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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

The author is mixing together several problems here.

1) Amazon bundling a video service with their free shipping program.

2) Amazon's proprietary software locking in you into whatever platforms that are in their business interests.

3) Panasonic's proprietary TV platform that people can't be bothered to develop for.

4) Digital Restrictions Management that prevents one from downloading a movie via Amazon Prime and playing it in any other video player on any other platform.

This is just the usual awful situation when you rely on proprietary software. Stop using Amazon Prime to watch videos. Write to them about the problems you have. I recently wrote to Audible because their ebooks come with DRM and cannot be played on GNU/Linux using Free Software.

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There's also a hardware ecosystem problem. Apparently we live in a world where people expect a TV to have a web browser with Adobe Flash on board.

I have a 30-year-old amplifier that still works just fine, despite having been built before CD players and MP3 players came along. Sure you could buy an all-in-one device that integrated the amp and the tape deck, but a lot of people avoided those because they wanted flexibility, expandability, and robustness.

Similarly, back in those days it was quite common to see little TVs with an integrated VHS player. But if you were the sort of person who bought individual audio components, you probably also avoided those things, because you recognized that the function of projecting a moving image on a screen was independent of the function of reading a signal from a strip of magnetized tape, and so keeping them in two separate devices bought you flexibility, expandability, and robustness.

Now, apparently, those old lessons are still useful. I'm not very much into TVs, so I don't know, but to me the real "ecosystem" problem here is that the TV apparently is not just a display device. It's pulling double duty as a web browser also (and who knows what else is in there). Unfortunately, a year and a half is a long time in terms of web technologies, so a perfectly good device for projecting moving images onto a screen is now deemed obsolete.

This arguably happens in every context. What keeps these "integrated" devices useful is the (hopefully) open nature of the software running them. A TV that supports open web standards will last a helluva lot longer than one that supports a vendor standard abandoned after a couple of years.

In other words, a TV that also plays online video is great as long as there's an open, standardized method of delivering it.

This is a great point. My Roku works great for Netflix, Spotify, HBO Go, and Amazon Instant Video, all on my "dumb" TV.

>Now, apparently, those old lessons are still useful. I'm not very much into TVs, so I don't know, but to me the real "ecosystem" problem here is that the TV apparently is not just a display device.

For a while, the appeal was that it was cheaper and simpler to just buy a smart TV that had Netflix, etc integrated than it was to put together some other solution yourself.

Turns out the reality is that the integrated smart functionality tends to be slow, clunky, and rarely updated. Now that things like Roku, Apple TV, and Chromecast are so cheap and easy, the tides have turned there.

While I was somebody that bought a smart TV a few years ago for those reasons, I've gotten to where I haven't touched those features since Chromecast launched. If anything, it's become an annoyance that my TV has a 15-20 second boot time when I turn it on. I know I've decided that my future TVs will be TVs only, and that seems to be a common theme among others I've talked to with smart TVs.

> Turns out the reality is that the integrated smart functionality tends to be slow, clunky, and rarely updated.

This was my immediate assumption as soon as I saw advertisements for "smart TVs". I assume it's even worse for in-car smart screen thingies, since you buy a new car even more rarely than a TV.

What I wouldn't give to have read your comment 2 months ago. Smart TV integration seemed great since we almost exclusively use Netflix. But the boot time and interface interaction speed is so slow, I now leave the input set to chromecast exclusively.

Add me to your list of people who will only be buying a dumb tv in the future.

This seems especially true with cars. I lease a new Volkswagen and it comes straight out of the factory with a navigation system that looks and feels so outdated that it makes you wonder why car manufacturers even bother trying.. It's just so slow and ugly compared to an iPhone or other smartphone that I cannot imagine anyone using it in a few years.

This rings so incredibly true to me.

Bundle solutions seem to offer more issues than they offer simplicity. Like you, I own a ~30 year old amplifier which does only does a few simple things thing: running my speakers, switching between two inputs, and supplying power to my PS3 (bluray player).

The two inputs are my TV and 3.5mm audio jack (for phones), my TV handles digital input, namely my PS3, my laptop, a RaspPi, and eventually a Chromecast when I get around to it.

My laptop makes my TV an audio visualisation screen (Project M), a Netflix screen (Chromium-Pipelight), a YouTube screen (Chromium/Minitube). A multipurpose media screen, without any smart-TV'esque clunkiness.

Chromecast is one of those things that is either purposely or coincidentally replicating this kind of setup for a more average user. You can use your tablet (extremely practical) to do pretty much everything I described above. Once again I find Google trying to be my (huge and scary) buddy, instead of hugging me to death by ecosystem lock-in. (Yes, I see the irony of Android with that statement.)

> PS3 (bluray player)

Hoo boy, speaking of proprietary issues, I unplugged mine over a year ago, and haven't missed it. I used the PS3 for Netflix and sometimes DVD/Bluray playing. The trouble is, you never knew when it would decide that it needed to update itself. Every update takes like half an hour to run, can't be postponed or run in the background, and your device can't do much until you run it, since naturally, you can't use your Netflix account, which ought to be completely separate, without logging into a PSN account that I have no use for. And of course, the Netflix interface is slow and terrible, and it doesn't really support anything else.

I replaced it with a Roku that does everything better and is a third of the price. Being tiny and taking almost no power are nice too. If it updates at all, it does it silently in the background, which is how I like it.

The last television that I purchased, just about a month ago, was a "dumb" television.

The reason?

The television I purchased before that was an LG "smart" television. At the time I bought it, LG promised that it would provide additional software for its TV platform that would enable additional services. It never happened. That particular TV still does exactly the same stuff it did on the day I bought it. And then I heard rumors floating around about how some "smart" televisions phone home and serve ads.

Screw that. There are any number of discrete devices with a network connection on one end, and a HDMI port on the other. I don't even need my television set to have its own tuner. So starting from my last purchase, I will now be buying televisions only as passive display devices with a variety of video input ports.

(And the device that translates the Netflix and Amazon Prime feeds to video will not be the Xbox, because there's no way in hell that I am paying Microsoft rent just to use the network interface on the box that I own to connect to a third party server. I already have at least 4 uncrippled computers in the very same room that can do that at no additional charge.)

>back in those days it was quite common to see little TVs with an integrated VHS player. But if you were the sort of person who bought individual audio components, you probably also avoided those things

Even more, if your VCR went rogue and started taking out tapes, you didn't have to throw out your TV. This mentality is now completely gone, because you're expected to throw your TV (or phone or whatever) out every 6 months.

Forced obsolescence is always a boon for manufacturers.

That's a cogent point, but those are all symptoms of the same problem, which I'm guessing from your last sentence, you are already aware of. The OP is merely using them as examples (again, demonstrable symptoms) of the illness that is "intellectual property", so that when people say "so what?" to the likes of EFF, you can show them articles like this.

As another example, on the same front page of HN that this article is on, is another entitled "When is it Stealing?", whereby the author begs the question by just blithely assuming that bits can be owned like physical property.

Don't get me wrong, I think attribution is a very important part of sharing information, but at the same time, too many people get caught up in believing they are special, when history has shown time and again that most "new" ideas were built upon the bedrock that is the thousands of years of our civilization, and usually multiple people get the same idea around the same time.

Did you get a response? The author mentions that he wrote to Panasonic and Amazon and was basically brushed off.

Yeah, not exactly a satisfactory one, though. Just something along the lines of "We have sent your request to remove DRM to our audio team. We value your feedback." It was a nice way of saying that mail has been forwarded to the audio team to throw in the bin. Still, better than being ignored outright.

Demand a refund. My girlfriend ran into this problem (we're pretty much a Linux household). Just could not get the audible books to run on Ubuntu and I wasn't willing to spend the time hunting around for a way to get around it. Fortunately, Audible was pretty gracious about the refund.

Are you me? That's the exact problem my girlfriend and I had and she did receive a refund.

I once asked Lovefilm about their video streaming (Silverlight) on Linux. I got a relatively honest answer: Movie studios required them to use DRM and no DRM solution is available on Linux. They will "keep looking for opportunities". I translate that to "waiting for the movie industry to give up on DRM".

"no DRM solution is available on Linux"

DRM is basically digital signing w/encryption right ? Linux doesn't have that ?

It's decryption of encrypted contents with a key that you're not meant to have access to, and with measures to try to prevent you from accessing the decoded video and audio on its way to the screen/speakers, despite the fact that the key is on your system and it's being played back via hardware that's physically under your control. It's a bit like trying to stop a sieve from leaking with your fingers.

The only way of making it sort-of, maybe achieve anything in software is through obscuring the key and decrypted data sufficiently to make it more effort than it is worth.

This means the DRM implementations are all closed source, and Linux ports are pretty much bottom of the priority list of any of the companies providing DRM solutions, not least because it gets massively harder to lock down access to the data on a system where tons of people know how to rebuild the kernel and modify drivers and otherwise try to intercept it.

"... it gets massively harder to lock down access to the data on a system where tons of people know how to rebuild the kernel and modify drivers and otherwise try to intercept it."

Because proprietary systems never get cracked; and it always takes more than one person to do it. For example, geohot.

My point is that Linux DRM is possible. But all DRM sucks anyway, because ultimately to lock down the system implementors choose to reduce the number of devices that can operate with it and sooner or later it's just one or two devices.

Of course the get cracked, but as you say: all DRM sucks anyway. So they set a bar based on how difficult they can make it to circumvent vs. market share. In that calculation it becomes easy to decide to ignore Linux - small desktop userbase and a much harsher environment makes it extremely unattractive.

It's never about locking it down fully - they're not quite stupid enough to believe they can prevent copying. After all they know perfectly well that most torrents are not originating from copies ripped by average consumers.

DRM is about a perceived tradeoff between the cost of DRM and how much copying they can stop by making it too cumbersome or difficult for a reasonable proportion of regular users.

It doesn't even necessarily have much to do with reality, but just as much to do with sheer fear.

DRM is handing a ciphertext, a decryptor, and keys over to someone else and asking them to use it only in the way that you want them to use it. (It's not signed because nobody cares whether the information is authentic or not.)

Once you have bought into the rigmarole that this can somehow be effective, you have to test and support various platforms. Doing that for Windows is cost-effective, doing it for MacOS is less so, and doing it for anything smaller is not a money-making proposition.

Of course, if you could add 2 + 2 to get 4 in the first place, you would use an open standard and be able to sell your media to everyone.

> DRM is handing a ciphertext, a decryptor, and keys over to someone else and asking them to use it only in the way that you want them to use it.

I think I have a new .sig.

I've always liked this summary of DRM from someone on slashdot:

Very, very simply, here is the premise behind DRM.

1. I know a secret 2. I want to tell you the secret 3. I don't want you to tell anyone else the secret 4. I don't trust you

Perhaps you can see now why there's no solution to that scenario.

Another good short one:

DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'

Simpler: since you need the key to view the content, the only security scheme possible is through obscurity of the key or the decryptor. Hence anyone with the appropriate flashlight can dispell the darkness.

Also, analog hole.

Except for that immensely popular linux distribution Android. Netflix and Amazon have no problem streaming to those devices.

If you recall, they had a huge problem streaming to them.

http://blog.netflix.com/2010/11/netflix-on-android.html

Netflix delayed their offering, and then restricted it to a few devices for quite some time, and now makes heavy use of the Android DRM framework. This doesn't exist on desktop Linux, and I doubt it could even be incorporated (however pragmatic) given the knee-jerk reaction to anything DRM.

Only if the video is being decrypted by the kernel rather than userspace, which may be true from what little I know about the inner workings of DRM. Otherwise, it's the GNU part that's important, not the 'Linux' shorthand.

The DRM is pretty limited (afaik) to the free streaming stuff included with Prime. If you pay to "own" (heavily scaremarked), you can download a copy yourself (some titles only allow you to "rent" the ability to stream; others wont let you download ieven if you pay to "own" the ability to stream).

Panasonic, a company not known for quality software -- what was he expecting? Just get a freaking $50 rokubox and be done with it. Then it won't matter if android or his tv doesn't make coffee to go with his salty tears. And it'll work with whatever shitty Smart TV he decides to buy into next.

So, hum, why would I accept the hefty price increase on Prime if I get quite literally nothing in return? I do not own a single one of the ‘compatible devices’ and apparently my browser (which works just fine on Youtube…) is not ‘compatible‘ either.

I just wanted fast shipping with no additional costs ¬.¬

Do you run lynx or something?

Edit: it's probably not your browser, but you do have to install silverlight.

Opera 12.16 on Debian, no Silverlight here. I even have a Firefox installed, too, but that still needs Silverlight which is not available for Linux (at least not in any of the official repositories).

Yep, that'd be the issue.

Wait, Lynx runs youtube just fine?

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