Slashdot Mirror
Netflix Now Works On Linux With HTML5 DRM Video Support In Chrome
An anonymous reader writes "Beginning with the Chrome 38 Beta it's now possible to watch Netflix without any Wine/Silverlight plug-ins but will work natively using Chrome's DRM-HTML5 video capabilities with Netflix. The steps just involve using the latest beta of Chrome and an HTTP user-agent switcher to tell Netflix you're a Windows Chrome user, due to Netflix arbitrarily blocking the Linux build."
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, was also on the Board of Directors for Microsoft from 2007 through 2012.
So yes, they can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Hastings
From the replies on the linked blog post, people are having distro-specific successes / failures even after following the instructions. I can imagine this being anything from distro specific paths, to permissions on certain binaries that could be different for say, Fedora from Mint, to codec issues (though as I understand it with Chrome the codecs are all basically wrapped up in the binary?) The specific technical details of this situation are a bit out of my area of expertise but I don't think any of the things I guess at here are out of the realm of possibility.
Technical issues aside - I welcome this development. I know and understand completely that a lot of people have issues with DRM making it's way into the core HTML (5) specs, but I kind of see it as unavoidable if we want to enjoy commercial content without needing completely non-standard garbageware like Silverlight or Flash. I have used Netflix with the Compholio Wine / Pipelight stuff, and while it works, it struggles to do so.
Yeah, there is a slippery slope and lots of compromise - but I would have less reason to ever boot into Windows if my paid subscriptions to content that I enjoy could work natively under "Linux". And just don't ask me to stop watching movies or playing 3xA game titles, because I won't.
He also was CEO of Pure Software. The guys who did the Purify malloc debugging tool for UNIX. Being in the board of directors does not mean much.
Right click on video player, "Save video as...", then when the Save dialog comes up, where it says "File type" switch from ".drm" to ".mp4".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I was able to get this working using the instructions in the original post - with the following changes:
I first tried with Debian stable. The google-chrome-unstable deb installs OK, but I couldn't get the video to play. /var/lib/libvirt/images/siddy.img -cpu kvm64,+nx -enable-kvm -m 1536 -soundhw hda -usb
I saw posts that it might work with sid. So I cooked up a sid vm.
My default NAT network was disabled, I found some instructions to re-enable it.
Once I had a sid vm, I found that there was no sound. I set it to ac97 in virt-manager but ended up abandoning virt-manager and using this command line
sudo qemu-system-x86_64
Once I had sound and networking going, I installed the google-chrome-unstable deb in the VM. Then I found the user-agent extension and installed that. I created a user-agent using EXACTLY the string given in the original post...
And now I'm watching a netflix movie.
Right now I have the chrome in the VM displaying to a Xephyr window in the host environment, will be interested to see if there is a better way.
And it's true we should not have to do crap like this to use our netflix accounts!