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Netflix Now Works On Linux With HTML5 DRM Video Support In Chrome

Posted by timothy on from the better-than-impossible dept.

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."

2 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  2. working in Debian Sid VM by jtotheh · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    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 /var/lib/libvirt/images/siddy.img -cpu kvm64,+nx -enable-kvm -m 1536 -soundhw hda -usb

    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!