# Let's ask NetFlix to release a native FreeBSD port



## PacketMan (Feb 27, 2016)

From another discussion:



scottro said:


> As for Netflix, a lot of that still runs on AWS Linux, though not Windows.  (Not to mention that it can only be played on FreeBSD through some Linux VM).  And there is some irony in that the millions of users of Netflix can't use FreeBSD to watch it.




I have already written NetFlix and submitted a request to their technical engineering group: to release a native FreeBSD Netflix 'player' port.  I encourage you to do the same.


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## tobik@ (Feb 27, 2016)

Someone (Google?) needs to compile the Widevine Content Decryption Module (https://www.widevine.com/wv_drm.html) for FreeBSD then you could watch Netflix with Chromium. AFAIK that's the only thing standing in the way of it.

But it's probably more likely that someone gets Google Chrome running with linux(4)...


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## scottro (Feb 27, 2016)

Although those who run most content provider companies don't understand the Internet, Netflix itself certainly does--they ought to try just releasing their own content, for example, Daredevil, in some format that any web browser could play, then advertise that if you run Free or OpenBSD you can watch some of their shows.  I wonder how many people they'd get--even people who didn't like Daredevil, but just wanted to support this.   Low though the numbers might be....for example, I remember reading somewhere that Theo said there were around 10,000 OpenBSD users.  Suppose half of them said, Yeah, I will subscribe to Netflix to support this.  That would be 5,000 customers, which seems to me to be enough to make some sort of impression, even for a company as large as Netflix.  

Actually that number sounds awfully low--I'm sure I'm either remembering incorrectly, or perhaps it's something he said 10 years ago.  Regardless, the point is, that if you get 5,000 new customers, it's probably worth it.  

I think most folks here understand the Internet well enough to know that removing the DRM would not make any difference in how much any show is pirated.


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## ANOKNUSA (Feb 27, 2016)

scottro said:


> ...they ought to try just releasing their own content, for example, Daredevil, in some format that any web browser could play...



This would be the way to go. Asking Netflix to create a special application for a specific operating system is a dead end, for two reasons. First, FreeBSD is a niche operating system, and a FOSS one at that. They probably won't see any point in the effort, and it would likely involve some awkward licensing issues. Second, making the issue about operating systems was the mistake Netflix made in the first place---they provide a service that should, quite logically, be platform-independent. People who have all sorts of different tastes in software enjoy the same movies and TV shows, and so might be inclined to subscribe to Netflix regardless of the system they're streaming to were a single delivery method---a browser of some sort---available to everyone.

Make the case that tying the service to a particular platform for no good reason artificially and arbitrarily limits the business potential of Netflix, requiring Netflix to manage multiple service plans (streaming-only, disc-only, streaming and disc) that people are herded into as their ability to access content is arbitrarily curtailed, while also performing maintenance and quality control for a whole slew of apps on a bunch of different platforms while in turn having to make compromises to satisfy Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. Making the whole service platform-independent would in the long run mean less work, more money, and better customer satisfaction. A totally new application might not even be necessary: a branded app could conceivably use an existing back-end from (Gecko or WebKit or something) with all the extra stuff stripped out.


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## scottro (Feb 28, 2016)

Well, here, in the US, the entertainment industry basically tells the government what to do--the most embarrassing example being a former senator hired to go to one of the AA groups, and then, when they were trying to pass SOPA, basically blatantly say, we bought you, stay bought.  So, it probably won't change.  It seems to only get worse--for example, Hulu could be watched by any browser that had flash, then they DRM'ed it and now again, one has to go through hoops (errm, Hulu hoops?) to watch it.

Those who make these decisions are so moronic that I simply have no idea what to say.   As I see it (not an original thought, don't remember where I read it, but I think it's quite true) there are three broad groups--those who will pirate regardless--maybe they're young and think it's cool, maybe they have no money, whatever, those who will never pirate, and probably the vast majority, who would rather watch it legitimately, but will pirate if there's no other way, or if it's really a lot of trouble to get it legitimately.  (Or who get fed up with, say, a DVD where you have to sit through the useless anti-piracy warning, another example of how corrupt the US government is, the ads, and so on.)

So, all these absolutely useless content protection schemes do is push paying customers to look for ways to get it illegally.   I'm too old and stodgy to care very much, I just find it useful as an indicator of how corrupt a politician may be.  For example, I thought one was relatively honest, then saw he was sponsoring a bill to put video pirates in jail, and thought, ah, another corrupt and ignorant one.


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## PacketMan (Feb 28, 2016)

ANOKNUSA said:


> Asking Netflix to create a special application for a specific operating system is a dead end, for two reasons. First, FreeBSD is a niche operating system, and a FOSS one at that. They probably won't see any point in the effort, and it would likely involve some awkward licensing issues.



But NetFlix success is significantly due to its use of FreeBSD. Sure they probably could have had good success with LInux too, but they chose FreeBSD for their home-made CDN, and it's working great. So surely they have the skills in-house to write a native FreeBSD port for NetFlix player.  Surely if they can put NetFlix on my smart TV, they can put it on my FreeBSD machines.


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## Oko (Feb 28, 2016)

scottro
You made my day with that post. I am with you 100% just I have to keep my mouth shut because of my thick overseas accent.

I thought this would be a good thread to throw in the image of my home network topology and show how irrelevant is this discussion. Both my TV and Blu-ray are computers in their own right and fully capable of displaying NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon and similar content without the help of a "real" computer. Anyhow if I as a geek have far more hand held devices and "non-standard' computers than the "real" machines what can you say about other U.S. households


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## scottro (Feb 28, 2016)

I should keep my mouth shut too, because once I start discussing our politicians and their corruption, I can't stop.  So, instead I'll just say, Cool, nice setup!

(Mine is far simpler--cable modem to Dlink router and a few machines working from that)

To go back on topic. I subscribed to Netflix at one point. I was mostly using CentOS-6x.  Its version of google-chrome won't work with Netflix, so I used a docker instance running Debian Jessie, an i instance created by a developer named Jessie for exactly that reason--to be able to see multimedia in a Docker instance.  However, were they to support FreeBSD--or even plain cross platform anything--I would certainly subscribe for at least a few months to show my support, especially as both Hulu and Amazon have now gone to the point of making their video offerings harder to watch in order to protect content.  (I'm sure that both Amazon and Hulu have people there who understand that this is useless, but see previous post about content providers.)


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## gofer_touch (Feb 28, 2016)

Oko said:


> scottro
> You made my day with that post. I am with you 100% just I have to keep my mouth shut because of my thick overseas accent.
> 
> I thought this would be a good thread to throw in the image of my home network topology and show how irrelevant is this discussion. Both my TV and Blu-ray are computers in their own right and fully capable of displaying NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon and similar content without the help of a "real" computer. Anyhow if I as a geek have far more hand held devices and "non-standard' computers than the "real" machines what can you say about other U.S. households



Huh? Where is FreeBSD in this picture?  Anyway a nice illustration, I think I'll put together something like this myself.


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## sidetone (Feb 28, 2016)

The only reason against them doing it, is preventing people from pirating video on their computer. Of course, this doesn't stop Netflix from selling their own proprietary software or hardware, to allow it to run on top of FreeBSD.

But I have a serious objection. Why do they force the use of Microsoft products, even if done on an Apple computer by requiring Silverlight? Forcing a dependency on Microsoft for desktop viewing is not an excuse.


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## Oko (Feb 28, 2016)

gofer_touch said:


> Huh? Where is FreeBSD in this picture?  Anyway a nice illustration, I think I'll put together something like this myself.


I have no use for FreeBSD at home. If a modern file system like HAMMER2 gets ported to OpenBSD I will have no use at home for DragonFly either.  At work we use FreeBSD on all file servers and several light weight Jail based virtual hosts. In the light of the issues with ZFS re-silvering which were described in the thread CDDL1 vs GPL2 I am not sure I made a right decision switching from HWRaid+XFS RedHat to FreeBSD. FreeBSD-ZFS and I would not be able to justify the use of FreeBSD at all. You will not find DragonFly on the picture of my work network topology. If you come this June to BSDCan you can hear the full story.


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## phoenix (Mar 1, 2016)

Netflix doesn't need to do anything in order to support FreeBSD as a viewing platform.  It's the web browser makers that need to update the Encrypted Media Extensions support in their FreeBSD browsers, compile the DRM plugin for FreeBSD, and ship it.  Once that happens, then you can watch Netflix on FreeBSD.  Chromium and Firefox both support EME on Windows and Linux; they're the only ones not supporting FreeBSD.  Once they flip the switch on that, everything else Just Works!  And for more than just Netflix.


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## protocelt (Mar 1, 2016)

If I recall Netflix used to do some user agent checks on the browser (even with Encrypted Media Extensions enabled) and wouldn't work if the OS wasn't Linux or Windows. Is this still the case?


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## phoenix (Mar 1, 2016)

That was needed to get it to work on Linux during their "beta" period for the HTML5 client on older versions of Ubuntu (newer versions of Ubuntu worked with the default user-agent).  You had to set the user-agent to Windows 8 (and sometimes to IE10 or something like that).  Once the HTML5 client was released, that was no longer needed on any version of Linux.

It may be needed for non-Linux/non-Windows, but as there are no EME/DRM modules on FreeBSD, it's pretty hard to test.


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## PacketMan (Mar 2, 2016)

phoenix said:


> It's the web browser makers that need to ......



Yeah but I like the NetFlix application on my PS3 way better, and its that app that I would like to see become available for FreeBSD. Since PS3 is FreeBSD based, there shouldn't be too much technical effort....more legal work I imagine.


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## usdmatt (Mar 2, 2016)

I'm pretty sure the PS4 is FreeBSD based, not sure about the PS3. However, that in no way means it would be trivial to port a Playstation application to FreeBSD. The Playstation is massively customised and has a completely bespoke API/ABI. This is a complete non-starter, barely even worth discussing, just like the post about porting PS4 games.

Netflix is a client/server architecture. The OpenConnect server is pretty much just a high performance web server. FreeBSD was a good choice for that, although in reality if the head guys were Linux users not FreeBSD, they would of built it on Linux, and it probably would of worked just as well.

Just because the server is FreeBSD based is in no way a reason to expect the client should be. The client is completely separate and they develop for the systems where there users are. The reality is practically none of their customers are using FreeBSD. Even if they were, their primary desktop client is browser based (do they actually make an 'app' for any desktop system other than Windows?), and so they rely on the browser vendors to implement the required support, as mentioned by phoenix. For a fraction of the work, their client works on any platform that supports the required features, and if FreeBSD implemented those features, not only would Netflix work, but anything else built using the same functionality.


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## PacketMan (Mar 3, 2016)

Well other companies with a lot less money and staff than NetFlix have managed to port their application to a multitude of OS's including FreeBSD, so I'm sure if they can do it, NetFlix can do it if they want too.

Regarding the use of Linux, I'm sure I read a document online on why NetFlix chose FreeBSD over Linux, and it had nothing to do with because their guys were FreeBSD users. I've tried looking for that again but can't find it anymore.


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## scottro (Mar 3, 2016)

Some of it was licensing too.


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 3, 2016)

If you can stand to listen to this Netflix engineer, he goes over the why thoroughly.


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## cpm@ (Mar 4, 2016)

A discussion related to watch Netflix on FreeBSD -> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2016-January/270264.html


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## grahamperrin@ (Mar 15, 2016)

Overlapping with some of what's discussed above: 

Chromium – Enabling Widevine Content Decryption Module – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange (2015-03-17)

Official PC-BSD Blog » New Video Tutorial on the Pipelight Plugin and Netflix in PC-BSD (2016-03-08)
Google Chrome (not Chromium) (PC-BSD forums, 2016-03-15)


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## ronaldlees (Mar 15, 2016)

> Overlapping with some of what's discussed above:
> 
> Chromium – Enabling Widevine Content Decryption Module – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange (2015-03-17)
> 
> ...



It's great that there may be some way to watch NetFlix on the BSDs.  I'm not much of a fan of black blob CDMs though.  I've decided to disable the Cisco black blob download, and don't run Chromium anymore (let alone Chrome).  And I worry about how much of a potential fingerprint the CDM socket might provide to the content provider ...  not that I know there is any at all.  I guess that's the problem.  If they stop making DVDs, I'll have to go completely dark.  Got candles though.


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