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Netflix Ditches Silverlight For HTML5 On Macs
An anonymous reader writes "Netflix yesterday furthered its plans to ditch Silverlight for HTML5 on Macs, having already done so last year in IE11 on Windows 8.1. HTML5 video is now supported by Netflix in Safari on OS X Yosemite, meaning you can stream your favorite movies and TV shows without having to install any plugins."
Courtesy of encrypted media extensions.
So presumably, Firefox will bring Netflix to Linux as well. While I can't say I'm happy to see DRM, I'm happier to be able to play the content than not be able to, and I don't think not including support for broadly-used technologies is going to win any wars.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They've been doing this for a year on Chrome OS
Because Silverlight *NEVER* worked on the Mac under Chrome. Video would stutter, the audio wouldn't play, it was a useless mess that reminded you that the internet is a minefield of incompatible "standards" and brought me back to the old days of "it must be cool if it crashed my browser"!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
They mean extensions to the standard, not the browser.
It's still a binary blob that has to do some function that is not covered by any standard. Calling it by a different name or pretending that such plugins are part of the official standard doesn't really change anything.
You still need a platform specific binary blob.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
also, it saves a bunch of battery to run it in html5 than in the silverlight. for a macbook air you can get an extra 2 hours watching netflix in html5 instead of silverlight! that's huge!
From the looks of this, the technical version of what this means is that Netflix has been working closely with Apple to bring MPEG-DASH Media Stream Extensions to Safari (they're already present in Chrome and IE11), and that MSE will be in the Yosemite release of Safari. This is good news for MPEG-DASH adoption. Hopefully we'll also start seeing hardware H.265/HEVC support in new silicon soon which will really open up the door for 4K (and significantly reducing current bandwidth usage for 2K/HD)
Contrary to widely held popular belief (especially among marketing types), there's not such thing as "HTML5 Video". There's a Video tag in HTML5 that allows you to embed a video player in a web page, but there's no standard as to what that actually means. When someone says they "support HTML5 streaming", they're spewing you a line of BS, because it doesn't exist. There are currently at least 5 different ways to send video to an HTML5-compliant browser: Apple HLS (supported by Safari, some WebKit browsers), MPEG-DASH (Supported by IE11 and very recent versions of Chrome), RTMP (Supported by Flash), RTSP (Supported by all kinds of things, but no adaptive streaming), and progressive download (Supported by just about anything, but can't do live streaming). Silverlight is HTTP-based, but not supported directly in the browser (Microsoft missed a golden opportunity with IE10+ to do that), and Adobe also has an HTTP transport called HDS, but it's not useful outside of Flash.
Once you've figured that much out, then you have to figure out what codecs your browser supports. If you're trying to stream live to Firefox, your options are pretty much Flash or nothing, since it supports neither HLS, DASH, or H.264, although MSE is being developed into the Firefox code, it's not ready yet - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/MediaSourceExtensions
And if you're running Android, all bets are off depending on Google's whims for that particular version's stock browser. When Android 4.1 came out they took HLS support OUT of the Android browser and at the same time got rid of Flash support, which means that in-browser streaming on Android became limited to the ancient RTSP protocol (HLS is still supported in the OS media player, and can also be accessed via API). Chrome for Android sort of supports MSE for DASH, but not yet. Google isn't part of DASH-IF, so they're not exactly anxious to support it on Android.
"... only browse the Internet ..."
It just occurred to me that 'only browse the internet' is archaic.
Because you can do anything on the internet, so 'only' doesn't apply.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nope.
Plugins live outside the browser processor space.
Of course the industry often doesn't use the terms correctly, so the definitions might be moot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It seems to me that an EME module would be much easier to crack than a full browser plugin. In which case I predict that the secret keys will be disclosed rather soon.
for silverlight? With 70% market penetration, a lot of which is probably netflix subscribers, what will keep people interested in developing for/using silverlight given that there are more utilized and better alternatives?
It should never be that painful. What kind of crap DRM is so tightly interwoven into the OS that it requires a complete reinstall to fix it? I can't play Netflix on this PC either due to Silverlight DRM being hosed. I'm not going to spend countless hours trying to fix it either, I'll just wait for HTML5 support and use a different PC in the meantime.
you have an amazing grasp of this topic...
but you're arguing rhetoric and being pedantic...here's how:
you say "it doesn't exist"...
then say there are "5...ways to send video" via HTML5
the problem is YOU...you don't understand that Netflix was foolish to use Silverlight, and only did it b/c they had to make Netflix work with anything...M$ forced Netflix to use Silverlight
you know exactly what TFA is talking about...as you plainly demonstrate, and further, you demonstrate how, technically, this is a big improvement to use HTML5
Silverlight is another example of M$ creep...getting rid of M$ creep sometimes involved **institutional change** b/c of how entrenched M$'s products have become
it's like removing a brain tumor
Thank you Dave Raggett
No. It's not a matter of masquerading the browser id; it's "plugin-free" because Mac OS X Safari will come bundled with support for the proprietary decryption blob (like Chromebooks and IE11). XBMC will not have that. Maybe the closed-source, proprietary Adobe blob that Firefox will start bundling will enable Netflix support.
All of this is just reason to avoid this nonsense on PCs entirely and just use a dedicated video streamer or some combination of tablet+streamer.
Even on Windows, these plugins are inefficient and fail to take advantage of the hardware acceleration available to "hobbyware".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
all those TVs and set top boxes that are running Linux would love to have Netflix support (or rather, Netflix would love those to support them)
I thought Netflix would love to support only that can support the robustness that the studios demand. This often involves a locked bootloader, which when used with devices that run Linux is called tivoization.
Because its existence threatens your non-DRM'ed media how?
The existence of digital restrictions management encourages the design of distribution platforms that forbid publishers from making a DRM-free release even if they want to. This has already happened with Blu-ray Disc, which requires all discs with menus to carry DRM (BDMV requires the payment of AACS royalties and BDAV appears to disallow rich menus), and with video game consoles.
A properly locked down system would not include Netflix in the list of hosts to which a machine can connect. For a separate machine in the break room with no access to the company intranet, a sane IT department would be more willing to install the Netflix app.
I'm having a hard time ripping, editing, and re-encoding my Blu-ray discs, via the internet. Perhaps you could help?
In what country? Laws vary.
Is there an HTML5 version of Blender for 3D modeling, on the internet somewhere?
Design something already.
How about online GIMP for full-fledged image editing?
Searching for an image editor for an operating system published by Google? Use the Google.
And "SSH" "on the internet" doesn't work well at all.
Was this supposed to be a joke? SSH is in Chrome Web Store.
A year or so ago I complained about Netflix using silverlight. I said that it was a stupid choice and that Silverlight was a Microsoft also-ran. A few people replied that they knew programmers at Netflix and that they were very smart and knew far more than some simpleton like me.
But the proof will be in the pudding. I suspect that with silverlight gone that people like me will finally be able to watch Netflix on their macs as I was 100% opposed to installing anything microsoft based on my machines, and absolutely 100% opposed to a browser plugin from a company like MS.
To me this is a classic case of technical people who are out of touch with the core business that they are doing IT for. I suspect that they could write a 100 page report supporting their use of this horrible technology. But I could find more than 1 million people who would write a two word report as to why they weren't going to use it.
well, I admit, I don't understand why IE switched from Silverlight to HTML5 for Netflix before Chrome
it makes my argument seem invalid
however, as technically proficient as GP's post was, it also does not make sense to me
Silverlight is bad, HTML5 is good...that much we can agree on (hopefully)
Thank you Dave Raggett
I seem to remember that Firefox supports H.264 only on platforms that already have the H.264 decoder. This excludes Windows XP (which only very recently went EOL) and Windows Vista Home Basic (which still has years of extended support left). It also excludes GNU/Linux if the user hasn't installed the non-US codec pack.
And how are we to get corn to pop just using HTML5? Run Flash in the background?
It's not used widely at all - it was useful in the days of multibitrate audio-only streaming (it's been around for ever) but I haven't encountered it in any of the modern streaming server platforms.
It is well-documented by the MAFIAA that all Linux users are thieving, murderous scum that deserve nothing but the grinding heel of a jackboot.
This doesn't appear to be specifically broken out anywhere, but I think it's an important point that the Silverlight Netflix client software has never supported greater than 720p at 3Mbps. Adding support for HTML5/MSE/EME to Safari will mean that Mac users can finally view all of those "Super HD" streams in full 1080p on their computers. (I've been chomping at the bit for that one, myself... now, if Apple would just release those darned beta redemption codes, so I can go play!)
One of the big reasons I cancelled my Netflix subscription was cause it ran like shit on my MBP.
I'm sorry, but if you can't display a simple streaming video feed, not even HD, on a quad-core i7 with a honking video card, you're doing something wrong.
yes...this makes sense...DASH is a proprietary media strategy
DASH is like the W3C in relation to HTML5
they are against HTML5 b/c it is not "proprietary"
this supports my argument
I read this as Netflix having been locked-in via contract as a DASH member to use fellow member M$'s silverlight for streaming
Netflix probably wanted to switch to HTML5 a long time ago but was bound by some ridiculous contract (or a bad interpretation of one)
Thank you Dave Raggett
This is true, but it's a far simpler binary blob that is much more limited in scope. It's just decrypting data, so it doesn't have to worry about things like hardware accelerated video decoding or graphics rendering. That's stuff that the browser has already had to figure out, so you might as well use it.
Exactly. My $50 wifi enabled bluray player streams netflix hd just fine.
ta-da!
thanks AC...for helping me pull that rabbit out of a hat
Thank you Dave Raggett
I hated that Harmony remotes used Silverblight as well, but now Logitech has come out with desktop version of the software. (About bloody time) I think the online Silverblight site now redirects you to download the desktop apps, so I think it is safe for you to uninstall the atrocity now.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
AC above explains it for you
Thank you Dave Raggett
I don't need anyone to "explain" HTML5 to me.
Do you understand the WHATWG vs W3C conflict and it's origins?
D...R...M...and tracking
the WHATWG is the only reason we have HTML5 & CSS3...the "avenue" (for lack of a better word) that un-tracked, non-DRM video can be streamed without proprietary software or plugins
go fsck yourself if you don't understand this
Thank you Dave Raggett