It’s probably part of the growing pains of the new service.įinally, a word on the variety of videos available on Instant Watching. On several videos-mostly TV series from the BBC-I was confronted with a “Media Initialization Error 8051” rather than an actual video. There are still a few bugs in the service.īeyond full-screen mode, there are some other quirks that Netflix still needs to work out of the service. You can slide the controller on the progress bar to skip to any part of the video, which begins to play again after a brief pause for buffering. The Netflix player window is simple, with a play/pause button, a progress bar, volume controls, and a Full Screen button, as well as a Back to Browsing button that returns to you where you were before you pressed Play. After a few seconds of buffering time, my selected video began playing without a hitch. A progress bar showed that the player was calibrating itself using my Internet connection, determining the bit rate that my connection could bear and adjusting the quality of my requested video accordingly. The Netflix Instant Watching progress bar.After I clicked the Play button, Safari loaded a new page with a black background and the traditional “red envelope” stylings of Netflix. (Netflix says that there are about 12,000 videos available for Instant Watching today. In order to start watching a video, you just click on the Play button, which is found on individual video pages as well as next to each item in your Instant Queue. What I can say is, playing back Netflix videos on my Mac using Silverlight was effortless. I can’t say whether that was a typical experience or one that was complicated by the fact that I was actually on a Mac running Windows in a virtual machine. I had to approve the downloading of various media keys in order to avoid an error screen that said I had no approval to play back videos. When I tried to use Instant Watching on Windows last year, it was a frustrating experience. So I was excited to finally get a chance to play videos within the happy confines of my Mac’s web browser, natively. I already own a Roku Netflix Player, and last summer I spent some time attempting-with limited success-to watch videos using Instant Watching via Windows XP in Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp. Though the roll-out of Instant Watching to Mac users is happening gradually (a post on Netflix’s blog says that the update is currently available for ”Ī small percentage of new Netflix members“), I contacted Netflix and was able to have them add it to my account for the purposes of this article. Rolling out support for Instant Watching to the Mac. This summer, the company began working with hardware companies to embed Netflix Instant Watching in set-top devices such as the With Apple and Microsoft supporting its plugin-free vision, Netflix’s next target is most likely Google and its massively popular Chrome browser, as well as the still-popular Firefox browser from Mozilla.In January 2007, Netflix brought the ability to watch a limited number of its catalog of movies and TV shows to users of Windows-based PCs-all for free, as a part of an existing Netflix subscription. The media source extensions keep the video pipeline optimized the encrypted media extensions protect the content so pirates can’t rip it off Netflix and the Web Cryptography API enables Netflix to encrypt and decrypt information between its JavaScript app and its servers. Netflix was able to make the switch on Mac, it says, because Apple implemented the three HTML5 Premium Video Extensions in Safari on OS X Yosemite, like Microsoft did last year for IE11. Last year, Netflix switched from Silverlight to HTML5 video in Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1. The rest of us will have to wait until the Yosemite public beta launches this summer. OS X Yosemite is already available to Mac Developer Program members, who can boot up Safari and watch HTML5 videos on Netflix starting today. Netflix says a MacBook Air streaming 1080p Netflix content using HTML5 will last two hours longer than it would with Silverlight. On laptops, that means longer battery life. By switching over to HTML5, Netflix majorly reduces the CPU load required to stream video.
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