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Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

So they are indeed going through with it. I thought they would push back a bit since Unity isn't ready on WebGL and Silverlight is still used on Netflix. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Hopefully Unity can get Unity 5 live and WebGL solid by April 15 latest.

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Netflix no longer requires Silverlight in Chrome.

True, still a ton of cleanup, old silverlight video/content/systems to clean up. I bet content costs are a little higher as well with many formats having to be pushed to the edges rather than one VC-1 format.

I wonder why haven't they moved all systems/browsers to it if their html5 player side and content is up to speed? I usually watch in Safari because I work in Chrome/Firefox for dev typically.

Hi, I work at Netflix.

We switched from VC-1 to H.264 a few years ago, so the encodes don't change with the switch from Silverlight to HTML5 video.

Currently just IE 11, Chrome, and Safari 8 in Yosemite support our HTML5 player. It depends on three new APIs in HTML5: MSE, EME, WebCrypto.

Shameless plug: I'm currently hiring for the engineering manager of the team that builds our HTML5 streaming video player. http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.php?id=NFX01593

IIRC, Netflix uses a no plugin mode in Safari on Yosemite.

The Unity 5 WebGL programs are beasts to download. It is too bad there isn't more ThreeJS-based development: http://threejs.org

Indeed three.js is more like the future but until the webviews in all mobile devices run WebGL fast enough, Unity helps most on the mobile side and one build so it is used. When WebGL runs fast across the board, many games can just use that for all platforms. I personally love three.js but use Unity, Lime/Haxe/OpenFL and Cocos because of mobile first.

The size is pretty much fixed regardless since it's usually game assets and audio/video that blow the sizes up, especially retina stuff.

There's always flash and javascript games if you're looking for games that are optimized for file size.

I find webgl to be completely unusable on linux; I have one box with a radeon and another with an nvidia. The nvidia one kind-of-sort-of works.

I had to completely turn off accelerated rendering in chromium on the radeon box, or I would get extreme display corruption on even on non webgl pages.

Are you sure this isn't a subset of the problem of "3D graphics on Linux?"

I assume you've verified against other 3D apps on those machines that the graphics stack itself is standards-compliant.

the nvidia box is definitely more solid than the radeon; the nvidia one does every 3d game I've thrown at it with no noticable issues. However, it's blacklisted by chrome for webgl, and when I tried forcing it, there were definite stability issues.

The radeon box, however, has noticable z-ordering artifacts and some minor flickering on games. Chrome is by far the worst application for it though, web gl or no web gl.

I have a box with Intel HD 4000 graphics (Ivy Bridge, when Intel graphics started being half-decent) and WebGL is great on Linux.

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