[CentOS] Watching Netflix movies on CentOS

[Matt Shields]

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Kevin Krieser <k_krieser at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
>  On May 4, 2008, at 9:23 AM, Matt Shields wrote:
>
>
> > On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 6:31 AM, Kai Schaetzl <maillists at conactive.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Ralph Angenendt wrote on Sun, 4 May 2008 10:22:11 +0200:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > In other words: They don't want your money. If I were you, I'd respect
> > > > that. Make yourself heard over at Netflix, though.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I remember about the Netflix format from before 2000. It's a very low
> > > bandwidth format with really bad quality. AFAIK it was mainly porn sites
> > > using it. I thought it had died out since long.
> > >
> > > Kai
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Netflix only started doing on demand movies about a year ago, and from
> > what I remember when I had the service it wasn't all that bad.  It
> > looked great on a laptop, and on my 720p 37" HDTV it looked better
> > than normal tv, but not as good as an HD program.
> >
> > I agree with Ralph, complain to them, I know I did.  Unfortunately
> > they probably don't think there are enough Linux users to justify
> > providing service to us.  I'm just really surprised they haven't
> > provided service to Mac users, the new Quicktime format actually has
> > better compression rates than any of the WMV/WMA formats.
> >
> >
>
>
>  Apparently the problem with the Mac is the DRM again.  The studios are
> apparently all worried that people will keep copies of the old TV shows and
> movies downloaded.
>
>  I have an old Mac Mini that I would like to use to watch some Netflix shows
> on (better than sitting in front of a computer, or watching it on a small
> laptop), but until it is supported I can't.  The Mini is hooked up to my TV
> directly.
>

Quicktime absolutely supports DRM, so what's the problem?  It's a
cheap company that's looking to get the most bang for the littlest
buck.  It wouldn't have taken much to have their system ask for the
users choice of player (WMP or QT), so the other remaining issue is
time to convert films to digital format and storage.  Since the
conversion is probably automated it shouldn't have taken that much
extra time.  So the only issue is disk space, which means that Netflix
was too cheap to spend the extra money to store a QT version of the
films so they could get the Mac users.  From what I remember of the
Netflix downloads they were looking for a cheap way to get ahead of
Blockbuster.  They looked good, but they did as little as possible,
which included a limited availability of movies.

And for those that say it's more complicated than I state, I have
built a site from ground up(programming and video encoding) which
hosted independent films in WMV and QT formats. For me the most
complicated part was converting films that were not on optical media
(like DVD), because if they were sent on tape format (DVCPRO, DV,
BetaCam, etc) you were limited to the speed of playback, whereas
digital you can rip faster.  When it came to storage, even at high def
quality storage was still cheap.  Even bandwidth for streaming was
quite cheap.
-- 
-matt