never jumped on that bandwagon and I don't miss it. I watch one or two movies a year, and the free, legal content available on Hulu / Crunchyroll / Youtube / over-the-air TV is more than I can possibly consume!

And besides, can't you just ask Netflix to mail you a physical DVD if your OS isn't compatible with their streaming service? Or did they finally shut down / spin off that service like they wanted to a few years ago?

Or you could reboot to Windows...I'm assuming your PC came pre-installed with it, and these days Ubuntu is pretty good at preserving your bootloader provided you don't tell it to format your disk when you install.

> I've never jumped on that bandwagon and I don't miss it.

That's... lovely. I'm not sure what it has to do with the price of rice in china, though. You don't miss something you've never had? That kind of goes without saying.

I watch considerably more than one or two movies a year, and netflix is a great way to watch them on a casual basis. I don't want to get CDs in the mail and I don't really have any interest in dual booting to windows (and no, most of my PCs don't come preinstalled with anything).

I'm really not even sure what the point of your post is, except to say that I should inconvenience myself greatly for no really good reason.

Bluray players are already at sub $100 prices. For people who want blurays, they can get the player. If they start becoming an issue, I bet valve can get blu-ray onto linux if they wanted.

I have no trouble playing BluRays on GNU/Linux. Not that I'd bother; BluRay drives are an extra expense, and are fragile as far as media go.

Much of the content I consume also requires software patching to watch comfortably anyway(anime for instance is often only ever released in Japan without English subtitles. Even if I could afford the discs, I wouldn't be able to consume the material comfortably until I've studied Japanese for a couple more years).

Your point about legacy support is moot. When people buy a new console they really dont care about running games from the previous generation. When sony stopped offering backward ps2 compatibility for the ps3 it did not stall their sales. For the xbox360 most of the xbox1 games were never made compatible with it. You are just talking about a vey small and vocal minority.

1. Can I develop an open source blu ray player with full aacs support and put it on my website without getting sued?

Depends. Do you live in Europe?

I run Steam under Wine for Skyrim on a reasonably priced system with a decent, but not great Nvidia graphics card. I use steam for most of the other games and buy stuff from humble bundle.

Currently I use a mish-mash of Apple TV and an older Sony box (which is actually pretty decent compared to apple except for itunes support) for the home theater, but I fully expect my future tv to actually have a netflix and what have you player on them. Gabe would do well to actually announce a tv that runs Steam, as the future probably is less and less a separate box.

Edit: Oops, forgot, I also have 100 Mbit ethernet, Bluray isn't in my future by a longshot. I expect more people will be on this plan soon.

why would a digital distribution platform care about a blu-ray drive. None of the games on the platform will ever be sold on physical media.

Anybody who cares about blu-ray players will already have one anyway. They could also pick one up for very very cheap.

> Newell has the ulterior motive of killing Microsoft's app store, which he clearly sees as a direct threat to Steam.

I honestly think that's all there is to this, because otherwise how is Windows 8 any more or less open than Windows 7?

I think it's not Windows 8 in particular that made Valve nervous, but it was probably the wake-up call.

The industry as a whole is moving into walled gardens right now, following Apple's lead. I'm very worried about that myself, so I'm cheering Valve on here.

It's true, having open platforms aligns with Valve's business goals. I fail to see the problem with that, it's a lucky coincidence.

Steam is every bit as walled a walled garden as any other.

Valve wants to build it on top of am open platform (Linux) because building a walled garden inside someone else's (MS's) walled garden is risky. But that doesn't make steam itself an open platform.

Yup, that's true. Currently they're blowing the open platform horn (for their Steam Box as well), but Steam itself is by no means open.

At some point, open platforms might no longer align with their business goals. That's when they'll do nasty stuff, and that's when I'll whine about them. Currently, I'm cheering them on.

There is pretty much nothing you can't do to a game you bought on steam. You can copy and modify all the files you download - in fact Valve strongly encourages doing so! You can even play on multiple machines at once over a LAN by turning off the steam client's ability to phone home.

Steam is a more like a walled national park - the walls are there, but they give you a lot more room to run around.

Not to forget, game sharing with up to 10 friends/devices is coming.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24063613

You're comparing apples with oranges.

Valve will position their steambox to compete with consoles, which have the same issues with backwards compatibility which you mention.

Physical media will matter less and less in the future.

My HTPC is a raspberry pi running a variation of debian and XBMC. I also have a chromecast for watching netflix and youtube.

I currently do not have a gaming PC and would be massively interested in a steambox when they're released.

What are blu-rays like for the rising 4K/UHD resolution? If that takes off, could we be looking at new format requirements? Higher bandwidth? Higher capacity? What about 3D? What about beyond that, holographic?

I don't know. This is all speculation, but I would grant Gabe the benefit of the doubt here. Over the next.. 5+ years, who knows what the entertainment world might be like?

Legacy support of old games on PC is overstated, at best. I still can't get Oni to work, even after installing guerilla patches.

Have you tried asking around on http://oni.bungie.org/community/forum/index.php ? I have been able to get Oni running on Windows 7 in the past (although IIRC only the modded EXE ran)

Disk media is a dying thing (even though DVDs remain the only normal media with easily removable DRM). Video is going to shift to purely digital distribution. Blurays are obsolete. Many people don't even have drives to read them and see no point to buy them. DRM lobby constantly tried to slow down innovation, and the technology stepped over them.

Bluray support was problematic in the past, but in 2013, on Ubuntu: 1. Install http://www.makemkv.com/. 2. Insert Blu-Ray disc. 3. Click copy.

Now it's ripped, you can play it through any decent media player - mplayer2, mplayer, VLC, etc. etc.

Sorry, legacy gaming support comes in the form of emulation, not physical media drivers. See every past device/format/drm locked gaming system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com