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Netflix Comes To Linux Web Browsers Via 'Pipelight'
An anonymous reader writes "With Netflix continuing to rely upon Microsoft Silverlight, the video streaming service hasn't been supported for Linux users as the Mono-based 'Moonlight' implementation goes without Silverlight 5 DRM support. However, there is now Netflix support for Linux-based web-browsers via the open source Pipelight project. Pipelight supports Netflix and other Silverlight-based web applications by having a Netscape plug-in that in turn communicates with a Windows program running under Wine. The Windows program then simulates a browser to load the Silverlight libraries. Netflix then works as the Pipelight developers implemented support for the Netflix DRM scheme within Wine."
When Microsoft abandons Silverlight, Windows users will still be able to watch Netflix through Pipelight through Netscape through Wine through Cygwin through, er, I must have missed a few steps or what ?
The little cage drops over the mouse, and you win!
Easy solution: cut off your nose to spite your face.
At some point you just spend $130 and buy an Android tablet at wally world. Or a $50 Roku.
DRM, in the virtual rental situation is acceptable, I'm not doing anything like purchasing the content, so they get to retain control. In exchange it's pretty cheap for what you get (see also: Steam)
I wonder why they just didn't disassemble the DRM. Whack it in a debugger and see what it is doing.
That is how Bluray fell.
Sure it is hard, but decoding it via Wine isn't?
But the end goal is to get joe-on-the-street to watch NetFlix on Linux. And this does give good performance, with the usual linux gpu caveats.
Drops frames on my AMD machine, but my roomie's nVidia is all smooth sailing even at SuperHD.
First of all, claiming to "come to linux" but only working under WINE is not really coming to linux at all. You can run Windows Notepad under WINE as well.
Secondly, WINE (with win32 compatiblity) is not officially supported on native 64 bit Linux systems unless you have 32-bit libraries installed. While this is probably fine if you are only installing binaries, but for distributions which install some applications by compiling them from source, it can cause some consternation when building some applications because the linker might end up trying to use the libraries in the 32 bit library directory instead of the 64-bit one which causes what's supposed to be an automated build process to fail, abruptly and unceremoniously. Although such errors are ultimately the result of faulty assumptions in the actual build script, and not the fault of actually trying to use both 32 and 64-bit libraries simultaneously on one platform, such errors are still frequent enough to be annoying... and I'd rather not deal with them.
Finally... it's Netflix. Their movie selection sucks.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Y'know, I read through the summary twice, and both times concluded that there's about a 1% chance of this whole mess working. Too many things relying on too many other things relying on too many other things.
Although having the word "Netscape" in there.....
Three Squirrels
I'm pretty happy with NetFlix on the devices I can use it on, but I've been thinking about dumping it because of the lack of Linux support. It's very inconvenient using the workarounds (Wine, VMs, etc) as a paying customer. Torrents are looking pretty tempting.
"Easy solution: cut off your nose to spite your face."
Huh? How so?
Their product is not something that is going to get me ahead in any way, it's not something I have to have to survive, or to thrive. It's a source of entertainment. One among many. If they dont want my business I will spend my money elsewhere, simple as that.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Wouldn't it be easier to run an android image in a virtual machine and just use the android netflix app?
Easy solution: cut off your nose to spite your face.
Correction: This nose smells funny, so detach it and use any of the other ones that work in browsers in Linux. Hulu, for example.
Easy solution: cut off your nose to spite your face.
That's funny, I think going with netflix is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Go with the pirate bay and you get a wider selection, no worries about streaming hiccups and no DRM. All around a better solution.
I was under the impression that Bluray players and smart TVs (especially samsung) run an embedded linux. How are they able to stream netflix?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I watch netflix in ubuntu. I accomplished it by adding one rep and installing one package. It manages the wine version, the windows firefox version, the silverlight version, and whatever other unholy nonsense is involved in making it work. The only glitch is that sometimes the audio is on fastforward when I first start watching something and I have to wait for it to go back to normal, then start the show over. This is on a relatively ancient macbook (it has an ethernet port), and it is still fast enough.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
DRM does affect your usage of a product sometimes (see Steam, you buy a game for a high price but then the system acts as if you only rented it). DRM systems should be upfront and honest that you're merely purchasing limited access to content, which is true for streaming television but not true for purchased song files or games or books.
Note also that in the US we've been able for decades to record television programs with the full support of of the Supreme Court. The new DRM streaming forbids this. You can ONLY see the shows as long as you continue subscribing and as long as the publisher allows it. In this sense, the rights that you are granted for streaming video is more like attending a movie theater than watching television. Ie, there is no equivalent of VHS recording in the secured digital video stream.
Just like Steam, the customers happily accept being branded with a hot iron as long as they're also given a carrot. The problem remains the same; most customers are excited to get the new content quickly but have no interest in access to their previously purchased old content.
These all seem like ways to get around the legal system or legal access to content, and ensuring that they have full control at all times. And this is just with their toe in the door, imagine how much further this will be locked down in ten or twenty years if no one objects today. What if George Lucas could have pushed a button and suddenly every single copy of Star Wars in existence was changed to show that Han did not shoot first, and no evidence remained anywhere that it used to be otherwise?
Makes me wonder... I somehow doubt that the PS3, Tivo or Asus Transformer have Silverlight so the DRM itself likely isn't a Silverlight exclusive. Why aren't there smart people foaming at the mouth to reverse-engineer that stuff? I guess Netflix is mostly a US service and countries where doing such reverse-engineering isn't illegal have no incentive? There are already plenty of people working on Blueray DRM and what not, I can't see this being as complicated.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Their product is not something that is going to get me ahead in any way, it's not something I have to have to survive, or to thrive. It's a source of entertainment. One among many. If they dont want my business I will spend my money elsewhere, simple as that.
It's something that makes cutting the cord and cancelling your cable/satellite TV subscription significantly easier. While that's not something that you *need*, it is something that's immensely useful to have.
Personally, I consider the $8/mo I pay for Netflix to be well worth it, especially when compared against the cost of a TV subscription. Your own economics may differ. But given the very wide array of devices I have where it works perfectly (including my cell phone, my tablet, and game consoles), I'm quite happy to keep the service, despite the DRM.
It'd be nice to be able to play it on my Linux-based laptop, and this allows that as well, but that is far from the only method I have to access the services. I am the target market for this app, not you.
On that note, has anyone else noticed Silverlight being pushed out to WSUS servers as another important Windows update? Three times?
As in, when we choose "Do not install, and don't tell me again", it re-appears in the subsequent two update runs. This is the second time this has happened in as many years.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...if you run Android! I'm no expert on programming, but if works in Android's flavor of Linux, why can't it be ported to the other distros?
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
If they want to take the black box route, then fine--they can write a native program with their DRM crap built in, compile it and package it for the major distributions (.deb, .rpm, .txz, .tar.bz2/.tar.gz). And keep the damn thing up to date, fully patched and supported, unlike Adobe's treatment of Flash on Linux.
I'd rather use that than a glorified set of hacks produced purely from reverse engineering a foreign black box like Windows and tricking it to think that it's running yet another black box (Silverlight) natively. And that would be better than corrupting a standard like HTML with DRM in a way, but I'll take some kind of HTML5 support over a pure binary blob that is maintained by a company who would probably not write a very good program to begin with. And besides, face it, it's DRM--it will be cracked in record time, especially being a part of an official spec if they do integrate it with the standard. They can't win with such a ridiculous joke of a "security" tool. If they write a program, probably every "security update" will be 95% potential breaking of their DRM, while they neglect the actual, real security issues.
A binary package would still be unacceptable, because it would continue to leave BSD users out. But, well, that's what happens with proprietary software, and honestly I doubt that a lot of BSD users would care because they tend to be much more forgiving of proprietary software. But maybe the HTML5 method could work. Although the standard would be contaminated in the process, and broken all to hell long before HTML5 is even complete.
That would make sense if Netflix was the only streaming video service around, but it's not. Hulu works quite well on Linux, and its no more expensive than Netflix. They even made a HuluDesktop app for Linux and Windows (though they've stopped hosting it) with a 10' interface, remote-friendly navigation, and LIRC libs.
And Hulu is a better substitute for TV than Netflix. Can you get current world news every day with Netflix? How about popular TV shows from ABC/FOX/NBC the day after they air? Great old shows like Total Recall 2070?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I prefer to pay for what I use when those who are providing it ask for money.
Principles.. It's good to have them.
"Personally, I consider the $8/mo I pay for Netflix to be well worth it, especially when compared against the cost of a TV subscription."
The $8/month is not the issue. That part of the price I would be perfectly willing to pay, that would be reasonable, if the rest of the conditions were not unreasonable and unacceptable. And the alternative for me isnt a satellite or cable subscription. Seriously, it's not only possible to live without TV, it's actually something that will probably do you good.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I do? That's news to me.
I wish someone had told me that I hate paying taxes. I would have been angry at tax time.
If paying $8 per month for more television and movies than I can actually watch in a month is being a sucker then I guess that's what I am. I use nextflix maybe 20 days out of every month. What kind of messed up worldview sees that as getting suckered? I pay more for bread and orange juice in a month than I pay for Netflix.
I see it as damned good value myself.
Boycott Netflix. They don't want the business, don't give them money. Send the message DRM is unacceptable.
Is Netflix the right target though? What makes you think they want to have DRM in their product? The answer is, they don't. Netflix was forced by its content providers to use DRM.
Netflix is not the only online delivery service forced to use DRM. Lovefilm, which operates in the UK was also forced to switch from using flash to Silverlight by the studios.
I agree that as customers, we should not have DRM forced on us. And yes, a consumer boycott is a way to show our displeasure. But to be consistent, target the true masterminds behind the DRM scheme, the movie studios by refusing to watch their movies on any medium. Consider this -if you boycott and kill Netflix, the studios will be happier because they earned more from the old system pre-Netflix.
... just to make a point:
1) Emulate a Windows browser in wine or similar (or even a full VM), complete with the DRM stack
2) Load Netflix and stream whatever it is you want to stream, but redirect the output to a framebuffer (netflix has no HDCP when run in a browser, does it?)
3) Recompress the contents of the framebuffer using some fast but inefficient high quality algorithm and save it to disk
4) Allow the Linux user to do whatever the fuck she wants with it, either watch it or reencode it for storage later
The DRM folks can't win. VM tricks aside, the real analog hole is open pretty wide for video. I have a consumer-level DSLR that will shoot 6000x4000 video at 6fps with no frame limit and negligible noise. It demolishes anything a HDTV can display as far as resolution goes. Getting one of those electronic shutter triggers ($25 from Nikon) and syncing it with the frame updates would let you scrape every frame displayed in 4 (24 fps) or 5 (30 fps) passes through the source. From there you've just got to do a curves adjustment to restore the original source pixel values (accommodating for calibration issues on your monitor and such).
Do this with a good monitor and I bet you could get really damn close to the original quality; modern SLR sensors and lenses are good enough for this. If you're too lazy to scrape it in stills mode, you can get a camera for under $1500 that will record near-losslessly-compressed 1080p video, and that you can use with reasonably inexpensive lenses that are essentially transparent.
And it takes *one* person to do this and torrent the result. Netflix can't stop this sort of thing.
I would like it to be very clear that the above person (3023069) is NOT the Jane Q. Public (1010737) who has been around Slashdot for years. This person has only been posting for about 2 days.
I do not yet know Slashdot's policy on impersonating other users, but I intend to find out.
(Having said that, I agree with what this person wrote here.)
(post 2)
Tax time is when you get your refund. That's why you're not angry. It was designed that way on purpose.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Pipelight looks a handy bit of kit and a fine project.
But I've been watching Netflix natively on my Ubuntu desktop just fine since last year. See Compholio.
http://compholio.com/ or search on "netflix linux" or similar to cast a wider net.
There are deb and rpm packages in 32- and 64-bit; you can subscribe to the ppa or compile as you choose. I don't know what distros this will work on as I've only used it on my host OS with Firefox. (I used to watch Netflix from within an XP vm using VirtualBox.)
http://thepiratebay.sx/
Real life is overrated.
I expect Netflix has no choice but to DRM the content as part of its contractual obligations and therefore any platform which does not provide a suitably strong DRM cannot be supported.
In any event Netflix is one of the stakeholders in the encrypted media extensions for HTML 5, so potentially at least one Linux browser, be it Chrome or Firefox could potentially be blessed to stream on Linux one day.
Any refund I may or may not get is tiny in comparison to how much I pay.
I have absolutely no problem paying my taxes. I look at my T4 slip and if the tax number is high then that means my earnings are high. I have plenty enough left over at the end of the year to enjoy a ridiculously comfortable life. Made far more comfortable because of what my taxes pay for.
The advantage of pipelight is that you no longer have to run a 32-bit windows version of Firefox under wine. Pipelight is a two part program that utilizes a native Firefox plugin ( ie. FF on Linux ) to pipe required Silverlight bits to a service running under wine. This is much more efficient and much closer to a native solution.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Why does every discussion about paying taxes have someone making this stupid point?
My internal combustion engine car only converts about 25% of the gasoline into work (ie. moving the car) the rest is dissipated as heat (ie. waste). Are you going to suggest that I just pour a bunch of gasoline on a bonfire too.. since the car is so wasteful of gasoline?
You seem to be of the (foolish) opinion that in order for me to have no problem paying taxes that not a cent must be wasted. Sorry.. but nothing is perfect. Sure I'd like government to waste less.. who wouldn't? Just like I'd like my car to be more efficient. But just because my car's engine is incredibly wasteful of gasoline doesn't mean I stop buying gas (or driving).. nor does government waste mean I stop paying my taxes (or get my panties in a bunch while doing so).