FOSS Week in Review
Is Netflix coming soon to a Linux near you?
Saurav Modak at Muktware was observant enough to note last week that Netflix is now offering-up programming with a choice heretofore unavailable. For the time being they’re still pretty much married to Microsoft’s dead or dying Silverlight, but they’ve taken HTML5 on as a lover. This gives users of the popular movie outlet a choice that, at the very least, should make things easier for Linux users who insist on using the Netflix service:
“Although hackers have already made a workaround to stream Netflix videos in Linux machines, performance is generally low and video playback is not hassle free. Some workarounds include running the entire browser in Wine, or running a Silverlight plugin in Wine and make it compatible with the browser. But all of them come at a cost of performance. Switching to HTML5 from Silverlight will greatly reduce all these hassles, as all you will need is a latest standard compatible browser to stream movies and TV shows. This will also allow support for mobile devices and tablets which are adopting more HTML5 standards day by day.”
We’ve seen this crisis coming since the introduction of Vista, which should have been a shining moment for the company. After all, the operating system was nearly six years in the making. They botched it, releasing a much anticipated OS that was not only a resource hog but basically just didn’t work. Wow. This was just after the release of Zune, a “me too” iPod, and before the release of the Kin phones, which are so rare that they probably fetch a premium on eBay.