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Comment by vault_ | Hacker News Reader

As a college student using a free prime subscription, it's kind of lame that it's paid only (I understand their reasoning though).

My only other concern is how they're delivering the videos. Is it just flash? Or is it some crazy Silverlight+DRM thing like netflix? If it's the former they could attract some Linux users who can't use netflix.

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The one benefit of Silverlight is that it's not as cpu intensive as Flash. It's nice because you can play it on an older pc/laptop.

DRM isn't a big concern since you're not buying the movies. It is different from buying and downloading songs. You weren't expecting them to let you keep the movies, right?

DRM is still a big concern if your HTPC runs Linux and they don't provide a client that works with Linux.

There's moonlight, which is a Silverlight alternative for linux. I just installed it for Ubuntu. Painless to install.

edit: You guys are right. Netflix doesn't work under linux. I just tried it under Ubuntu. No go. It's too bad since Silverlight does use less power and Netflix has impressed me so far.

Microsoft doesn't license their PlayReady DRM components unless it is hardware secured. The only Netflix platforms that Linux works on have PlayReady chips in them basically - Roku, and Boxee literally JUST got Netflix support.

Moonlight absolutely doesn't work in Ubuntu. And Silverlight runs like a dog in a VM, even with 2d/3d accel (and turned off since they're not 100% stable) and that's giving my VM 3 cores and 3 GB of my memory, AND it's on a separate hard drive than my host OS.

Netflix is completely worthless to Linux users. I welcome competition from Amazon.

Microsoft doesn't license their PlayReady DRM components unless it is hardware secured

So you mean to say that the average Windows XP box is "hardware secured"?

I think you mean, "Microsoft doesn't license their PlayReady DRM components to anyone that isn't big enough to hurt its adoption".

Do you use Netflix? A while back I bought a Zotac Mag to have as my entertainment center. I set up Ubuntu on it, my usual dev tools and Boxee. I found out that there was no way to make Netflix work on Linux, other than through a Windows VM (which the Mag's cpu couldn't deal with).

Because I had to have Netflix (my wife uses it all the time) I took the Mag to the office and bought a used Mac Mini on Craiglist just for this.

Why didn't you just loaded Windows on the Mag? Windows 7 Media Center has one of the best Netflix clients I've seen. Also Boxee on Windows will do Netflix, although last time I tried it the Boxee version of the NetFlix client was really, really shitty.

Atom CPUs are too slow for virtualized media playback.

It's just Flash, like their existing purchase/rental videos.

Seems to be just flash.

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