Netflix Where Art Thou?

Off course, I no of know spelling checker that nows when the rung word is being abused.

lol.

crap, now I can't change it cause you made fun of me but I can go back in and misspell where. Art would be a stretch. It's spelled right in the blog...waht I git fer not usinig copy and past. Now quit picking on the mentally challenged and go sign the friggin' petition.

Ok ok, signed. :P We have been considering it, but the fact that it doesn't work in Linux annoys me a bit as I am planning to buy a MythTV box as soon as our buddies at ZaReason finish building and testing it, and having it stream NetFlix would be a nice bonus if the fam decided to sign up. :)

I'm not sure what NetFlix's issue is with doing it nicely cross platform. After all, Hulu and Fancast both work perfectly in Linux, and they have a rather vested interest in making their content stream-only and non-downloadable.

If they can do it, NetFlix should be able to as well.

I signed the petition four times, as Chairman Mao, Che Guevara, Marie Antoinette, and Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova. Because having celebrities sign will get more attention and make them take us more seriously.

But seriously folks. I hope this helps. Broadcasters and distributors are under a lot of DRM pressure, which is intensified by the raw naked greed of DRM vendors who see big monies within their grasps.

The other side of this we must have clean hands. It's pretty hollow to make all kinds of noise about our sacred rights being violated by DRM when we're guilty of committing copyright infringements.

I ran into http://www.audible.com/ a site which sells audiobooks.

Not only doesn't their proprietary software run on Linux, their books cannot be downloaded without the proprietary software. And the downloaded files are DRM'd and cannot be converted to MP3 at all for playing in generic devices. Only specific playback devices are supported, the ones with DRM (Zune, for example).

Their "technical support" response is, "Yes, it doesn't work on Linux. We know, and we have no plans to support Linux at all. Thank you for using Audible.com, our merger with Amazon means we'll be offering movies soon!"

Not to me, they won't.

Plus it's silly for Netflix to be all weird about DRM-ing streaming distribution when it's trivially easy to copy DVDs.

Right TC. You can't (well, can't easily, I assume there's a way though - I only spent a few min searching for how to out of interest) save the vids you stream from Hulu and FanCast. Considering those are run by the big media, they have a rather large interest in making the content viewable only and not downloadable (at least until they add a "buy and download this show/movie" feature...). And those services just use flash and work quite nicely in Linux.

And those are free services. So what's NetFlix's problem? heh.

Gots to tell ya --

I wouldn't mind downloading Hulu content because I don't have a big fat download pipe, and I would rather play stuff on VLC than flash, but...

I'm pretty happy to just stream hulu and even watch the relatively few short commercials they put in. I have no problem with Linux-friendly sites making money.

I tried watching a movie on Netflix, had to use the work PC. It streamed a little over an hours worth - just enough to get me into it - and then it just stopped. It wouldn't play anymore.

That was my first and last movie streaming on Netflix.

Since they have some kind of player, Linux based of course, I thought the source code would be forthcoming, but given the performance of their servers I'm not waiting.

moopst:

If you have /tmp on its own partition, it may have filled up with the stream data. That is sure to interfere with playback.

I fixed it on our newswire, sorry I didn't catch it Ken..

Wait --

We're not looking for though?

Are we at least mixing up some cookie dou?

Quoting:Now quit picking on the mentally challenged and go sign the friggin' petition.

Not sure if that will do much good. If Netflix themselves had put out a petition, yes. If you were writing directly to Netflix, yes. But who pays attention to petitiononline.com?

Oh it's ok Scotty. I don't mind a few thousand close friends knowing I ride the little bus to school. Did you know that if you stick your bottom lip on a metal light pole in the winter, you get stuck?

That's why they won't let me walk to school anymore. !-).

@gus3:

It was on my work laptop running XP, a Dell D630 w/ 2 Gig of ram. All indications were that the stream just stopped. I'm guessing they ran out of bandwidth and since they don't buffer any significant amount...

I was watching the bandwidth usage and it was pretty steady, they probably only buffer a couple minutes worth if that. I went back a few minutes before it stopped and it had to download it again. So, youtube uses a superior design, they buffer ahead and when done you can re-watch it with no second download, though NF had a better picture quality. The quality was nearly a match for a DVD, but at times the motion was a bit choppy and the color sometimes looked like 16 bit with pixelation in places where it is smooth like the sky with small changes in color. But what really killed it was that the movie just stopped half way through.

Hmmm, bad assumption on my part. I figured you were running Linux.

And yeah, that pixellation is a big distraction. I've seen it on my parents' TV, and it's using an NTSC signal.