[HN Gopher] Netflix's new player breaks the ability to modify th...
___________________________________________________________________
Netflix's new player breaks the ability to modify the seeking of a
playing video
Author : spaceribs
Score : 276 points
Date : 2021-10-17 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plopdown.video)
(TXT) w3m dump (plopdown.video)
| gedy wrote:
| It's cool the OP could figure workarounds and debug this, but I
| fear web assembly will turn the web into a bunch of opaque binary
| blobs that makes this impossible/impractical.
|
| Neat tech but be careful what you wish for!
| spaceribs wrote:
| I want to thank the mods for changing the title of this article
| posted here, my original title was a bit hyperbolic to say the
| least but I am quite worried about where this path leads overall.
| elcomet wrote:
| Could someone explain better what this is about? I don't
| understand what "seeking" means in this context.
|
| I can still go back or forward manually in my video if I need to
| Causality1 wrote:
| Netflix's user-side software has always been garbage. The android
| app forces you to keep a separate brightness slider from your
| phone, so if you watch Netflix a lot you're constantly having to
| adjust your screen brightness twice. It's also nearly 2022 and
| you still can't reorder the profiles on the login screen. How
| fucking hard can that possibly be?
| pjmlp wrote:
| The Web is just one decade away (tops) of being a synonym for
| ChromeOS runtime anyway.
| arpa wrote:
| and that spells the end of personal computing.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I disagree. I think there is enough vested interest in keeping
| the open web from turning into another google property. I
| strongly believe that regulatory forces will take effect before
| google owns the entire planet.
|
| DRM-controlled media content covers just a tiny fraction of
| what the open web offers and represents the only hard barrier
| to entry in development of a new browser from scratch. Yes, the
| technical challenge is extreme too but not impossible. There
| are large organizations that are making serious headway in this
| space right now: https://www.ekioh.com/
| pjmlp wrote:
| The people shipping Electron apps don't seem being interested
| in keeping the Web open, rather adding value to Chrome OS
| conquest of the Web.
| renke1 wrote:
| While I agree in general, no one is stopping Mozilla from
| creating a viable alternative to Electron that's based on
| open standards exclusively.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It won't matter, when the powers that be decide it is too
| much work to write cross platform Web UIs.
| bob1029 wrote:
| What do you propose we do to fix this problem?
| pjmlp wrote:
| For starters, if Web technologies must be used, webviews
| and console/daemons that start system browser.
|
| But naturally having to actually ship a cross browser Web
| UI is so much trouble. /s
| Retric wrote:
| Chrome browser share has slightly dropped over the last year.
| Ex: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
| pjmlp wrote:
| You are missing Electron apps.
| mikeryan wrote:
| Interesting chart it looks like Safari picked up some share
| around the same time Chrome dipped. Clicking through by
| platform it looks like most of that was on mobile. I'm
| guessing some iOS change did that more than anything else.
| cute_boi wrote:
| are these numbers correct by wide margin? Because I know many
| browsers like brave etc seems to use Google User Agent. And
| the funny thing is I am on firefox and I use Google Chrome UA
| so that skype etc works.
| jstsch wrote:
| You see this pattern in tons of web apps and sites. The browser
| is slowly turning into some sort of virtual machine. A sensible
| DOM structure with logical element naming seems to be a thing of
| the past. I think it makes development more complicated and also
| increases the barrier of entry for new devs.
| foxfluff wrote:
| It turned into that (more than) a decade ago.
|
| I was still browsing the web with links2 and a tiny text mode
| browser (similar to w3m) of my own writing until around the
| time google said "let's kill IE6." Shortly after that, the web
| at large started becoming unusable with simple browsers. It was
| still reasonably usable with script blocking, but that ship
| sailed too, and the vast majority of sites now absolutely
| require some scripts before you can see the text and images or
| navigate at all.
| fouc wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if some sort of legislation could fix this
| trend of abstracting users away from the web (and from
| software, and from hardware).
|
| Beyond just "the right to repair" we also need "the right to
| access the web", and "the right to run old versions of
| software and OSes", and so on.
| toxik wrote:
| The browser is becoming a TV. In the future, computers with
| keyboards and actual user control will be specialty devices for
| experts, quite separated from the content you can access today.
|
| It is really sad to see what humankind is about to lose in the
| name of copyright and content ownership. We really could have a
| share everything utopia, but no, our societies are built on
| adversarial competition and our politicians are unwilling or
| simply unable to stop the unending barrage of overreaches.
| selectodude wrote:
| You're aware that is what people actually want though.
| toxik wrote:
| People want to consume their content, nowhere does that
| dictate that they sign away their rights and actual
| ownership of their devices that they buy with their own
| money. The already existing DRM is user hostile, it is
| about control and nothing else.
|
| Users do NOT want these things, if you took the time to
| explain what it means, and gave them another option.
|
| The only reason the current set of DRM malware still exists
| today is by artificial scarcity, and mafia-like bullying
| through courts. Public opinion was largely in favor of peer
| to peer sharing content, but that wasn't good enough for
| the big boys. They wanted to be able to bring ALL other
| parties to their knees: cable manufacturers, display
| makers, computer makers, storage device makers, and of
| course, users. EVERYONE is now under their control.
|
| The general public is apathetic to the issue of DRM, they
| certainly don't want it. But they are not given a choice.
| You must have a HDCP certified computer, cable and display
| - otherwise no content for you.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Which people? The ones that want to get rich at the expense
| of others, or the ones the former bamboozle into believing
| this is how tech should work?
| selectodude wrote:
| The vast majority of people who want to pull a television
| out of the box, log into netflix, and watch their shows.
|
| For them, technology is a means to an end. Nothing more.
| arpa wrote:
| I don't want to believe the battle is lost, but I don't see a
| way to fight back aside from establishing a hacker
| counterculture, which is kind of happening with tor and
| internet alternatives.
| btown wrote:
| For the endgame of this, look no further than Figma. Their
| entire engine is custom-built in C++ and has been since 2015:
| https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
|
| > Instead of attempting to get one of [HTML/SVG/JS Canvas] to
| work, we implemented everything from scratch using WebGL. Our
| renderer is a highly-optimized tile-based engine with support
| for masking, blurring, dithered gradients, blend modes, nested
| layer opacity, and more. All rendering is done on the GPU and
| is fully anti-aliased. Internally our code looks a lot like a
| browser inside a browser; we have our own DOM, our own
| compositor, our own text layout engine, and we're thinking
| about adding a render tree just like the one browsers use to
| render HTML.
|
| For what it's worth, this isn't all that dissimilar from game
| development on proprietary engines, and that hasn't stopped
| indie game devs from experimenting. But it will be a huge
| problem for accessibility.
| ajdude wrote:
| Even the website this post links to just displays a blank page
| for me, with JavaScript disabled.
| cnfernandes wrote:
| Does this apply to Netflix Party (or Teleparty)
| cnfernandes wrote:
| Is Netflix party / Teleparty now broken?
| gfodor wrote:
| Netflix used to use Silverlight for their player. I wrote
| something a while back that needed to drive it and ended up
| writing code to click the scrubber to drive it. Guess we are back
| there ;)
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| "Almost there". Silverlight was not working in Linux afaik.
| rzzzt wrote:
| For different values of "not working", there was Moonlight:
| https://www.mono-project.com/docs/web/moonlight/
| speeder wrote:
| I have impression DRM vendors REALLY want you to buy a smart TV.
| Except F1 that is just stupid.
|
| I used to watch all stuff I wanted on a MacMini attached to a
| dumb TV.
|
| Suddenly, Netflix stopped working on all browsers except chrome.
|
| Then F1TV did the same, not only that some people found out it
| COULD work on other browsers, but after an specific update, they
| added code where it detects what browser you are using, and if it
| is not the browser and OS they want, the whole website refuses to
| work.
|
| I then decided to replace the aging MacMini with a Raspberri Pi
| to see if I could solve this problem, but as I researched I found
| out that it wouldn't solve it either, Google makes the Widevine
| DRM, and seemly lately it has been notorious for doing silent
| changes that break it on all platforms except official Chrome
| versions on Windows, Android and Chrome OS, people using Pi for
| media wrote a bunch of posts all over the internet with warnings
| like: "Oh, Netflix will work on the Pi some 3 months per year, it
| will start working after someone manages to make Widevine work
| with Chromium, and then after some weeks working Google will make
| a silent update and break it again for several months until
| someone figure out how to make it work with Chromium again"
|
| Also I am still bitter that the DRM race led to the death of 3D
| sound cards and some cool stuff that was possible with analog
| video on Windows versions before Vista.
|
| EDIT: about F1 being stupid: most DRM streaming apps have a
| SmartTV version. Formula 1 official doesn't. They want you to use
| Chrome on a PC. I just cannot understand what is wrong with them,
| why not allow people to watch Formula 1 on a TV like most normal
| people would want to?
| danShumway wrote:
| > I used to watch all stuff I wanted on a MacMini attached to a
| dumb TV. Suddenly, Netflix stopped working on all browsers
| except chrome.
|
| How is this possible? I was told that standardizing DRM
| interfaces in the browser would stop Netflix from forcing users
| to download native apps instead of using regular browsers and
| open streaming technology.
|
| > Google makes the Widevine DRM, and seemly lately it has been
| notorious for doing silent changes that break it on all
| platforms except official Chrome versions on Windows, Android
| and Chrome OS
|
| So wait, standardizing DRM _interfaces_ didn 't do anything to
| increase platform/browser availability for the actual DRM
| _implementations_ that are only licensed to be used with
| certain browsers and on certain devices? No one could have
| predicted this.
|
| Utterly shocking. It's almost like the standardization process
| for web DRM changed literally nothing about Netflix/Chrome's
| plans, and really only existed to provide a PR boost and the
| veneer of respectability to an outcome that they were always
| going to pursue anyway regardless of what the standard was.
|
| Oh well, live and learn. And by "learn", I of course mean make
| the exact same arguments verbatim the next time we want to
| standardize DRM interfaces on image tags and then accuse
| critics of wanting the open web to die.
| dgan wrote:
| This is not only Netflix. French media do the same using
| exactly the same Widevine DRM, which simply doesn't work on
| Firefox. My sister couldn't watch some replays of her shows on
| my laptop because she couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Wait... I first heard of widevine last week when I tried
| watching netflix on my work's laptop (debian), using firefox.
| It didn't work so I googled, found out about widevine and
| special settings. I tweaked some chrome/chromium parameters
| but it didn't work.
|
| All this in a private window.
|
| Once I used Netflix in a normal window (Firefox or chromium)
| it worked.
|
| Worth a try ?
| Anon_troll wrote:
| I don't think Firefox and Chrome run extensions/plugins in
| private windows without you first allowing them to run.
| That might be the case here.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Widevine is more or less the "industry standard" for in-
| browser video DRM. Basically everyone uses it.
| arpa wrote:
| Netflix has made a significant dent in piracy, but DRM will fix
| that...
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Did they, though? I never noticed a lack of availability of
| torrents and NZBs for movies and TV shows.
|
| Oh, I get it. They're using the same zero-sum definition of
| "drop" that they used when calculating profits. With a
| convenient and well-priced legal streaming option, new
| consumers are less likely to seek out pirate copies. (This is
| true.) If you count every subscription as a "lost" pirate
| copy then you can describe pirating as having "fallen" from
| this hypothetical maximum level to the current real rate of
| piracy. You don't have to even bother looking at the actual
| rate of piracy, which may have grown over the same period.
| That's the kind of math they use to count how much money is
| "lost" to piracy; assume every downloaded movie would have
| been paid for if piracy didn't exist. So of course the same
| formula would apply to describing how valuable their platform
| is.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Netflix made a dent in piracy when they were the only game in
| town. With the fracturing of streaming services leading to
| the very thing Netflix solved piracy will be on the rise
| again.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| You mean you don't sign up for all of Netflix, Hulu,
| Disney+, Paramount+, AppleTV+, HBO Max, Peacock, ESPN+, and
| Amazon Prime?? You really should, it's so convenient
| juggling subscriptions and apps for everything
| individually.
|
| But don't stop there. You want some documentaries? Throw in
| Curiosity Stream, it's pretty cheap and you'll get Nebula
| for free! You'll want BBC Select too, though. Oh, you like
| Anime? Here's Crunchyroll. A horror fan? Don't forget to
| sign up for Shudder!
|
| Or you could just log into your VPN and go to Pirate Bay. I
| mean, if you were a dirty awful criminal.
| smolder wrote:
| What do you mean about the death of 3D sound cards? Do you mean
| surround sound, like 5.1, etc? That's still a thing, and not
| incompatible with DRM.
| chha wrote:
| Not sure if this is valid in all cases; avid user of Netflix
| and F1 fan here. I only use Firefox on Linux to watch them
| Shorel wrote:
| >Also I am still bitter that the DRM race led to the death of
| 3D sound cards and some cool stuff that was possible with
| analog video on Windows versions before Vista.
|
| I share your bitterness about this same issue.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Honest question, as someone who's (probably) too young: What
| where these 3D sound cards and - just from the name - isn't
| that what Dolby Surround (etc) does?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| In the 90's I chalked it up to "surround or 5.1 marketing"
| but it might have been something else
| https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/3d-audio
| chha wrote:
| Yeah, there were several manufacturers who produced
| soundcards that basically offered two channels of sound,
| but where elements creating sound on-screen could be
| positioned as in a 3-dimensional world. I had a Packard
| Bell with an A3D[1] card, and I remember being fascinated
| by the demos they supplied.
|
| [1] -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor#A3D
| detaro wrote:
| And how did DRM get in the way of that?
| londons_explore wrote:
| What is the benefit to netflix of preventing a user
| programatically seeking the video?
|
| I can only imagine that perhaps netflix is trying to eliminate
| bugs caused by third party plugins that (for example) seek the
| htmlVideoElement, but don't trigger the network request to
| preload the necessary video that would normally happen as the
| user is dragging the scrubber.
| avidiax wrote:
| This could be step 1 of ad-supported Netflix. Create the
| infrastructure to keep you from skipping embedded ads.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| They might do that as a much cheaper option, but whatever
| streaming service forces their users to watch ads will just
| see most of their users leave.
|
| I haven't seen ads that can work around my hand covering them
| up (but I am sure I will eventually), but if I am forced to
| see ads, I won't consider paying for the service.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'm not sure ads work out financially for netflix. They
| currently get ~$120 per year per subscriber.
|
| Even google only earns $130 per user, and their ads are worth
| considerably more because they target the most valuable ads
| on user purchase intent (for search at least, where they get
| most revenue).
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Manually seeking works in Netflix and in ad video like
| YouTube and Hulu. Automated seeking uses the same APIs unless
| bugs.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Do engineers on these teams not voice their concerns and refuse
| to do stuff like this that actively hurts the web?
| standardUser wrote:
| If the tens of millions of people employed by carbon-emitting
| industries don't risk their jobs to prevent the literal ruin of
| the planet, not sure why anyone would think employees would
| take that same risk to prevent some third-party plugins from
| breaking.
| geofft wrote:
| You're asking if Netflix tolerates engineers not toeing the
| party line about their product? Have you seen the news last
| week? :)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| No what news, please share.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| I have been that engineer on occasion, though not specifically
| with regard to DRM. The pushback has typically been something
| like, "There is too much money on the line," or even, "If we
| are not setting the standard on this, someone else will, and it
| will probably be even worse."
|
| In the end, work is not voluntary for the majority of engineers
| involved in these things, and so you just have to accept that
| you are not going to win the argument unless you have a good
| argument that what you are being asked to build is not
| possible. Engineers often speak of how DRM is basically
| impossible, but that is only true in an ideal world; in
| practice DRM is good enough to satisfy business needs and
| concerns about web openness have yet to materialize (at least
| in a way that would undermine the business case for it). The
| relatively small number of hardware and software platforms one
| must deal with now further weakens the arguments against DRM.
| bosie wrote:
| I get where you are coming from but to me this wouldn't make
| sense given that they work there in the first place. Same goes
| for the network team serving the content etc. You start working
| there, it would be unprofessional to refuse to do this. Quit
| (or never start working there) if it makes you feel uncomfy.
| deadbunny wrote:
| What incentive do they have? Some good feels don't compare to
| that sweet remuneration package.
| scrose wrote:
| For every engineer that says no, there's thousands of other
| engineers willing to do whatever's asked for $400k+/year
| MattGaiser wrote:
| At least where I have worked, by the time it gets to me the
| decision has already been made that X feature will happen.
|
| So you could voice concern there, but it wouldn't matter.
| wpietri wrote:
| That's circular reasoning. If you and your colleagues said,
| "No, sorry, we're not implementing that", then that would
| mean the decision hasn't in fact been made. Your decision to
| give up your power as to the decisions is what makes it true.
| wpietri wrote:
| This points at a huge problem in software culture. A lot of us
| don't see ourselves as professionals, with our own ethical
| standards and responsibilities. We just do whatever a boss
| orders us to do, like minions or mercenaries.
|
| It's also an organizational problem, though. If you're, say, a
| doctor or an actual engineer, there are professional
| organizations that stand up for the professional standards and
| that can have your back if you're being asked to violate them.
|
| This is especially disappointing to me given the demand for
| software developers. It's much easier for us to find news jobs
| than most people, so the risk of taking an ethical stand is
| much lower for us than most people. And we also have a lot to
| gain! So many places are poorly run that businesses and
| developers would all gain if we used our power to fix process
| and organizational issues.
|
| I've certainly done my best to use that power well. But I would
| love to see cultural and organizational changes so that more of
| us do that.
| malloreon wrote:
| 100% true.
|
| If a software engineer writes software that hurts people,
| they believe in hurting people and believe people should be
| hurt.
|
| If they didn't, they wouldn't write software that hurts
| people.
|
| The impressive amount of freedom tech workers have to choose
| what they work on means the ethical and moral issues with
| their production should fall on each person's shoulders, but
| it doesn't.
| standardUser wrote:
| This attitude implies an unambiguous, black and white world
| where such decisions are always clear. In other words, a
| fantasy world which does not exist.
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree it's a bit hyperbolic. But it seems weird to
| suggest that developers, who are hired for their
| intellectual power and subtlety, are great at figuring
| out the implications of complex decisions except when
| ethics are involved.
|
| I think it's more likely that their sudden inability in
| this one aspect is related to Upton Sinclair's
| observation: " It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something when his salary depends upon his not
| understanding it."
| mdoms wrote:
| It's a video scrub bar. Calm down.
| Kiro wrote:
| No, because employee shaming like this make people distance
| themselves from the criticism and isolate in their work bubbles
| where they can easily justify any wrongdoings.
| fitzsim wrote:
| Sort of meta, but why does plopdown.video require JavaScript?
| Without JavaScript enabled it renders as a blank page. The actual
| post is just text and images. Why put that behind a JavaScript
| wall? Doing so excludes all non-JavaScript-supporting browsers
| from viewing the site. That's also a type of open web failure,
| another example of the type of problem the article does a good
| job of dissecting.
| krono wrote:
| The percentage of visitors without JS likely doesn't make it
| worth it for the developer to spend time handling this
| nonstandard.
|
| A site like this can definitely be created without JS, but it's
| their site and therefore their choice.
| detaro wrote:
| The percentage of visitors with extensions like Plopdown
| likely doesn't make it worth for Netflix to spend time
| handling this nonstandard. ;)
| krono wrote:
| The ability to seek is the standard so you've got things
| turned around I'm afraid :)
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| But it's their site therefore their choice.
| krono wrote:
| Yes I believe so. Having said that, if I had a Netflix
| sub I would seriously have considered canceling over
| this.
| spaceribs wrote:
| In my case, the actual plugin doesn't work without Javascript,
| and this was actually the cheapest option for hosting and
| staying within what I already had in my Nx monorepo. (it
| literally costs me $10 a year and I'm only paying for the
| domain)
|
| I'm looking into some options for this with cloudflare, but
| it's been pretty low on my priorities for the above reasons.
| I'm also one of those people that turns off javascript by
| default, so I know your pain, but I'm also not a multi-billion
| dollar company.
| seanwilson wrote:
| Tangential, but does Netflix have a reliable keyboard shortcut to
| pause the video? On Chrome, it seems to break when you switch the
| keyboard focus to some parts of the UI. You're also prevented
| from seeking backwards at the credits without clicking a button
| first (one is "watch next episode").
|
| I can see why the second one might be a deliberate design choice
| to push you to watch the next episode but I'm surprised the first
| isn't caught in user testing unless there's another shortcut.
| Youtube lets you press `k` to pause which seems to be reliable.
| loeg wrote:
| Have you tried space to pause?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Not directly, but there is a pause function on HTML5 video
| elements you could toss into a bookmarklet.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4155329/how-to-pause-a-h...
|
| If you use Firefox, you can set a keyword for it, so you could
| hit F6 to focus the address bar and type it in.
|
| It really shouldn't take all this to get even close, but I've
| never had much luck with space since it's focus dependent.
| Maybe you could use something like AutoHotKey to click the
| video area when you press a certain button/combo.
| IceDane wrote:
| Netflix's player has been awful for years now. It's soooo heavily
| modified web UX that it just takes me back to the days of
| websites being built entirely in flash.
|
| I wish we just had a normal player and a normal website and not
| this disgustingly over-engineered ad-delivery experience. But I
| don't expect this to change every. Netflix will do everything
| they can to control their content.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Counter point: I really like the way Netflix is built. It's
| great for discovery and the series I'm watching are right at
| the top if I simply want to jump back in. Sure, they could
| really do away with the autoplay and add some minor tweaks, but
| overall I'm happy. In fact, I even went for a native app
| instead of Kodi for my TV, just to get the original UI.
| Zekio wrote:
| Great for discovery? everyone I know use external sites to
| know what content was just added on Netflix, because having a
| `Recently added` that isn't a week behind is too hard
| Sebb767 wrote:
| That's not something I really care about, to be honest. I
| don't have too much view time, to be fair, so it might be
| this, but I don't need to know about what was just released
| this moment; what I want is to find something I want to
| watch right now. And at least for me, Netflix works quite
| well in supplying that.
| snthd wrote:
| Does the inability to jump to a timestamp adversely affect blind
| users?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I'm not aware of any screen readers that reach into the dom and
| call media element APIs directly. They essentially interact
| with the controls on the page that sighted users interact with.
| Shorel wrote:
| New?
|
| This error message has appeared since I first used Netflix.
|
| It happens about one third of all times I pause the video and
| then try to continue.
|
| F5 will not fix it.
|
| Only solution is to close the browser and open it again.
| pickledcods wrote:
| The rise of Trusted Computing where users are considered
| untrusted and perhaps even criminal by default. It will only get
| worse: playing any kind of media with a browser and OS you
| dislike.
| mindslight wrote:
| I can't reproduce the problem under mpv or Kodi. We've already
| passed the peak user experience of software bondage. Here's to
| hoping the next big trend is popular adoption of user-
| representing software.
| arpa wrote:
| RMS was right all along.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| "Who controls your computer? Is it you?"
|
| "Either the user controls the software, or the software
| controls the users":
|
| https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
| mhh__ wrote:
| As someone very unimpressed with RMS-the-human, he is just
| bang on the money when it comes to software freedom. He is as
| right on that as he is odd as a person, I think it's a real
| shame (an inevitable one, but still) that the GNU concept
| seems to be lost on many younger programmers e.g. the
| GNU/Linux meme (there would be no kernel and no "Linux"
| without GNU, GCC, and the GPL so I have no issues giving them
| credit when due)
| jhgb wrote:
| > He is as right on that as he is odd as a person
|
| We're continuously being told that we need different people
| to come up with different ideas. Then the same people are
| unimpressed that people with unconventional ideas are
| unconventional. SMH.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Unconventional doesn't cut it. _I 'm_ unconventional. RMS
| is a creepy weirdo and frankly kind of an asshole.
| mandmandam wrote:
| You're not unconventional, you're anonymous.
|
| Why do you think it's okay to smear Stallman like this?
|
| And for the people who apparently are supporting this
| smear, please take a minute to educate yourself:
| https://stallmansupport.org/
| jhgb wrote:
| > is a creepy weirdo
|
| I'm positive we call them "autists" these days, not
| "creepy weirdos", just like we don't call low-IQ people
| "idiots" anymore, even though we did at some point.
| chc wrote:
| "Autist" is a term (usually pejorative these days) for
| people on the autism spectrum, most of whom are not
| creepy weirdos.
| jhgb wrote:
| Yes; objectively nobody is a creepy weirdo because it's a
| cheap, nebulous, meaningless term. Yet for some reason
| there seems to be no shortage of people using it to
| designate people who are just different in some way.
| foxfluff wrote:
| Already the case with proprietary banking apps..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| technogeek00 wrote:
| The boolean tracking appears to be something like an asset state
| machine / tracking running in the virtual player. Manually
| seeking the video tag is likely an unexpected change triggering
| an exceptional transition in the logic.
|
| The thing to keep in mind here is that the seeking timeline of a
| video tag element does not need to represent the actual media
| timeline when you are using MSE. It can represent any time the
| virtual player running in JavaScript wants to maintain and is
| usually more related to the buffer timeline and ensuring pts
| continuity across segment appends. Netflix has historically had
| relatively simple streams which may have allowed this to be the
| actual seek time, but looks like some deeper streaming changes
| are landing. For a more complicated example take a look at how
| multi-asset vod and live streams in a single video tag surface
| times.
|
| I don't work for Netflix, but do work in the field and since it's
| relatively small know some of the folks over at Netflix. They
| definitely aren't out to break things purposely, it's more likely
| not a case they exercise and broken by a change like someone else
| has said. If you want to patch the functionality it may be worth
| exploring the dispatch of mouse clicks on the seek bar. That
| probably does a translate to time and then calls the virtual
| player seek API which would be the new hook point you want.
| spaceribs wrote:
| Yeah, I have a feeling it was due to optimizations deeper in
| the stack, I'm just deeply unhappy that what essentially should
| be an interoperable API via the <video> element was locked down
| in such a spectacular fashion.
|
| The edge cases of varying video providers has been really eye
| opening when i've been doing this project, it hard to imagine
| how screenreader software (or any meta-software that makes it
| easier for the disabled) works at all.
| Shouganai wrote:
| Sorry, a little off topic gripe about the article itself. I have
| gigabit internet and still noticed the two images for this
| article loading line by line, top to bottom. Upon inspection I
| see they are using massive (5.67mb & 3.6mb) .png images with a
| resolution of 2832x1838. However, the maximum size they are ever
| displayed is 836x546.
|
| It took me less than 1 minute to do a quick and dirty
| optimization bringing them down to less than 100kb each. Here you
| go author:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/WGk8dBS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pHSFsCb.jpg
| jacobobryant wrote:
| Shoutout to https://images.weserv.nl/. e.g. given
| https://example.com/foo.jpg, you can do <img src="https://image
| s.weserv.nl/?w=100&url=https://example.com/foo....">
| m_a_g wrote:
| I love the HN community.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Idea: a simple service that takes a URL and discovers stuff
| like this and spits out optimizations.
| eterm wrote:
| Pretty sure Yahoo and google both had a service that did that
| a decade or more ago.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Being in a forum with people in the middle of nowhere can
| serve as a very immediate "service" e.g.
|
| - hey guys look at my blog post
|
| - I'm in [a village in Tibet or whatever] and it's still
| loading after 30 seconds...
| capableweb wrote:
| Solution: This already exists, Google Lighthouse is one
| (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse) but many
| non-Google alternatives exists too
| (https://alternativeto.net/software/google-lighthouse/)
| wongarsu wrote:
| So Google's Lighthouse? Or more on-the-fly fixes by the
| webserver like mod_pagespeed?
| spaceribs wrote:
| Thank you, I did this blog post rather quickly :(
|
| Edit: updated the images, thanks again
| Shouganai wrote:
| You're welcome, have a great day friend.
| standardUser wrote:
| "When seeking the video to annotations in the plopdown timeline"
|
| There has to be a way to phrase this that is comprehensible by
| humans.
| kissickas wrote:
| Ironic from a website that requires me to allow javascript to run
| before I can read a text-and-image blog post.
| ajdude wrote:
| Came here to say that.
| amelius wrote:
| Back to torrents then.
| mankyd wrote:
| Going to give a guess as to more pragmatic reason this came
| about: they don't have a requirement or test for it.
|
| Some engineer was asked to make a feature. That feature happened
| to break 3rd party seeking. It probably wasn't intentional, just
| incidental.
|
| Because they have no internal requirement to support this, nor
| anyone/anything testing for it, it silently broke.
|
| It was probably not malicious, even if it feels like a step
| backwards to this extension developer.
|
| Whether it _should_ be fixed of course, is a different matter,
| but when I see statements like "DRM vendors REALLY want you to
| buy a smart TV"[1] I frown, as it is contains an assumption of
| intent that I suspect isn't there.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28896614
|
| Edit: The title of the article (and original title here) is
| "Netflix's new player is an open web nightmare". My response is
| written in response to this sort of inflammatory language.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| It's honestly better in some cases just to lock these types of
| folks out - you can save yourself a ton of a headaches later.
|
| Look for words like offended, nightmare, deeply upset, outraged
| - if you see a lot of that - disengage!
| arpa wrote:
| We're jaded enough to assume the reverse of Hanlon's razor (for
| me it was when google dropped their "don't be evil", hard).
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > they don't have a requirement or test for it.
|
| Automated and thorough testing of client-side JavaScript is a
| huge, huge burden because you cannot simply run a script in
| isolation in a headless V8 instance or something: you need the
| entire browser and clone environment running.
|
| Secondarily: the major tools for performing automated testing
| of web-applications within modern browsers are all lacking in
| some critical way, for example while Cypress automates Chrome
| fine, for some reason it loads the entire SUT into an
| <iframe>!!!! That alone will introduce massive differences from
| production, top-level browsing (the project is full of hacks
| that do things like re-write `window.top` so that the SUT can
| almost believe it's not running in an iframe, but enough
| differences leak through).
|
| For all the effort Google put into Angular's Protractor, Chrome
| does not make this easy.
| margaretdouglas wrote:
| The issue isn't that the testing is challenging. The ask here
| is Netflix covers all third-party Chrome plugins that
| manipulate the playback experience. Is it really Netflix's
| job to ensure all changes are compatible with third party
| tools like the one linked here, or others like Language
| Reactor?
| davidzweig wrote:
| If they wanted to, it wouldn't be much work for them to
| provide a stable API for such tools. Mostly it would
| involve making certain functions/properties that are
| internal to their modules/closures available on a global
| object. For Language Reactor, it would be helpful to have a
| handful of stable classes or ids on different HTML
| elements, and an email when major changes are incoming.
| Even just to have access to the new code early on in the
| rollout would be nice. There is a frantic two weeks every
| year where LR is breaking for users and we can't debug,
| because we don't have the new code yet.
| jefftk wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with the WebDriver protocol:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/WebDriver
|
| Works across browsers and lets you simulate the user and
| check anything you want.
| muro wrote:
| Sure, it's technically possible, just very unstable.
| tyingq wrote:
| I think that's true for many things Netflix does, but wrapping
| the seeking event handler for HTMLMediaElement with private
| state specifically to catch unexpected seek events seems like
| it would be known to break 3rd parties. That's fine, of course,
| they aren't claiming to support a public api. But it doesn't
| seem accidental or some oversight.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Any change to frontend behavior will likely break someone at
| Netflix's scale. They are likely desensitized to breaking
| these things, otherwise they would never make any changes.
| tyingq wrote:
| That's roughly what I was saying. It wasn't an oversight or
| accident.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I agree. We ran into this issue all of the time at a past
| employer with a lot of tech enthusiasts in the customer base:
| We'd make harmless changes to our own code that broke someone's
| community software that relied on undocumented APIs from time
| to time. Without fail, someone from the community would jump to
| conclusions and start stirring up controversy with claims that
| we were deliberately breaking 3rd-party applications.
|
| The strange thing was that people from all over the internet
| wanted to get in on the controversy and anger, even when they
| didn't use the software that broke. This created a weird
| incentive for software authors to complain loud and wide about
| any breaking changes because it became free advertising for
| their software. We tried quietly helping some of them fix their
| software with hints, but that quickly became an avenue for
| "<company> caves to pressure from angry customers" stories that
| only made our problem worse.
| devwastaken wrote:
| That's the problem, the company didn't publicly engage with
| their users that needed it. A simple intent to ship with a
| list of changes related to API's is a great start. The
| employees should be using the most popular of the user made
| software. That's how organic communities function. The
| problems occur when company thinks theyre God and their
| software is controllable - it's not. People are going to use
| it as they see fit, and if you don't Shepard it that
| community will find their owns reasons for why the company
| ignores it.
| wdb wrote:
| There is typically a reason when APIs are not documented.
| There are no guarantees given it will keep working etc
| parineum wrote:
| >A simple intent to ship with a list of changes related to
| API's is a great start.
|
| So the controversy can start sooner?
|
| >The problems occur when company thinks theyre God and
| their software is controllable - it's not.
|
| This isn't some github project. This is proprietary
| software owned by Netflix. This isn't "the community"
| getting upset, this is a small group of people using closed
| source software in a way that wasn't intended. Most people
| using Netflix just use it the way Netflix wants them to.
| ssivark wrote:
| Fascinating. I'm curious what were the landscape of MOs
| you/company evaluated. Eg: would it have been possible to
| encourage a slightly more organized relationship with the
| enthusiasts by communicating the challenges to them?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It's tough. I engaged with the community a lot at first and
| we made efforts to give them what they wanted.
|
| Over time this created a weird, unhealthy dynamic where
| parts of the community felt entitled to special treatment
| from the company. Some of them felt like they were
| stakeholders in the company and that we were obligated to
| incorporate them into the development process.
|
| At worst, it reminded me of some of the "parasocial"
| relationships described in social media situations, where
| the followers start to feel like they were owed much more
| than regular customers due to their dedication as super
| customers. Even worse, some of them had their own YouTube
| channels, newsletters, or Discord communities for our
| products and would often threaten to turn them against us
| if we didn't do what they wanted. That part was especially
| saddening.
| ssivark wrote:
| Hmmm, that's interesting in an unfortunate way that can
| only be learned from experience. I have wondered about
| why companies don't better engage with enthusiasts /
| power users, and now I have a better appreciation for the
| challenges. Thanks for sharing.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The cause of the problem here is generally that you didn't
| provide (or adequately document) a reasonable API to do that
| thing.
|
| If you did, and the third party was fishing through your
| internals to do it instead, they're the assholes. That's
| generally more work than reading API documentation so if the
| API exists people are likely to use it, which should make
| this rare.
|
| But if fishing through your internals was the only way to do
| it, maybe change that if your goal is to not hear from so
| many angry people after you move things around.
|
| Expect people to use the undocumented unstable interface if
| the documented stable interface doesn't exist or doesn't
| work.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| But how do you do that with the web? If someone is digging
| into the actual source of the site, that's on them. But
| that doesn't mean our team has time to provide and support
| an API for 3rd parties.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Especially if the service is free, it's not reasonable for
| companies to bend over backwards to build, support, and
| maintain an API. One can expect users to build on
| undocumented and unstable interfaces, but they shouldn't
| expect the care one might receive if they had a contract to
| support that functionality.
| azinman2 wrote:
| You're touching on a wider huge problem for society now:
| people make assumptions that ascribe malice when there is
| none (and/or vastly misunderstand something), and the
| internet lets this amplify and morph into bigger issues than
| should exist.
|
| When social networking was nascent, there was this assumption
| that decentralized voices would help get truth out faster
| than could ever happen, and the principals of democracy would
| flourish. While that sometimes happens, it seems more often
| than not public opinion falls victim to conspiracy theories
| aided by cognitive biases (especially confirmation bias) and
| those who purposefully wish to distort.
|
| What's saddest to me is that I've come to the conclusion that
| the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. We cannot expect
| that technology will go backwards, and the only viable option
| is the China one of absolute information control, which
| itself is scary. Those who do not adopt this will be
| vulnerable to outside control and inside dark forces, and
| those who do will create a censorship authoritarian state.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > We cannot expect that technology will go backwards, and
| the only viable option is the China one of absolute
| information control, which itself is scary.
|
| There is an obviously better alternative, which is non-
| centralized moderation.
|
| This is HN. It's moderated. It's not moderated by a
| government or Mark Zuckerberg and it has no monopoly on the
| dissemination of information, so if you don't like the
| moderation here you can go somewhere else and there are in
| actual fact other places to go.
|
| That works.
|
| The real problem right now is that the biggest platforms
| are too big/centralized, which means you get chokepoints
| that attract hamfisted bureaucratic censorship instead of
| vigorous competition for high quality moderation.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Except it doesn't. It falls victim to all the same
| things. I've seen things posted with all kinds of
| conspiracy theories that I happen to have intimate
| knowledge of from where I've worked, and those theories
| are dead wrong. They're a combination of not knowing
| about public information, not being able to understand it
| (outside of skill set), not bothering to do research
| before stating opinions and amplifying (upvoting) things
| that sound right but are in fact not, incorrectly
| connecting dots that are unrelated, bringing in false
| "facts", stating opinions as facts that others assume are
| then facts, and a host of other issues.
|
| If all you're depending on is others to upvote and
| downvote, then you information bubbles are easy to form.
| Facebook is notoriously bad for exactly this reason, as
| are forums that attract certain demographics /
| ideologies.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1172/
| vertis wrote:
| We could save everyone a lot of time commenting on HN just
| by auto categorizing by XKCD.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| At a previous company we had someone angrily call in with a
| bug. We had moved a button several pixels and this broke some
| automation they had built which relied on the pixel
| coordinates of the button. It was exactly as dumb as it
| sounded.
|
| So I don't see much reason for Netflix have a deprecation
| cycle for undocumented functionality that a third party
| extension relies on. If you want to rely on internals, don't
| be surprised when they change.
| zmj wrote:
| > At a previous company we had someone angrily call in with
| a bug. We had moved a button several pixels and this broke
| some automation they had built which relied on the pixel
| coordinates of the button.
|
| This is part of why Windows doesn't update the old Control
| Panel screens - the UI is the API for automation like this,
| and backwards compatibility matters more than consistency.
| Cyphase wrote:
| I don't find that particularly hard to believe, but do
| you have a reference for this?
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| A slight tangent: I know I'm not the only one who
| considers the old control panels to be far superior to
| the new ones, even if Microsoft disagrees.
|
| The new UIs won't allow you to keep open the Bluetooth
| config panel at the same time as the Windows Update
| config panel, for instance, as they share the One True
| Config Window. You can only view one at a time. A little
| ironic for an operating system named for its ability to
| run multiple UIs at once.
|
| Fortunately many of the old config UIs are still there on
| Windows 10, especially for more advanced points of
| configuration.
|
| I imagine the old UIs are also more resource-efficient,
| for what that's worth, following the usual trend with UI
| toolkits.
| spaceribs wrote:
| I'm specifically trying to avoid a bad integration though,
| the API for <video> is quite clear for how to interact with
| a <video> element hosted on a page, as defined by the HTML5
| spec.
|
| This is the issue I have with this change, I'm following
| all the rules here and those rules apply to every video
| provider on the web for rendering video.
|
| While I don't think it was purposeful, it certainly needs
| to be called out that crashing the entire page is certainly
| nonstandard behavior for a <video> element.
| syshum wrote:
| At my company humans will complain if you move a button
| because most people operate on their own muscle memory, any
| time Microsoft, or some other software vendors moves a
| button, no matter how small, we get ends less complains,
| automation is not needed.
|
| For automation, this is likely because you company did not
| provide proper official API do to proper automation. Many
| companies do not, nexflix does not. So people have to hack
| around internals to make the things do what they want.
|
| I am still at a loose why companies, and devs are such
| control freaks they only want people to use their software
| / hardware in the exact way they want them do, offering no
| other control options, automation API;s or any other
| "power" features". It is their way or the highway... and
| screw you if you do not like it
| x0x0 wrote:
| To give you some perspective from a user:
|
| The GSuite (or whatever they call it these days) google
| groups UI is hot garbage. However, I finally figured out
| how to open a group -- effectively a mailing list -- to
| the public internet. This was carefully documented in our
| internal wiki because, again, UI is hot garbage.
|
| Google has too many PMs, so someone decided to go screw
| with the UI. It is now not much easier, but it is
| different, so I had to spend another hour figuring out
| how to do the same thing. For your "convenience" as a
| customer, the change has invalidated the vast majority of
| help text on the internet helping users work around the
| deficiencies in Google's UI.
|
| And that is why users hate change: the previous UI might
| not have been good, but we'd already figured out how to
| use it. So a change creates work with zero benefit to us.
| syshum wrote:
| Yea, I love Microsoft Documentation [/s]. There has been
| more than a few times I have been trying to do something
| in azure, following the official Microsoft documentation
| which says something like "Click this button, then in the
| submenu choose X" except the button is not there, and the
| submenu has been moved....
| bob1029 wrote:
| > that only made our problem worse.
|
| This is the part of PR that I fail to grasp. At a certain
| point, couldn't you just post "fuck you" on twitter and
| disregard the noisy mess? Would 100% of everyones' customer
| base _actually_ walk away from them if they don 't play "the
| game" on social media just right?
| toast0 wrote:
| Been there. Basically, ignoring twitter and press pretty
| much works. If you have a working customer service
| mechanism, you need to be ready to respond there with a
| brief note of something like 'this use is not supported by
| us, bye', and once you have that note, you _might_ consider
| responding to press with that.
|
| You might want to engage with 3rd party developers, but
| it's clear that it would quickly become much more work than
| supporting in-house clients. When the server team
| unintentionally breaks an in-house client, they don't start
| a big distracting PR war about it; and when an in-house
| client unintentionally breaks the server, there's leverage
| to fix the client (or the server) and insight into how the
| fixed client deployment is going.
|
| It can also be difficult to fix sensitive or just complex
| issues in a coordinated way when there's unequal access as
| happens with in-house and 3rd party development. Being non-
| transparent is easier; although certainly less desirable to
| many.
|
| If you have a compelling product, people often don't follow
| through on their plans to drop it.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| What I'd be afraid of is fake review brigading causing
| lasting damage to brand.
| SahAssar wrote:
| I tag those commits with "spacebar heating":
| https://xkcd.com/1172/
| nindalf wrote:
| Comment sections are no fun if we're going to assume good
| intent of people we don't know. I suggest we ignore this
| reasonable explanation and start a frenzied campaign against
| this obviously malicious change.
| margaretdouglas wrote:
| I feel like I'd find this comment more humorous if it wasn't
| a parody of what is actually happening.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It probably wasn 't intentional, just incidental._
|
| The reason people assume intent is because such things often
| enough _are_ intentional. Making your product harder to
| interoperate with outside of your control is a well-established
| practice for SaaS companies, particularly the big ones[0].
|
| The reason this blog post has a story is not because this
| behavior is surprising, but because it's annoying, and because
| it can be construed as an accessibility issue - accessibility
| being the only excuse for having sane computing experience that
| won't be dismissed as "silly power users with their silly
| wishes".
|
| --
|
| [0] - See e.g. the lengths to which Facebook goes to make it
| hard to work with its DOM.
| Secretmapper wrote:
| To be fair, Facebook has very deep incentives to do this (ie.
| to prevent adblocking)
|
| I'm not sure what such incentive is here for Netflix
| spaceribs wrote:
| I actually tend to agree with this take honestly. If I was an
| Architect over at netflix implementing QoE, and all my minions
| were making calls directly to the html element for seeking
| instead of using the API I created, I'd want to catch that
| regression quickly too.
|
| That said, there is no public API for that functionality beyond
| the DOM element for anyone else, so I'm not sure what was
| expected for any sort of integration.
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