They will simply cover up their shady practices by saying "it was for codec checking" whereas they are also crippling the experience for Linux users.
Given that there are some very talented programmers out there who know what they are exactly doing, it's hard to believe that it's incompetence.
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand, https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
Random Web Front End Developer is not frequently going to be that person. And Person Who Managed All The Media Encodings is probably not likely to be working on the web front end.
Most likely scenario is the front end dev will get a chunk of JSON from the media encoding dev describing the media, and then be left to their own devices to figure out how to translate that into something the Media Capabilities API will understand.
Consistent results across browsers is also really difficult to achieve. Chrome in particular is super pedantic about the content type field. Firefox sometimes ignores parts of the content type field. It's nuts.
It's an especially awful argument when switching the user-agent makes the problem disappear.
"Forgive the multi-billion dollar conglomerate with a vested interest in user capture; they probably just don't employ the proper people" is a very weak argument on something like this.
I mean, Apple makes even more money than MS, and they don't seem to know the first thing about online media codecs and cross-platform API sniffing. So... yes? Even as someone who uses Linux as their daily-driver, there's pretty much no way for me to get mad at Microsoft for what's pretty obviously a mistake (and not even a serious one at that). Microsoft is a hostile company, but that's not a reason to make their molehills into mountains for them. I seriously doubt a any of the outraged commentors on this page are typing their comment from a real Linux box anyways. They're more incensed by the opportunity to hate Microsoft than they are by the actual problem.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, you need to know what the exact content type is for your media, both container and codec. With video, you also need to check the audio at the same time. And there isn't any documentation on the exact format that it's expecting.
It's a gigantic mess. You can't just give it a media stream and ask it "can you play this". It's often easier to just attempt to play the media and wait to see if it errors (which it can still do after even a few frames of playback succeed).
If the rumors about timed exclusives for the new Bethesda games are true, too, they’ll have lost all goodwill.
Oh, I need a link for that. definitely not a fan of their java changes, but I haven't heard about them trying to force users to use bedrock.
Who exactly are they losing goodwill from?
This behavior is normal in the console market, but not common in the PC market at all.
"X sucks too!" is very rarely any kind of a defense at all. What does that have to do with Microsoft's behavior?
If you excuse bad behavior because there's a WhatAbout distraction, no criticism of anything will ever be valid.
I'm not sure Microsoft is deliberately making things worse for Linux users, either, but the fact that a better implementation is both possible and straightforward enough suggests that cross-platform performance is not quite the priority that marketing materials make it out to be. We're not talking rocket science here. If this is indeed not specifically about Linux, then either Xbox Cloud's code review practices are at best questionable, or the paradigm that best describes their approach to client-side performance is #yolo.
Also remember that Xcloud is still beta, with a feedback form after every session, and probably some telemetry. While it would technically not be rocket science to detect codecs, I'm more inclined to think that this is a blanket denylist because enough reports have come up and showed that using better codecs/higher quality produced a subpar experience even though codecs are reported as supported (which might come from a zillion reasons such as codecs falling back to software decoding, or underpowered hardware, and both could be true for PC, Chromebooks, and Android).
The game streaming use case seems to be very different from general purpose video streaming: it's realtime, is not efficiently compressed (due to the realtime nature + tight latency budgets during encoding), and changes rapidly unlike the main other use of realtime video streaming (video calls). So if software decoding is fine for watching Netflix or making a Zoom call, this is different.
Browsers have APIs for detecting codec support, but I don't think there's anything for detecting hardware accelerated video decoding. But given Chrome on Linux doesn't support this on any hardware, it's a pretty decent heuristic.
My guess is that they are just lazily using User-agent as a proxy for codec detection. I don't think there is a reason to jump to a malicious intent here (even with existing priors).
Linux often doesn’t come with non-free codecs installed, these are often optional extras, even if many people install them.