An Inside Look At How Netflix Builds Code (sdtimes.com) 48
mmoorebz writes: Netflix is known as a place to binge watch television, but behind the scenes, there's a lot that goes on before everyone's favorite show can be streamed. The first step to deploying an application or service is building. Netflix created Nebula, a set of plugins for the Gradle build system, that "help with the heavy-lifting around building applications," said the engineers. Once the code has been built and tested locally using Nebula, the team pushes the updated source code to a Git repository. Every deployment at Neflix begins with the creation of an Amazon Machine Image, and to generate them from source, Netflix created what it calls "the Bakery." It exposes an API that facilitates the creation of AMIs globally, according to the blog. When it comes time to deploy and after the "baking" is complete, teams will use Spinnaker to manage multi-region deployments, canary releases, and red/black deployments. Netflix is continuing to look at the developer experience and determine how it can improve.
Netflix: It would be very helpful... (Score:5, Interesting)
...if you even BOTHERED to look at your Streaming GUI from a customers' perspective. Difficult to find anything, hard to stop and backup, or skip forward. It's as if you threw it together at a drunken party. I love to watch the content, but getting there and being able to control the experience is at about the Windows 3.1 level of design.
THEN brag about your production build process as something that turns a great user experience into code that delivers it!
Re:Netflix: It would be very helpful... (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome to the new apps age, where options are too complicated for the stupid sheeple.
Multi windows systems? Too complicated, we need gnome 3!
Email? Too complicated, we need Whatsapp!
IRC? Too complicated, we need Slack!
Middle mouse equals paste for wayland? Too complicated, we don't need a paste buffer!
Re:Netflix: It would be very helpful... (Score:4, Funny)
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It supports the ctrl+v/ctrl+c buffer, but there is no support for a middle click paste buffer that's refreshed when selecting text.
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I just say that they currently don't have it. Perhaps they will, in the future. Perhaps they won't.
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Well... it doesn't have three disjoint paste buffers.
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Ditto. I prefer the old stuff. Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!
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Email? Too complicated, we need Whatsapp!
IRC? Too complicated, we need Slack!
To be fair, both Whatsapp and Slack aren't just simpler alternatives to e-mail and IRC. They offer different substantially different features.
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It seems that they can't be bothered with QA testing their client releases as well. For a few weeks, I recently had a Netflix client on my XBox One that didn't work with my remote control. I had to power on the XBox game controller and use it to navigate the menu! They eventually offered an application patch for that, but what the hell, guys?
Instead of investing millions on automated tests, maybe they should invest $50 in a Harmony remote that works with an XBox One and have someone test with it before sign
Succeding, according to their incentives (Score:2)
Viewers value the amount of time they get to spend watching things. Suppliers charge by the number of times a stream is started and by the popularity of the streamed work. Therefore, Netflix is incentivized to get you to watch any random thing the whole way through then start you on the next random thing.
What you are complaining about are deliberate choices which show that Netflix is successfully responding to their incentives.
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Suppliers charge by the number of times a stream is started and by the popularity of the streamed work.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that most content is contracted on flat fixed fee basis. Here's an example contract (PDF, Wikileaks) between Columbia Pictures (Sony) and Netflix for a package of content. All flat fixed fee with incremental increases. Nothing based on the number of times streamed.
https://wikileaks.org/sony/doc... [wikileaks.org]
Perhaps other content is contracted by the number of times streamed but you gotta show evidence.
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The windows 10 app has been a clusterfuck. For months the remote control worked, but video would freeze but audio would continue and then video would play catchup a few seconds later.
Finally they released an update that fixed that.
But the remote control doesn't work. Can't even play/pause with it right now.
It used to launch full screen, now it launches windowed, every single time. That wouldn't be so bad except you can't put it into full screen until AFTER something is streaming; not while you are browsing
Bad browsing feels intentional (Score:2)
I believe the obfuscated browsing is intentional on their part, designed to mask the limited content available and somehow make it seem as if there is more content than there really is.
I seem to recall when they first started streaming, there were better search options but it often returned basically null results. I think that plus the initial rise of complaints about how little content there was actually available for streaming have led them to "refine" the user interface to make it seem if there was more
Why does every HD stream start with crappy res (Score:2)
Whenever I start a Netflix show the first 5 minutes or so are crap resolution. But by the end of the show it's fine. I generally see that it's streamming at about 2.5Mb/sec both at the start and at the end. I have a 20mb/sec connection that actually speed tests well, I have three different wifi routers, and three unrelated devices that can show movies (not at the same time).
Netflix tells me they think it's my routers. Yet amazon streaming works fine. What can I do to answer this?
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I wouldn't call the Netflix UI great but I have no problem with the basics that you slagged them about. Using keyboard shortcuts makes stopping/starting (spacebar), skipping backward/forward (left/right cursor keys) very easy.
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Works on my fedora machine. Was a bitch to get it to work properly (pipelight etc), only manage to do it on FF and the behavior isn't as smooth as on Windows when I resize or fast-forward but it works.
BTW season 4 of House of cards is awesome.
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You don't have to use pipelight any more if you're willing to install Chrome (not Chromium) and watch Netflix with it. See my other comment [slashdot.org]
I don't use Chrome for anything else, so I set it up to treat Netflix like an html web-app and just run it fullscreen at launch. Gives a pretty good experience, actually.
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Chrome (not Chromium)
Or for the Chrome adverse, Chromium + Chromium-Widevine. Chrome simply has Widevine baked in.
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I haven't looked in years, but when they were coming out with streaming video, for some idiotic reason they refused to use any form of standards, so their service didn't work on Linux machines (I don't count heroics like windows VMs or whatever).
Has that changed? Can I subscribe to Netflix streaming and just, you know... watch the stuff on my computer now?
If you're willing to use Chrome (not Chromium), sure, it works just fine in Linux. Fuck you if you're using Chromium, Firefox, or anything else though... proper Chrome is the only one that supports whatever DRM bullshit Netflix uses. I think it's related to that Encrypted Media Extensions thing.
Still, though, it does work natively on Linux and has for about a year and a half now.
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No, your niche OS isn't supported. You'll just have to live with watching it on your Blu-ray player, smartphone, game console, or smart-TV.
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I think they don't allow it on purpose. They won't even say how many movies they got.
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once i took the initiative to count, and the best I could narrow it down to was "greater than ten". I had limited time.
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I don't think it is in Netflix's interest to give you just any ol' sort.
Instant Watcher is one of the few third party sites that still has access to the Netflix content API. You can sort by most anything.
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Using the website interface on my vista box right now. At the top right is a "sort by" drop list with 5 options, two of which are alphabetical listings(A-Z and Z-A).
Drop the app and try it on a browser sometime.
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You're conflating the product with the process used to produce it. In fact, those two things are pretty much orthogonal.
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Wish (Score:1)
I must be an oldfart (Score:2)