About four years ago, we shared our plans for playing premium video in HTML5, replacing Silverlight and eliminating the extra step of installing and updating browser plug-ins.
Since then, we have launched HTML5 video on Chrome OS, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Edge on all supported operating systems. And though we do not officially support Linux, Chrome playback has worked on that platform since late 2014. Starting today, users of Firefox can also enjoy Netflix on Linux.This marks a huge milestone for us and our partners, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla that helped make it possible.
It wasn’t that long ago we barely dared to imagine HTML5 video taking over from Flash and Silverlight.
It was only yesterday that I was trying to figure out why the widevine plugin wasn’t working in Chromium so I had to result to using Chrome under Debian. If I can just Firefox instead, that rocks. One less dependency on Chrome! Now if I can convince someone at work to fix a few things, I can dotch it altogether.
The plugin works. Chromium fails because it doesn’t have H.264 which Netflix uses.
Firefox doesn’t respect my wishes to not autoplay HTML5 videos.
There’s a media.autoplay.enabled setting, but it has long been known that this doesn’t stop websites that use javascript to play video.
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/58365/prevent-cnn-com-fr…
I never want media to auto download & play until I explicitly click on it. With flash this was easy to accomplish and flash would stay unloaded until I clicked on it… perfect! I’ve tried installing plugins like “HTML5 video everywhere” to disable HTML5 autoplay, but everything I found merely patches the javascript of specific sites like youtube rather than directly preventing the video element from autoloading inside the browser. So many websites with unrecognized javsscript will autoplay anyways.
So far mozilla has refused to do anything about this in firefox. I can honestly say that because of this, flash was a better user experience. Yes it’s ironic to assert that not playing media as programmed on the website results in a better experience, but there you have it.
Apparently chrome and safari let you disable HTML5 media until requested. I’ve stuck with FF for a long time, but maybe it’s time I reconsider.
Edited 2017-03-23 01:32 UTC
Too bad we had to cripple ‘HTML5’ to the level of Flash [and Silverlight] to make the cut. The web isn’t open anymore nor is it platform-independent.
Exactly! This solution still relies on “Content Decryption Modules” that are OS, platform and architecture dependent, so I don’t see how this is any better than what we’ve been using so far.
Also note that despite the HTML5 “standard” (whose version by the way? Each vendor supports its own set of features) this wasn’t working on Firefox “just because”. So yes, call me unimpressed — and a little bit worried too.
RT.
Perhaps if the people demanding a fully open web had concentrated on creating something competitive with the closed standards instead of complaining that closed standards were being used, we’d be further along in that goal today. The “closed” people came out with H.264, while the “free software” people came out with Theora and later VP8. Come on. There really was no contest. Meanwhile H.265 is well on the way. What open standard do we have to even come close to competing with it?
darknexus,
When I last checked many years ago, VP8 was indeed inferior to 264.
However it’s important to note that, due to software patents, it was never going to be a fair competition: proprietary codecs can implement the best known algorithms whether they’re patented or not, even those invented by open source competition. However the inverse is not true and “open” codec engineers have to explicitly code around patented methods. This constraint leads to engineering choices made for the sake of legal purposes rather than technological merit.
Edited 2017-03-23 20:04 UTC
Huh? The use of DRM has nothing to do with video codecs. And Netflix is using VP9 too.
We still need proprietary binary plugins. Now it is just called Widevine instead of Flash…
The difference is that you can disable the plugin and non-DRM video still works.