Netflix Ditches Silverlight For HTML5 On Macs 202
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.
Re:Linux soon? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:no plugins? (Score:2, Informative)
"HTML5 video" doesn't actually exist. (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.
Re:Linux soon? (Score:5, Informative)
Can someone explain this? Netflix runs on Linux under Wine, so why the need for hardware/driver support?
IME it runs poorly under Wine. I have had good results with an XP Pro x32 VM running under Linux x64, though. Not even too much added overhead, it seems. However, XP Pro x32 under XP Pro x32 seems to fail due to DRM. Hooray Linux!
Re:So basically this is the beginning of the end (Score:3, Informative)
Silverlight has been dead for a long time. Microsoft officially ended all future development of Silverlight in March of 2013. This is just the natural progression of its funeral.
Re:So basically this is the beginning of the end (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully, nothing will keep people interested in developing for Silverlight, given that Silverlight is dead. This isn't the beginning of the end -- the beginning of the end was when Microsoft announced that Silverlight 5, released three years ago, was going to be the last version of Silverlight released. I'm not saying "Silverlight is dead" as hyperbole -- it's officially a discontinued product.
References:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.c... [microsoft.com]
http://social.msdn.microsoft.c... [microsoft.com]
It will continue to be supported by Microsoft until 2021, but nothing new's happening with it.
Re:silverlight bad, HTML5 good (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft is a charter member of the DASH industry Forum (along with Adobe and Netflix and a few others) and is really pushing DASH (if the hype is to be believed, it's the Second Coming). That said, it has a lot of very useful technical benefits over silverlight or HLS.
http://dashif.org/members/