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Netflix Ditches Silverlight For HTML5 On Macs

Posted by Unknown on from the giving-up-freedom-for-tv dept.

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.

5 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Linux soon? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.'"
    1. Re:Linux soon? by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I really don't see why they just don't abandon the whole "watch video in your web browser" scenario. Since Netflix only supports paying customers, it isn't really much to expect that people will download an app/application to play the videos. They already have apps for Android, iOS, Windows, XBox 360/One, Playstation 3/4, Wii (U), a bunch of apps integrated into various smart TVs. There's probably a few that I'm missing here. I don't know why they just wouldn't require that you install an application to view videos on Mac, Windows 7, or Linux. If the Linux client was a pre-compiled binary, it could probably be made reasonably secure against people trying to copy content. At least as secure as a DVD or BluRay anyway.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:Linux soon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      It doesn't. Thanks for your support :)

  2. saves battery by Noah+Haders · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  3. "HTML5 video" doesn't actually exist. by Manuka · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.