Hackszine.com: NetFlix Archives

Archive: NetFlix

August 7, 2007

Rip Netflix "Watch Now" movies

Netflix's "Watch Now" feature is really a great idea poorly implemented. DRM-laden and viewable only on XP service pack 2 or Vista, your viewing experience is limited to that crappy laptop you keep hidden in the closet. You know which one I mean - it came out of the box with more stickers on it than a red delicious apple (the irony!), took 3 hours to boot the first time, and you use it for testing websites in IE. It's okay, we all have one.

There must be a better way to "Watch Now."

Turns out, if you can handle scanning through a little HTML source, you can download the highest bitrate version of a film, strip off the DRM with a handy utility called FairUse4WM, and then transcode it with Flip4Mac, VLC, or whatever your preference. You still need to do the DRM stripping on your XP or Vista PC, but when you're done with it, you'll have the ability to Watch Anywhere.

Resources:
How to rip Netflix "Watch Now" movies - [via] Link
FairUser4WM - Link

March 16, 2007

NetFlix Hearts Hackers

Netflix Queue

Yesterday's Wired News article on the Rise of the Netflix Hackers suggests that "Netflix claims to appreciate the work of hackers." The emphasis in the quote is mine, because the implied skepticism strikes me as a little disingenuous, based on the content of the rest of the article, including this bit, which I see as pretty strong evidence to support Netflix's "claim":

"We have some fanatical followers out there, and we're open to their feedback," Swasey says, "especially if it helps us improve the service." As proof of this, he cites the Netflix prize, which will award $1 million to whoever can come up with an algorithm that improves the effectiveness of the company's movie recommendation engine by 10 percent. To give contestants something to work with, the company released an anonymized dataset of 100 million movie rankings from half-a-million NetFlix subscribers, scrubbed of personally identifying information.

Obviously, Netflix doesn't appreciate what they might see as stealing (such as the person who claims to have cracked the beta Watch Now feature to get unlimited downloads of free movies with the service), but the majority of hacking done by this "ingenious subset of the Netflix subscriber base" doesn't have such questionable goals. Though Netflix might be a little caught off guard when hackers reveal their secret "throttling" technique (which delivers high-demand movies more quickly to new and infrequent users) and use this information to manipulate their queuing system, they seem to recognize that these hacks drive them to innovate and make the service better.

So, if you've got a good (in both senses of the word) Netflix hack, we'd love to hear it. Netflix might not be comfortable hearing it, but they appear to be smart enough to realize that they'll benefit by being pushed beyond their comfort zone.

(via Hacking NetFlix)

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January 25, 2007

NetFlix "Instant Watching" in Firefox

NetFlix Instant Watching in Firefox.jpg

For all lucky NetFlix users who see the "Watch Now" tab at NetFlix.com (indicating early access to the new Instant Watching feature) but are disappointed that the feature is IE only, Hacking NetFlix has uncovered a fix for watching NetFlix streaming movies within Firefox:

Install the IE Tab Add-on, and in the IE Tab options (Tools menu, IE Tab Options) add "http://www.netflix.com" to the sites filter.

As noted at the end of the post, all we need now is a hack for Mac support (actually, more of us still need the Instant Watching feature too). ... Well, anyone?

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