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Comment by diyorgasms | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anything unreasonable about asking the studios to provide their product in a particular format. What if you wanted to purchase a movie, and the studios only offered it on Betamax?

Relying on Flash or Silverlight is similar. I use Linux, and Flash is officially unsupported on Linux. Silverlight has never been officially supported on Linux. If these are the options, then I cannot watch the movie out of the box, I have to find a flash installer (I had better hope one's in my package repositories), or I have to install wine and build Silverlight into my browser or some such.

I think it is totally reasonable that you would ask the studios to provide content in a manner that you can actually watch. Let's not even get in to the Blu-Ray encryption snafu and how that affected those of us who use non-commercial operating systems.

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I don't see anything unreasonable about asking the studios to provide their product in a particular format.

So if I hand built my own codec I could then ask Netflix to provide videos to me using it?

Of course, that's an extreme example. But they're not obliged to cater to your every whim - they're a business that makes business decisions, like losing X% of customers because they don't want to support Y codec/platform/whatever.

>> What if you wanted to purchase a movie, and the studios only offered it on Betamax? >> I use Linux

So it's more like a betamax owner complaining that movies are only issued on VHS :)

Hey, man, inconvenience through obscurity is a real problem causing suffering to literally dozens of people.

It's also totally reasonable for them to not provide their product in a form that only a tiny percentage of people actually need. Might as well complain that they no longer sell VHS tapes because "all I have is a VCR and I just want content in a form I can watch". At some point you have to recognize that you need to meet them halfway. I mean heck, you even recognize that Flash isn't supported on Linux. How hard is it to replace the word "Flash" in that sentence with "Hulu"?

Well if they provided a MKV file for sale then anyone could use it on their devices how they see fit. Similarly to how people can download mp3 files and play them on any device they want.

The current situation is that I have to watch TV shows via EME within Chrome or Flash or Silverlight (non of which I would otherwise have near my computer) or not be able to pay the content producers any money (which I like doing because I want new content created). It is as if I had to own a sony TV to tune into certain channels and a panasonic TV to watch others.

If they want to prevent piracy then simply watermark the MKV files individually, register the sales and sue the buyers who's MKVs end up being torrented.

My point is that they should at least try to compete with piracy as far as user experience goes. I can download a movie and play it on Linux. But apparently providing a legitimate means for me to do so isn't worth their time.

I don't like to recommend it but google chrome works with Netflix out of the box these days

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