[SGVLUG] No Netflix for Linux

[Christopher Smith]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Christopher Smith <cbsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 6:57 AM, John Kreznar <jek at ininx.com> wrote:
>> "Sean O'Donnell" <sean at seanodonnell.com> writes:
>>
>>> Haven't googled too much yet, but do the web service API stream
>>> features require silver light to decode, too?
>>
>> In that case, Braddock might start with the Google response to
>> "silverlight+linux".  It's rich with hits.
>
> You want to start with Moonlight: http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

Sorry, I should be more helpful than that. I've been lurking on this
thread without taking the time to share what I know.

Basically, it isn't that much needed to make it so you can get Netflix
working on Linux. Unfortunately, the remaining bits needed are very,
very critical.

Moonlight has no support for DRM. The needed bits are just not there:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight/SecurityStatus#Digital_Rights_Management

The missing technology is called PlayReady.
Here's the URL with everything about it: http://www.microsoft.com/playready/

As you can imagine, Microsoft is actually very motivated to support
other parties adopting PlayReady, so they provide a porting kit which
includes a fully portable ANSI C implementation of the technology,
along with very comprehensive documentation on the object header:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/E/2/FE21F9E5-322F-4F5C-93FE-C79F70B0C6EB/PlayReady%20Header%20Object.zip

So, from a technical standpoint, it isn't hard to get PlayReady on
Linux. Indeed, here is a URL for an implementation of PlayReady for
Android: http://www.discretix.com/android_drm.html

The problem is the licensing requirements are hard to meet for Linux
desktops, as detailed here by Miguel de Icaza:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-16.html#comment-151543541

So there you go: it's basically down to a legal problem. I keep
thinking there is probably a way Netflix could get around this, but
clearly there hasn't been enough of an incentive for them to do it.

-- 
Chris