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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."
If they do not want my OS, they do not want my money... I mean it is nice that it can work, but I am not signing up yet.
Because no matter how strongly they state that a configuration is not supported, if it's not expressly blocked, people will try to get technical support for it. And with the distro landscape as it is, supporting mainstream software on "Linux" is a nightmare.
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
I used to be a long term NF user (the mail dvd's, that is) but the service started getting slow (mailings were not as fast as before) and many titles were dropped (not NF's fault, but I still had less choice).
TPB does what I need and there's never a problem with compatibility ;)
sorry, entertainment industry, but I gave up on you. for decades (quite a few of them) I helped fund your overpriced shite. that has now ended.
my cost is that of a VPN and that's it. and so, I'm 'there' until things drastically change, and I don't see that happening even in my lifetime.
so, even though linux is now 'working', I could actually care less. too little, too late.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So exactly how much less could you actually care then?
Desktop is over. Everything is now tablet, and a few years ago was "The Year Of Linux On The Tablet," or Android anyway...
(Slight sarcasm alert)
A Linux user calling tech support...that's rich.
If it is browser based, is it really THAT hard to "support"?
Yes. I have actually done phone support, and you would not believe how dumb some people are. Many will call for support before they even turn their computer on. They want someone to babysit them through the entire process before they even try to do it themselves. The only way to deal with these people cost effectively, is to hire a bunch of Indians or Filipinos, and have them walk the users through a canned script. Once you start throwing in additional variables, and Linux has a lot of variables, then the complexity of the script increases exponentially. Pretty soon, you end up having to hire expensive tech support people that are actually capable of thinking and troubleshooting. Why should Netflix do that for an extra 1% in sales?
To the same kind of people who consider a lottery ticket an investment.
Oh, I've heard Linux users calling tech support all sort of things. Most of them not suitable for polite conversation, but still...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That means you do care, at least a little.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I also think "I could care less" is dumb. I just wanted to point out how zero is not always the lower limit, because obviously this is an important topic to many a Slashdotter.
Frankly, if you mean "I don't care", then by all means say so, there's no need to put it in any fancier terms. Especially when you get it wrong, which is what frequently occurs whilst endeavouring to overliteralize, perchance even hypercorrect matters.
Of course, if you actually say "I don't care about $x", there's still a non-zero level of caring. If you genuinely don't care, you won't even think about it, you just walk away.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
He's really not. Right now, for example, he mostly works on a Chromebook. At least that's what he's usually on when I see him working in the kitchen*.
(I work at Netflix)
* Reed doesn't have an office / cubicle / set location, so he tends to work either in a common area or in a random conference room until you kick him out because you reserved the room
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!