hi

I read rumors that netflix will move from silverlight to html5 in August. If this is so, will linux be able to play these streaming videos without any special plug-ins?

Second question, will all operating systems be supported at the same time to play netflix with html5, or will windows and Mac be the first and linux last?

i didnt know a date on neflix moving to html 5 but i did know they were. html 5 is an open format AND the reason netflix is doing it is so it is so it is on a universal format and thus widely compatible, it should be fully compatible on linux right away unless they release some kind of program that limits it in some way. but even if they did do this, it is fairly likely that wine could incorporate it into their project.

while i cant speak for netflix, i do believe there is no reason why netflix wouldnt be able to be played on linux after the html5 switch as they are trying to get in as many users as they can.

Mozilla is adding support for HTML5 DRM to Firefox. The idea is for Firefox to be able to play Netflix without any plugins, and the launch platforms will be Windows, Mac and Linux. As you can see from the tracker entry, there is no way that it's going to be ready by August.

Here are (AFAIK) Mozilla's most recent press releases about it:

• Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME
• DRM and the Challenge of Serving Users

It seems like DRM is bad for linux and opensource according to this article
http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201406/page03.html

It's... controversial. The reality is, however, that if you want native Netflix support, then DRM is the asking price.

The only part of the article above that I'd quibble with is this:

The article came out a month before Mozilla announced that this would not be the case. I'll let you follow the links that I posted about the actual implementation.

Suffice to say that they're not including the DRM module (which will not be written by Mozilla) with the browser download, and they're going to treat it as inherently hostile and use a scheme akin to running known malware in a VM.