Why do these "Linux gets Netflix" stories not have the same bad attitude from folks as the "W3C caves to DRM" stories? They're the same topic, essentially.
My guess would be that in the "Linux gets Netflix" story, the positive angle ("I get Netflix!") is specific and concrete, while the negative ("More DRM, yuck") is more abstract. Whereas in the "W3C caves to DRM" story, it's flipped; the negative is specific and concrete ("Standards body kowtows to corporate overlords"), while the positive ("maybe someday that will mean I can watch video on Linux") is more abstract.
I'd say lots of people are extremely dogmatic when its comes to certain topics. They will condemn things like DRM without even considering the positive aspects. I like to see DRM the pragmatic way: Without it, neither cheap streaming of music and movies nor would cheap games via services like Steam would be possible.
I don't consider trading computer freedom for streaming movies to be positive.
That's entirely your choice — and one with which I tend to agree. Don't presume your opinion on these matters is a universal truth, however. Other people have other priorities, and it's not up to you to decide that they're wrong.
I wasn't a vehement opponent of W3C implementing DRM, but I'll put my two cents in;
I don't mind if private companies implement DRM in their own products. I do mind DRM being standardized, meaning every vendor has to implement it in order to be complaint with the standard.
Ubuntu != linux, it is just a distro. Similarly Chrome is not the browser standard, it's only an implementation.
If this story was actually "Linux adds DRM to kernel for netflix and other media companies" I think you would see a huge reaction.
That sounds logical at first blush, but you're actually looking at the problem backwards.
Markets have power, standards organisations don't.
If the W3C had for some reason told browser vendors "now you have to ship DRM to comply with the standard", with no evidence that it was something that consumers wanted, they would have been told to go to hell. Exactly that happened with a whole bunch of other W3C "standards" that no one was actually interested in shipping; XHTML2, SMIL, XForms, etc.
In practice what happened with DRM is that consumers made it clear that they were very happy to run DRM systems in exchange for access to media. For example almost everyone is prepared to install Flash and Silverlight to get access to video services like NetFlix. Media companies also made it clear that they had no intention of giving up on using DRM on their products, especially whilst consumers were showing themselves to be so ready to embrace DRM-using services. So it's already been the case for some years — essentially for as long as bandwidth sufficient for streaming video has been commonplace — that, as a browser vendor, you have the choice between supporting content that uses DRM (e.g. through your plugin system) or losing so much marketshare you become irrelevant.
More recently browser vendors, including Microsoft, Apple, and Google, decided to cut out the plugin middleman and start shipping their own proprietary DRM systems baked directly into their browser. It was at this point the W3C got involved in standardizing the interface between the browser and the DRM system. But this was long after there was any hope of keeping DRM off the web; everything that's happening now is a retroactive damage limitation exercise.
There is a difference between a product with market power and a standard. A product's lifecycle is always limited and its market share after going up can only go down. Witness Flash, witness IExplorer and ActiveX, witness Symbian.
A standard on the other hand can potentially live forever. And all implementations must follow it. And for example, a browser with DRM in it can no longer be fully open-source, which should be reason enough for W3C to not standardize DRM. Plus let's be honest, DRM is fundamentally flawed, its main purpose for which it actually works being the lock-in of honest users, purpose that is incompatible with the concept of a browser. If Netflix wants to serve DRM-ed content, they apparently have no problem in implementing their own thing, so I fail to see what the W3C is trying to solve. And yes, next we'll talk about the Linux kernel, because DRM is only "secure" if the whole chain is "secure".
And also if users want Netflix, that's fine, I'm actually happy that it works on Linux now, but I don't want DRM and users may not want DRM forever, as could be seen with MP3s and pushing for standardization is shoving it on people's throats.
Yea, I agree, that's why I wasn't that opposed to W3C adopting DRM into the standard.
But I think most the resistance is more ideological than pragmatic. People are upset because the standard represents a shared platform that every actor in the market has a say in. People who are anti-DRM, for whatever reason, saw it as an attack on something they identified with or felt like they were apart of. But those people don't really identify with Canonical or Google in the same way and feel those companies are within their right to implement whatever is best for them even if it's something they disagree with.
I've made this point before on HN. The standard does not require browser vendors to include any DRM scheme to be fully compliant. Netflix however can require a specific DRM component in order to play their content.
Alright, I'm going to use an analogy that's a bit thin, but just stick with me on it.
Imagine some private organizations decided it would be safer if everyone that came to their establishment had a fully loaded gun with their specified ammunition requirements (I know this is a ridiculous presumption, but just suspend disbelief for a second). So say a bunch of businesses like gas stations and restaurants implement this policy.
If you are anti-gun or a pacifist, you can just avoid those establishments. But what if the practice became wide spread enough that a state or the federal government decided to mandate that everyone had to own a gun. They didn't need to buy ammunition or ever use it, but they had to have the gun.
Obviously that would piss off a lot of ideologues who are vehemently opposed to guns and violence. You can pragmatically say, "Well if you're against it, then just don't use it. I mean the majority of people will use it or won't care." But forcing even the outline of something onto people who are ideologically opposed to it is obviously going to be met with resistance.
So I know that analogy isn't all that great, but I think the principle is mostly the same. This standard is forcing the outline of DRM to be enabled on everyone's browser (since pretty much every major or usable browser is going to implement it). Yea, you can never go to a web site or download a specific DRM component. But you're still forced to have the "unloaded gun" of DRM.
I'm not personally that much of an ideologue, so I don't think it's that big of a deal. But there's a pretty strong contingent that is ideologically opposed to all forms of DRM. It's not that hard to see why they are upset about the standard if you try to look at it from that point of view.
the analogy is that you can use 99.9% of the web _now_.
Since "everyone has DRM anyway", Youtube can implement it too. Then Vimeo or whatever. And you end up having to use a browser with DRM, or looking at a broken WWW.
(think of what disabling javascript means these days)
W3C implementing DRM is only an extension of W3C implementing encryption.
And W3C implementing encryption is a Good Thing, IMHO.
DRM may be a stupid, silly idea: one that causes more problems than solved; one that can and will be circumvented. For media you have purchased to own, it is arguably Evil(tm).
But for media that you have rented, or media that you have access to via a subscription? I don't see the problem with it. The bigger discussion shouldn't be about DRM, but about the new commercial paradigm of not even owning the copies of the media you purchase outright. DRM in this case is a red herring.
in the scenario of "you can get more bandwidth" who is being screwed?
And the answer is: the same person, if you just look at the whole issue instead of the single positive angle.
Of course, if you think that DRM is a good thing (i.e. inability to have open source implementations, need to load binary blobs, limiting use of content to what the provider decides etc) then yes, DRM is exactly like encryption for you.
Yet, since there is a substantial number of people who do _not_ believe it, this still makes the two things different.
(which advocates that users should be able to exercise free software freedoms with "their software" -- I presume meaning the software that the users use) used to be easy to find from the front page. Clicking around on the home page today, it was far easier for me to find the Netflix announcement than an explanation of what free software is or the idea that Ubuntu supports or advocates it (!).
I've sometimes asked Ubuntu folks about how Canonical's work with proprietary ISVs fits in with their commitment to software freedom, but I haven't gotten any explanation.
If Netflix were on Chromium, and Debian accepted Chromium in its repos, I'd be upset. As it is, I'm tentatively saying that this is a partnership between Google, Ubuntu, and Netflix to expand their customer base, and as long as it isn't aggressively trying to infect the rest of the ecosystem, good on them.
Maybe a better comparison is the general glee shown about Steam coming to Linux. I would never install Steam on my machine, but I also can't imagine a situation in which I'd be forced to because (for example) Gnome wouldn't run without it anymore. Therefore, I think of it as a non-bad thing that may be a good thing if it attracts developers.
This is similar to many other situations in the history of Linux. It's generally a matter of giving someone the option to do something vs forcing it on their machine.
The W3C action is interpreted (rightly or wrongly) as forcing DRM on your machine whether you want it or not. Having the ability to watch Netflix, if you want, is not controversial among most Linux users.
The closest previous situation was probably the blow-up over Mono being installed by default. If it had been available for installation by those who wanted it, there would have been no issue, but it instead had to be installed and then removed. [To avoid upsetting anyone, I didn't care much one way or the other, I'm just saying that was the source of the problem.]
Because the problem is that the encryption is still happening within Chrome, not within linux itself (if I understand this correctly), and the latest build of Chrome for Linux now includes this drm. So the issue is either still 1) W3C caves to DRM or 2) Linux caves to Chrome, and #2 will not be nearly as popular a story because its both a slightly more complex issue (only slightly), but mostly because there are too many google fanboys on this website for it to gain much traction.
HN's audience largely supports innovation and potential revenue streams above freedom. Complaining about DRM will inevitably get someone compared to RMS.
Without DRM, someone will write a script to suck down all new Netflix videos and immediately post them to e.g. Popcorn Time. Then Netflix will drop Linux support.
It's a shame that so many people in the OSS community have such an asymmetric and hypocritical view about paying people for their work and respecting creators' licensing intents. If I take a GPLed GitHub repo, clone it, incorporate it into my commercial closed-source app, and release without source or credit to the author in violation of the GPL, everyone gets bent out of shape. But apparently quite a few people in the community don't extend that kind of respect to non-programmers. Only developers have rights -- artists, musicians, etc. can go suck it.
Just commenting on why the industry refuses to give up DRM despite the fact that it's complicated, costly, limiting, and users hate it. Want DRM to go away? Start showing the same respect to all creators that you show to others in your own field.
(Not directed at anyone in particular, but to prevalent attitudes and behaviors in the community.)
Marginally more effort makes a huge difference. Linux on the desktop takes marginally more effort to use than Windows or Mac. What difference does that make in popularity?
Effort also introduces time lag. If the next episode of Walking Dead takes 24 hours longer to show up on TPB, I'll probably see a bump in legitimate streaming and rentals.
I'm not arguing that DRM works, especially in the CS sense that it really makes things "uncopyable." (That's impossible.) I'm attempting to explain why people keep doubling down on it and what behaviors drive that. If DRM leads to 5% more sales and costs less than what they get in revenue from 5% more sales, they'll use DRM.
These companies spend just as much time staring at their spreadsheets as they do in any other industry. If DRM does not correlate with increased sales, now the bean counters ask "why are we spending this money to license this DRM technology?" It becomes a red cell on the spreadsheet, not a black one.
It's also about changing customer habits. Napster, TPB, etc. mainstreamed industrial-scale piracy and taught users that this is easier and cheaper than buying content. The studios and record labels and such were definitely asleep at the switch for the rise of the Internet (understandable as they are not in tech), but now they've woken up and created channels that make it just as easy to buy. Now if they make it harder to pirate too...
> Effort also introduces time lag. If the next episode of Walking Dead takes 24 hours longer to show up on TPB, I'll probably see a bump in legitimate streaming and rentals.
Popular TV shows are available on TPB within minutes, not hours or days.
OTOH, I don't think appeasing Hollywood will help anyone but Hollywood. Their thinking is grounded in ideology not economics; if their content is pirated they think the DRM isn't working so they demand stronger DRM. If their content isn't being pirated they think the DRM must be working so it should be maintained or strengthened.
I used to think this way until I met more people in music, art, entertainment, etc., and generally learned more about how the world actually works.
These people aren't dumb, and they pay a lot of attention to customer behavior just like marketing professionals do in any industry.
They also don't necessarily like DRM for intrinsic reasons. It's actually cumbersome. There are some interests in the industry that like it -- such as DRM vendors themselves and various hardware/console/software interests -- but the actual content producers are largely indifferent to it in itself.
All they want is for people to actually pay for their content. At the biz level they don't care how or why.
If users paid and refrained from engaging in bulk, industrial-scale piracy without DRM, then DRM would wither and die. There'd just be no value proposition to it -- it would add a layer of complexity, cost, and inconvenience to no benefit. You think these guys want to license an expensive proprietary DRM platform if their data shows it makes no difference in their sales numbers?
You've seen this happen within one or two semi-closed ecosystems. iTunes no longer uses DRM because data showed that users of iTunes who purchased music on iTunes were no more likely to pirate it without DRM than with it. But my guess is that users of iTunes who also purchase on iTunes are people who are generally in the habit of purchasing their music/movies and like the convenience of being able to do it with one click. These results from that specific user group do not necessarily translate out to the entire general public on all platforms.
I've also heard that Amazon has made DRM optional on Kindle and that many publishers don't check that box, but I've never published on Kindle so I'm not sure.
But I guarantee you that if Netflix allowed HTML5 video with no DRM mechanism you'd have a direct scripted cron-jobbed pipeline from Netflix to Popcorn Time and similar industrial-scale piracy ecosystems. I know it, and they know it, and that's why you're not gonna see DRM-free open Netflix or Hulu until people stop behaving in this way.
I mean come on people. It's cheap. A movie rental on iTunes (much more expensive than Netflix) costs what a freaking latte costs at Starbucks. Netflix is like 1/10th the cost of cable. Grow up. People have to eat and art must be a viable profession (with you know benefits, 401ks, etc.) or you're not going to get much of it beyond garage quality.
Yeah, record companies and movie studios can be jerks just like VCs and such, but all you're accomplishing is to bust the bottom out of the industry. When that happens, scarcity-driven thinking takes over and people act like even bigger jerks and everyone gets squeezed even more. You're not empowering the artist -- you're moving the artist even further down the totem pole while reducing the amount of money that's even available to trickle down to them.
VCs might be jerks sometimes but think about what would happen to the software industry if they disappeared or were no longer able to raise funds? What do you think programmer salaries would do over time? What would happen to innovation? What would happen to VC behavior if they were squeezed even more?
The stupid thing is I've actually seen people pay more to pirate via HideMyAss-type VPNs and torrenting VPSes (e.g. Digital Ocean nodes) than it would have cost them to just buy the damn feed. Now there's an ideology for you. (Not talking about people who use VPSes to watch outside the U.S.... that's a different issue. I'm talking about people here in America spending over $15/month to chug and seed pirated torrents instead of getting a Netflix account.)
(Again not aimed at anyone in particular in this thread, but at prevalent behaviors in the community.)
> But I guarantee you that if Netflix allowed HTML5 video with no DRM mechanism you'd have a direct scripted cron-jobbed pipeline from Netflix to Popcorn Time
So why does this work? Is Chrome 37 for Linux now being shipped with support for Encrypted Media Extensions, i.e., HTML's built-in DRM, with Netflix relying on EME? Or has something happened with Moonlight to support Netflix DRM? Or what?
Chrome 37+ already had the necessary DRM extentions, but it only worked with a recent version of the NSS library. It was possible to play HTML5 video on Netflix in Linux since then, but you needed to fake your user agent to say you were on Windows.
The reason it works now is that Ubuntu 14.04 (the latest LTS version) has updated to the necessary version of NSS, so Netflix will serve HTML5 video to the standard Chrome user agent on Ubuntu. Netflix just didn't allow it before because the LTS version didn't support it - you had to manually update the NSS library outside of the package manager to make it work. Netflix just didn't want to flip the switch to allow it until it would work on the standard packages on the LTS version.
It seems to work on any Linux distro with the necessary Chrome and NSS versions now without any user agent altering - I'm able to watch Netflix on Arch Linux now with the standard user agent.
Its HTML5 DRM built into Chrome. Its actually worked for ~a month in Chrome for Linux if you just spoofed the user-agent string to Windows, absurdly. The only thing really prompting this announcement is that Netflix is no longer blocking Linux user-agents.
It only works in Chrome at the moment, as Firefox does not support the required DRM.
It makes it sound like Canonical made some sort of concerted effort, didn't they just package Chrome (or do the Chrome people do that)?
Packaging and uploading to the repos is work of course but I imagine most of that is automated, the feeling here is that Canonical strived in some way to get this result. I'd be interested to know what Canonical did out of the ordinary to get to this result?
Has the DRM for Chrome been cracked yet? It seems that having the complete data flow from the server sent packets through to the displayed data would make it relatively easy to work back and crack it sufficiently to make saving drm-ed streams to a local compressed video format possible.
Obviously you could use a modified video driver or grab the data from the actual display - the problem with that would be speed and data size.
Presumably the data stream of the compressed video is in memory at some point in the process and could be sniffed?
IF it's been cracked doesn't it show the futility of applying DRM in the first place?
Nobody cares about cracking Widevine to extract 4 Mbps Netflix streams when Blu-ray rips are already available on the Pirate Bay. But if someone does crack it, Google will release a Chrome "security update" that makes it just different enough to make the crack not work, they'll tell Hollywood everything is fine, and the process will repeat until one side gets bored (see iTunes).
Everyone already knows that DRM is futile. But if you don't have DRM, you won't get Hollywood onboard for digital distribution.
So, we just smile, and nod, and say, "My, that's quite a lovely DRM setup you have", and it doesn't stop anyone from getting anything for free that they want. We just don't acknowledge that too loudly in public.
Seems like an absurd waste of time for so many people to be involved in implementing this.
I've always assumed movies were watermarked, so we know who owned the copy that was cracked. It could be powerful: If a unique identifier is embedded in every copy, it could track the origin down to the theater room or down to the watcher.
This is another great example of the difference between Chromium (free and open source browser) and Chrome (proprietary, branded fork of Chromium).
Amusingly, the previous workaround for running Netflix on Linux used Firefox (running under a patched version of Wine)[0], though it looks like Netflix is unlikely to come to Linux for Firefox in the near future[1]
Been doing this for about a year now through pipelight[0] and another more esoteric hack before then. I hope this fix is not so hard on the cpu although I'm guessing it is the same wine hack in a different form.
I'm not certain but I don't think so since Chromium is supposed to be the fully open source version it doesn't support the codecs or Media Source Extensions[0] that make it possible to enable the DRM modules Netflix uses.
You can test for support on Youtube[1] as well (I don't have Chromium so I'm not sure what the results are.)
This is awesome, but I see a lot of complaints from people who can't get it to work. In the past, I've used netflix-desktop[0] to watch from my Ubuntu partition. I've found that it works exceptionally well.
I'm willing to bet it will work in any Linux distro that has the newest Chrome installed, so Mint and Arch Linux will probably also work. Haven't confirmed yet though.
my problem is that as soon i install chrome, ubuntu becomes unstable...not with chromium, if someone has any advice on how to fix it, i would appreciate it.
I share your distaste for DRM, but wanted to throw in a comment of support for Netflix. A couple of years ago I was quite disgusted by how a Netflix employee was heckled on stage at the Linux Collaboration Summit. It seems hypocritical of our community to tout user freedom and then fail to treat a public speaker with decency. The right to redistribute other people's stuff unconditionally is not such a basic human right that it justifies such poor social behaviour.
I don't like DRM, and the impression I get from most Netflix employees is that they don't like it either. They haven't chosen to take the approach of Stallman and avoid all-things-DRM entirely, but theirs is an understandable choice and one I respect, even if I do not agree with it. They have contributed some awesome stuff to the free software community and are making media available in more readily accessible ways, even if it's not as readily accessible as some of us may like. It's the people producing the media who insist on such controls being in place in order to license their content to Netlix.
I think one could take a position in between between treating invited speakers disrespectfully and endorsing their work. (It seems like that's maybe actually the position you're taking.) It would be great to find a way to articulate and strengthen anti-DRM norms in more parts of the technical community, so that people don't keep thinking of DRM as natural or inevitable (and so other people can see that there's actually resistance to it in the tech world!).
>> It seems like that's maybe actually the position you're taking
That's definitely part of it. I'm all for free-as-in-libre software, but the fact is very few people are willing to bet their entire business on free-as-in-gratis software, and that's understandable. When we attack companies who contribute heavily to free software because they do not contribute exclusively to free software, we're harming the free software movement as much as they are.
As a side note, I agree we need to come up with better ways to stop consumers from thinking of DRM as inevitable. Like most people on HN, I'm sure, I'm often asked for help with technical things - I find it has a big impact on people (albeit one at a time) when I explain how the vendor of the product makes it difficult for me to help them or for them to help themselves, and how they should consider vendors who place freedom above profit.
Always. This is native Netflix without running any unofficial patches to WINE to get it working. Sadly only supports the closed Chrome since that's the only Linux browser that supports the neccesisary DRM. You've been able to get Netflix working by faking your user-agent to Windows with a new enpoug Chrome and NSS, but this is without the faking your user agent part.
The karma bullies can keep downvoting this all they want, but I definitely have had Netflix running in a browser on an ubuntu box without any modification before this announcement. The only thing I can think of that may have affected my box vis a vis Netflix was the installation of VLC which installs some proprietary codecs (e.g. libdvdcss)
