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Netflix's new player breaks the ability to modify the seeking of a playing video

319 points by spaceribs 5y ago

Shorel 5y ago
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.
jstsch 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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.
  - arpa 5y ago
    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.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    You’re aware that is what people actually want though.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
    - toxik 5y ago
      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.
- btown 5y ago
  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-tool-on-the-web/ 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 5y ago
  Even the website this post links to just displays a blank page for me, with JavaScript disabled.
pjmlp 5y ago
The Web is just one decade away (tops) of being a synonym for ChromeOS runtime anyway.
- arpa 5y ago
  and that spells the end of personal computing.
- bob1029 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
    - bob1029 5y ago
      What do you propose we do to fix this problem?
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        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
    - renke1 5y ago
      While I agree in general, no one is stopping Mozilla from creating a viable alternative to Electron that's based on open standards exclusively.
gfodor 5y ago
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 5y ago
  "Almost there". Silverlight was not working in Linux afaik.
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    For different values of "not working", there was Moonlight: https://www.mono-project.com/docs/web/moonlight/ https://www.mono-project.com/docs/web/moonlight/
speeder 5y ago
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?
- smolder 5y ago
  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.
- dgan 5y ago
  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 5y ago
londons_explore 5y ago
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 5y ago
  This could be step 1 of ad-supported Netflix. Create the infrastructure to keep you from skipping embedded ads.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    Manually seeking works in Netflix and in ad video like YouTube and Hulu. Automated seeking uses the same APIs unless bugs.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    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).
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    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.
sergiotapia 5y ago
Do engineers on these teams not voice their concerns and refuse to do stuff like this that actively hurts the web?
- deadbunny 5y ago
  What incentive do they have? Some good feels don't compare to that sweet remuneration package.
- scrose 5y ago
  For every engineer that says no, there’s thousands of other engineers willing to do whatever’s asked for $400k+/year
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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.
IceDane 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
      - f1refly 5y ago
        this is mostly not about what's just been released this moment, but what's been licensed at the moment. i think the catalogue is rotating frequently and you cannot count on the movie you want to watch being there in a week, but it might reappear anytime again after the license was dropped. i dont give streaming platforms my money, but my brother complains about it a lot.
pickledcods 5y ago
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.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Already the case with proprietary banking apps..
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- arpa 5y ago
  RMS was right all along.
  - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    "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 https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
_cxgq 5y ago
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/WGk8dBS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pHSFsCb.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pHSFsCb.jpg
- spaceribs 5y ago
  Thank you, I did this blog post rather quickly :( Edit: updated the images, thanks again
  - _cxgq 5y ago
    You're welcome, have a great day friend.
- m_a_g 5y ago
  I love the HN community.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Idea: a simple service that takes a URL and discovers stuff like this and spits out optimizations.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    Solution: This already exists, Google Lighthouse is one (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse) but many non-Google alternatives exists too (https://alternativeto.net/software/google-lighthouse/ https://alternativeto.net/software/google-lighthouse/)
kissickas 5y ago
Ironic from a website that requires me to allow javascript to run before I can read a text-and-image blog post.
- ajdude 5y ago
  Came here to say that.
mankyd 5y ago
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 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.
- arpa 5y ago
  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).
  - andreareina 5y ago
    At a certain point (size of org, number of incidents) you decide that mere stupidity is not an adequate explanation. It doesn't have to rise to the level of actual malice, but willful negligence is on the table.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  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.
gedy 5y ago
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!
Causality1 5y ago
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?
- genewitch 5y ago
  Netflix won't even let you change which account "owns" the account - my daughter was very young when we first got Netflix, and there was multi user (or whatever tablet she used didn't support it) so my account was full of children's videos. Once Netflix added multi user, I renamed the first user to her name and made myself a new name same as the old name. If I want to look at DVD queues (hah) I have to be on her user to do so. I'm actually surprised how easily everyone forgave them for the bait and switch they pulled that essentially put brick and mortar video rental places out of business, though.
fitzsim 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    The percentage of visitors with extensions like Plopdown likely doesn't make it worth for Netflix to spend time handling this nonstandard. ;)
    - krono 5y ago
      The ability to seek is the standard so you've got things turned around I'm afraid :)
      - MarcellusDrum 5y ago
        But it's their site therefore their choice.
        krono 5y ago
        Yes I believe so. Having said that, if I had a Netflix sub I would seriously have considered canceling over this.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
snthd 5y ago
Does the inability to jump to a timestamp adversely affect blind users?
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spaceribs 5y ago
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.
seanwilson 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Have you tried space to pause?
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  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-html5-video-on-an-event 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.
elcomet 5y ago
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
technogeek00 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
cnfernandes 5y ago
Does this apply to Netflix Party (or Teleparty)
cnfernandes 5y ago
Is Netflix party / Teleparty now broken?
standardUser 5y ago
"When seeking the video to annotations in the plopdown timeline" There has to be a way to phrase this that is comprehensible by humans.
amelius 5y ago
Back to torrents then.
blockarchitech 5y ago
Sometimes people bash companies for stupid reasons when they make mistakes. This guy in the other hand, dives deep in why, how, and more. I like this guy.

319 points by spaceribs 5y ago

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.

jstsch 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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.
- arpa 5y ago
  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.
- selectodude 5y ago
  You’re aware that is what people actually want though.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
  - toxik 5y ago
    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.
btown 5y ago
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-tool-on-the-web/ 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 5y ago
Even the website this post links to just displays a blank page for me, with JavaScript disabled.

pjmlp 5y ago

The Web is just one decade away (tops) of being a synonym for ChromeOS runtime anyway.

arpa 5y ago
and that spells the end of personal computing.
bob1029 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    What do you propose we do to fix this problem?
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      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
  - renke1 5y ago
    While I agree in general, no one is stopping Mozilla from creating a viable alternative to Electron that's based on open standards exclusively.

gfodor 5y ago

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 5y ago
"Almost there". Silverlight was not working in Linux afaik.
- rzzzt 5y ago
  For different values of "not working", there was Moonlight: https://www.mono-project.com/docs/web/moonlight/ https://www.mono-project.com/docs/web/moonlight/

speeder 5y ago

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?

smolder 5y ago
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.
dgan 5y ago
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 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago

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 5y ago
This could be step 1 of ad-supported Netflix. Create the infrastructure to keep you from skipping embedded ads.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Manually seeking works in Netflix and in ad video like YouTube and Hulu. Automated seeking uses the same APIs unless bugs.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  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).
- tomjen3 5y ago
  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.

sergiotapia 5y ago

Do engineers on these teams not voice their concerns and refuse to do stuff like this that actively hurts the web?

deadbunny 5y ago
What incentive do they have? Some good feels don't compare to that sweet remuneration package.
scrose 5y ago
For every engineer that says no, there’s thousands of other engineers willing to do whatever’s asked for $400k+/year
MattGaiser 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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.

IceDane 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
    - f1refly 5y ago
      this is mostly not about what's just been released this moment, but what's been licensed at the moment. i think the catalogue is rotating frequently and you cannot count on the movie you want to watch being there in a week, but it might reappear anytime again after the license was dropped. i dont give streaming platforms my money, but my brother complains about it a lot.

pickledcods 5y ago

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.

foxfluff 5y ago
Already the case with proprietary banking apps..
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
arpa 5y ago
RMS was right all along.
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  "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 https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
- mhh__ 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.

_cxgq 5y ago

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/WGk8dBS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pHSFsCb.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pHSFsCb.jpg

spaceribs 5y ago
Thank you, I did this blog post rather quickly :( Edit: updated the images, thanks again
- _cxgq 5y ago
  You're welcome, have a great day friend.
m_a_g 5y ago
I love the HN community.
Waterluvian 5y ago
Idea: a simple service that takes a URL and discovers stuff like this and spits out optimizations.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  Solution: This already exists, Google Lighthouse is one (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse) but many non-Google alternatives exists too (https://alternativeto.net/software/google-lighthouse/ https://alternativeto.net/software/google-lighthouse/)

kissickas 5y ago

Ironic from a website that requires me to allow javascript to run before I can read a text-and-image blog post.

ajdude 5y ago
Came here to say that.

mankyd 5y ago

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 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.

arpa 5y ago
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).
- andreareina 5y ago
  At a certain point (size of org, number of incidents) you decide that mere stupidity is not an adequate explanation. It doesn't have to rise to the level of actual malice, but willful negligence is on the table.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
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.

gedy 5y ago

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!

Causality1 5y ago

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?

genewitch 5y ago
Netflix won't even let you change which account "owns" the account - my daughter was very young when we first got Netflix, and there was multi user (or whatever tablet she used didn't support it) so my account was full of children's videos. Once Netflix added multi user, I renamed the first user to her name and made myself a new name same as the old name. If I want to look at DVD queues (hah) I have to be on her user to do so. I'm actually surprised how easily everyone forgave them for the bait and switch they pulled that essentially put brick and mortar video rental places out of business, though.

fitzsim 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  The percentage of visitors with extensions like Plopdown likely doesn't make it worth for Netflix to spend time handling this nonstandard. ;)
  - krono 5y ago
    The ability to seek is the standard so you've got things turned around I'm afraid :)
    - MarcellusDrum 5y ago
      But it's their site therefore their choice.
      - krono 5y ago
        Yes I believe so. Having said that, if I had a Netflix sub I would seriously have considered canceling over this.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

snthd 5y ago

Does the inability to jump to a timestamp adversely affect blind users?

bastawhiz 5y ago
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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spaceribs 5y ago

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.

seanwilson 5y ago

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 5y ago
Have you tried space to pause?
mkr-hn 5y ago
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-html5-video-on-an-event 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.

elcomet 5y ago

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

technogeek00 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

cnfernandes 5y ago

Does this apply to Netflix Party (or Teleparty)

cnfernandes 5y ago

Is Netflix party / Teleparty now broken?

standardUser 5y ago

"When seeking the video to annotations in the plopdown timeline" There has to be a way to phrase this that is comprehensible by humans.

amelius 5y ago

Back to torrents then.

blockarchitech 5y ago

Sometimes people bash companies for stupid reasons when they make mistakes. This guy in the other hand, dives deep in why, how, and more. I like this guy.