Netflix vs Linux

Nakoron · July 15, 2014

When, oh, when, will Netflix finally convert over to HTML 5..?

They have been toying with it for years now.

Needless to say: Microsoft's silverlight doesn't exactly work on Linux.

There is a few workarounds, but it defeats the purpose of a dedicated low-powered HTPC; as running Wine requires some CPU horsepower.

This is, IMO, the only thing holding your favorite flavour of Linux from being the ultimate living room media centre.

Netflix themselves have hinted and teased. 'Even said they had a building working in-house. This was almost two years ago!

Askew · July 15, 2014

Silverlight sucks ass, it can't even do the highest bitrate 1080p stream from Netflix in a browser and even the fucking PS3 can do it...

There is an app for W8 that gets around this but the vast majority of PC users are stuck with Silverlight, I hate it and I can't wait until they get rid of it.

mooseducks86 · July 15, 2014

I love getting those "oops... something went wrong!" errors, and then having to uninstall, reinstall, uninstall, delete a specific file, reinstall.... then just use a different browser for a while.

I bought an apple tv JUST for netflix. It can hook up to my monitor or tv via HDMI... had I known, I would have bought a used 2nd gen Apple TV to also install XBMC on. The interface on Apple TV is a lot faster than a WD box I tried... The WD was $20 less and just... terrible. "Push the left button" "I did!" "No you went too far now" "It wasn't moving!". Frustrating.

I like the idea of the Apple TV (more so with XBMC installed) that I could grab and bring to a friends house for movie night or to a hotel on a trip and have Netflix or whatever fairly easily. It's much smaller than a game console. I recommend to anyone who is interested in XBMC to go find used 1st gen or 2nd gen... although the 1st gen is big and ugly, it also has a harddrive that could be useful, but output is only 720p for the first two I think.

Chromecast and Amazon Fire are out there too, but I have no experience with them yet. I know they both do Netflix. And that's about all I know.