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Netflix Extends "Watch Instantly" To Mac Users
CNet is reporting that Netflix has opened up its "Watch Instantly" feature to Mac users (here is Netflix's blog entry). They accomplished this by using Microsoft's Silverlight technology on both platforms, abandoning the Windows Media Player solution that had been employed in the first, Windows-only, version. Silverlight's DRM capabilities meet Netflix's needs, apparently. Netflix warns that this is beta software. Mac users can opt in here, then watch instantly with Safari or Firefox 2+, with the Silverlight plugin in place. Movie selection is somewhat limited.
Sweet, we can now taint our Macs to watch Netflix streams.
I was just arguing with a mac fanatic on a forum about how 99% of software doesn't run on a mac cuz they're kinda specialized and now here comes the best article ever. Netflix has been around for how long? And they only pretty much did it because they found out it works easily with Silverlight in Intel based macs only. Other than that mac users are left out in the cold as usual it seems. I think this is kinda dumb news though cuz I mean if people have a mac, they should be used to pretty much not being to run any appls they find online ever so they usually either dual boot with XP or have a limited purpose mac like for multimedia editing. Mac people, give it up already and either have a single purpose media editing Linux system for a hell of a lot less or just get a damn PC and stop making people occasionally write software for you.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Niggers love my big sphinx of quartz.
I am really afraid of DRM giving Silverlight power and more distribution (and vice versa). While Flash has (or will have?) DRM capabilities too, another "competitor" on the DRM market could really make things even worse than they are.
This also theoretically opens the door to watching movies in Windows WITHOUT having to use IE. I never understood why IE was required to begin with since the current non-beta DRM was Windows Media-based.
It doesn't seem to differ from the normal instant watch selection. Obviously that selection is limited in that it does not encompass the entire Netflix library- that would be infeasible regardless of the player being used.
As far as I can tell, the beta allows access to the full instant watch selection that IE users would see. The player loads and buffers much quicker than the player in IE7- allowing for much faster skipping forwards and backwards on the old P-IV in my living room. The performance difference is fairly pronounced on my relatively new laptop. Under Firefox it is consistently 15 seconds from clicking "play" while browsing instant-watch to the actual start of the video. In IE7 it will take between 30 seconds 45 seconds. Video quality is indistinguishable in terms of clarity, but I noticed much less stuttering in the silverlight player.
On the old pentium IV machine in my livingroom, the time to play drops from about 1 minute to 25 seconds. While this is half the time, it was never a big deal when compared to the convenience. What is a big deal is the impressive drop in stuttering compared to the player in IE7. On my dinosaur of a living room computer, the video for all netflix movies would stutter every few seconds or so until the movie was fully buffered. In the silverlight player, there is no noticeable stuttering.
I did this totally subjective, non-scientific, arbitrary, and slightly drunk comparison on the following two machines:
Older-than-dirt desktop-
-2.4 GHz Pentium IV
-1GB DDR 333 RAM
-Windows XP Home SP3
-Ati Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB VRAM)
Slightly Newer Laptop-
-2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
-2GB DDR2 RAM
-Windows XP Pro SP3
-Ati Radeon Mobility x1400 (god awful)
say what you want but if you've used silver light it's actually a pretty impressive platform. my only beef is it's download size vs flash. flash is what, 800kb? silver light is 8megs. not really a huge deal i guess but a bit of a wtf considering they do the same thing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This was somewhere (digg?) a couple days ago and it was in limited release to new users only. I still can't use it:
Our apologies -- instant watching is currently not supported for Macintosh.
We are working on a solution for Mac users and expect to have it available by the end of 2008.
Which will happen.
No sig today...
Sadly, I titled the first post really poorly. After playing around with the "beta" player on a couple machines for a little while longer I found a few other things worth noting.
The Silverlight player does not require nearly as much free space as the IE7/WMP player for the "high quality" video to play. I've checked and the library is the same as that availible for the PC as far as the 182 items in my instant queue go.
While that doesn't cover the thousands upon thousands of items they stream, it does cover a wide range of properties. So far as I can tell, the Starz! content, the CBS current series content, the NBC current series content, and all the showtime content is still there. Other than that, well who cares if "Santa Clause Conquers the Martians" isn't availible in Firefox. Oh wait, it looks like it is.
Odd, I've been a Netflix user for about 2 years and my roommate has it running on his Mac right now. I'd call their customer service and ask. Did you follow the link in the CNet article? Do you have silverlight installed?
I'm a huge fan of Netflix's DVD rental. I'm on the 8-at-a-time plan and with the exception of the attempt to drop profiles, they've never given me anything other than fantastic service. When it comes to this watch instantly stuff they completely fail, though.
1. Selection is horrid. Even where they have quality content, it's something like season 2 of some TV series, with season 1 nowhere to be found. If they are going to use DRM, I expect some quality content. Otherwise, I'm fine with It's a Wonderful Life. No need for Titillating Monster/Sci-Fi Movie Du Jour, thanks.
2. They've gone from Windows only to Silverlight only. That's great for my media box, which runs Myth. Linux may be a minority on the desktop, but is it really so among media boxes?
3. I have a huge amount of bandwidth, am just a few hops away, and they stream me a postage stamp.
Another annoying, proprietary bullshit extension I'm going to need to watch video in my browser that people are going to end up building entire websites in.
As if I wasn't ADD already. Now they just h
Yeah it's funny how they switch from a crappy proprietary solution, to yet another, even heavier.
No silverlight here, has it been ported to BeOS yet ? What about *BSD, AROS, Haiku ?
I still can't understand why one needs a whole VM to play a video, be it flash or whatever. There is absolutely no point... Damn, "the net was so much better, simpler before". They wouldn't have any problem using the EMBED tag if they didn't insist on using DRM. And this works on all platform, using whatever player is installed, instead of enforcing an ugly and slooooow player on everyone that doesn't always work.
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_flash_sux_even_on_linux.png
And I've yet to find someone who can show me formal proof of work of DRMs. They are inherently ... http://www.defectivebydesign.org/
I guess we all know it: https://thepiratebay.org/ And it doesn't require any Silverlight.
When you come home from the pub at night after a few beers you don't want to wait for BitTorrent, you want it NOW!
If they can get it working on Xbox instead of PCs they could even have a hit on their hands.
arrghh
Yes, that's a great solution to an incompatible horse-and-buggy problem. Let's switch to a donkey-and-buggy!
I tried it on my Intel machine running 10.5.4 and the installer says that it will not run on a power pc. So i then installed the package using pacifist and it crashes safari every time i try to view a movie.
Another quality M$ product.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I did it at Morro Rock. It was the middle of the night, and my girlfriend kept getting scared every time a car turned around in the parking lot, because their headlights would shine on us for a split second. Good times.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I've watched instantly on both PC, the "original" MSIE version, and Mac with Silverlight. On the PC, it's very watchable, especially in full-screen, and this is on a 2GHz P4. On Silverlight on the Mac it's like watching YouTube: massive pixellation on fast cuts and pans, and pretty fuzzy borders otherwise. And this is on a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo MBP. Unless this is a result of it being beta or a Silverlight fault, I'd have to say that on a Mac it pretty well, to use a scientific term, sucks.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
I've been watching Netflix on my Intel (mac) for months now. I just run VirtualBox with windows installed. Works great. Works with Linux too. Of course you have a valid Windows XP or vista Lic but given were talking about a payment service here, the small cost of obtaining any old windows lic if you don't already have one is not really an issue.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Anyone tried it on Moonlight? I've tried a few other Silverlight applications on Moonlight with varying degrees of success. I might consider restarting my Netflix subscription if Moonlight could play the "Watch Instantly" features.
This is obviously quite the coup for Microsoft and the Silverlight platform, which has up to now been a "nobody cares" platform. The main effect of their previous big user, NBC for the Olympics, was to drive people to BitTorrent.
I fully understand that NetFlix wouldn't be allowed to make Hollywood movies available without some sort of DRM. But do they remember they're competing not with DVDs by mail or DVD rental, but with unlocked BitTorrent downloads?
How usable is NetFlix via Silverlight? Does the DRM have little enough pain-in-the-butt factor to compete with free?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I couldn't get Silverlight to install in Firefox for some reason so I tried Opera. If you tell it to identify as Firefox then you can use watch instantly with Opera.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
The DRM on the Windows Media Player plugin for Netflix doesn't work because my monitor is too big. I shit you not. It took a lot off googling to figure out the problem, but the player won't play when I have my 24" widescreen hooked up, but will with my 19".
Does the silverlight plugin have this same restriction? Either way it'll be nice that I can play these on my Macbook Pro now.
Every time I see a mention of Silverlight, it's followed shortly thereafter by a stream of comments of the form "Silverlight sux0rz". However, none of the ones I've skimmed have given any particular reasons.
I'm curious as to specific reasons why I should avoid installing the Silverlight plug-in on my Mac. I'm already aware of (and sympathetic to) the "DRM is fundamentally evil" argument; I'm looking for other reasons beyond that (and its companion "Microsoft is evil").
When they support linux , Then I'll rejoice
I think its a great match
You speak London? I speak London very best.
You can't opt back out of the beta once you opt in, so caveat emptor. I learned this the hard way after I found out that the Silverlight player doesn't seem to utilize the full-screen video overlay when playing over s-video from my laptop.
All the Silverlight griping aside, I am already watching Dr. Who season 1 on my macbook, and it makes me quite happy. :D
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
It's nice to have the option for more content on my Mac Mini HTPC. I primarily use it for Broadcast HDTV via MythTV and DVDs from Netflix. So, this give a whole new source of content.
I have been using it for a few days, with mixed results.
- The quality is not great, and can vary widely. It seems to adapt to your internet connection speed. So, I think my Comcast "Burst then throttle" service screws it up. I often get the message saying needs to re-buffer.
- It's completely browser based. So, no integration with MythTV or FrontRow. No remote control, etc. I hope even the browser based version can be improved (e.g. flexible bookmarking).
I watched a documentary on it, Street Fight, and while the quality was not great (viewing on a 720p projector) for a documentary this was not a big problem. I also watched Tin Cup, and found it to be acceptable. But, I tried a couple movies with more action, and found the compression breaks down under a lot of movement.
And it was to get away from Microsoft.
I have been trying the Mac/Silverlight version, and found the quality to be a bit lacking.
I had been considering buying one of the LG Blueray DVD players, in large part because it supports Netflix streaming.
Has anyone compared both viewing methods? Can I expect better quality via the hardware decoder (LG player or Netflix's Roku box)?
Can I get it in Canada yet? Or is the border stopping the internets from coming over here still?
So, how long until we can get this going on linux? I'm tired of using a virtual machine to watch my movies.
:(){
Competes with existing Apple product.
I already canceled my NetFlix account. I just wasn't seeing the value-add of waiting for the disc to arrive in the mail, when I can get most movies I already want to watch immediately somewhere else (iTunes, drive to Movie Gallery, Amazon Unbox on my TiVo).
I use Mac at home (I work on a Windows box all day at work, why would I put that in my house?) and I got tired of waiting for Netflix to get out from under Microsoft. Now it's clear they never will.
On the other hand, I can't figure out why anyone would by a AppleTV either. TiVo works for my family just fine.
Anyway. How many hours can/should a person spend sitting in front of a monitor (answer: all waking)?
A gig of RAM? My G4 ibook is out.
It seemed to work on my 24" iMac last night. Quality wasn't particularly good, but it did work, and seemed to have no issues running fullscreen.
Movie selection is somewhat limited.
I don't understand, Mac users have a smaller selection of Watch Instantly movies than Windows users do?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
This is not for all mac users. You must have an Intel macintosh for for it to work. I have literally the last iMac made with the PowerPC chip, and it is still going strong. I have no plans to replace it, but I do now have plans to drop Netflix. Why pay for a service I can't use completely and that they're not willing to support?
DRM, it's for the consumer's own good.
Microsoft has over a decade's track record of giving short shift to security in favor of performance. Like Java, they are using components implemented in the interpreted code to implement the security model, rather than implement a guaranteed closed interpreter that has no mechanisms to do dangerous actions. The main difference is that Sun had a decent security track record - where they had security problems, they closed them completely - and took the course of sticking to compatibility and security over trying to stay on the bleeding edge in performance (and Microsoft took advantage of that to push their horridly risky ActiveX technology).
I don't trust ANYTHING Microsoft does to be secure. They are still pushing "security theatre" solutions like UAC and the leaky sandbox around IE instead of breaking with inherently insecure APIs.
People have claimed that they're going to be different this time. I've been hearing that for a decade, and it's never happened before. What's different this time?
What are you looking for in terms of API or codec info?
Silverlight will be adopting H.264 in its next major version: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/H264-and-AAC-support-coming-in-Silverlight/
The VC-1 codec is already a SMPTE spec: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1
The Silverlight Xaml vocabulary spec for Silverlight 2 was published in September: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/6/0A6F7755-9AF5-448B-907D-13985ACCF53E/%5BMS-SLXV%5D.pdf
My video compression blog