10

I recently installed Fedora 14 on my home PC so I have a dual boot system running windows and linux. I probably would primarily use Linux on that machine as its older and Linux manages its resources MUCH better than Windows does, BUT I'm a bit of a Netflix junky and from what I've read there isn't currently a solution that allows for Netflix to work on Linux. Evidently Moonlight (which as I understand is supposed to be like silverlight) is missing a key piece of functionality. So is there really no solution?

Improve this question
6
  • Hmm... I'm starting to think there might not be a solution... :/
    – Kenneth
    Mar 12, 2011 at 9:03
  • In general any service employing DRM won't work on Linux.
    – Šimon Tóth
    Mar 12, 2011 at 11:03
  • Is there a reason for this? Perhaps a solution pending?
    – Kenneth
    Mar 12, 2011 at 16:51
  • There are several different reasons. Licensing (GPL directly forbids most types of DRM), patenting (alternative implementations can't be created), NDA (even if the DRM technology isn't patented and there aren't licensing issues, you will have to sign an NDA which is of course incompatible with creating an open source implementation).
    – Šimon Tóth
    Mar 12, 2011 at 17:13
  • So most likely there will never by a way to make it work then... :( And I'm guessing the only work around would be to use Wine or something like that... but then that defeats one of the big purposes of being on Linux. Oh well... dual boot it is! lol
    – Kenneth
    Mar 12, 2011 at 18:18

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
2

From what I understand, the only way you can reliably watch netflix is through a virtual machine running Windows. At this point, playing natively in Linux is not supported.

Improve this answer
1
  • It's great to see (judging by the recent comments made here) that this problem has been solved since I wrote this comment in 2011, and that there are now ways to run Netflix on Linux.
    – J. Taylor
    Oct 17, 2014 at 6:55
2

With Microsoft abandoning Silverlight, Netflix has made strong efforts to switch their video delivery software to HTML5. An HTML5 video player does not need a browser plugin like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight to work. However, in order to stream videos, Netflix requires their delivered content to remain secure. This is achieved in HTML5 via a browser plugin known as Network Security Service. Finally both of these components are mature enough.

If you use Chrome version 37 or later and have nss-3.16.2 or greater, streaming videos on Netflix should work out-of-the-box on any Linux distribution.

Improve this answer
1

there is an easy way to install netflix now. How to install Netflix on Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install netflix-desktop
Improve this answer
0

The answers to your questions are here: http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/netflix-on-ubuntu-is-here.html By adding a ppa you can get a special blend of wine and firefox that will run the netflix videoplayer (silverlight). It's 3 commands and although I personally have had some trouble on the 64-bit kernel it works well on a 32-kernel. If you have further questions or you get it running on a 64-bit kernel let me know.

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Please summarize the steps in your answer so they will be preserved even if the link dies.
    – depquid
    Mar 19, 2013 at 17:45
0

You can watch netflix inside of a webbrowser simply by changing your user agent. Normally your browser sends a user agent to the server when accessing a website containing your browser version and your operating system. It looks something like this:

Firefox on Linux:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0

Chrome on Windows:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.7113.93 Safari/537.36

You can fake your user agent using a browser extension. When your user agent says that you're on Windows, you can watch Netflix inside of your browser even though you are on a Linux system. I'm not sure why Netflix doesn't want Linux users to watch their content but it works!

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Note that that question was asked 10 years ago. Netflix has been running out of the box on Firefox/Chromium for a few years now. If it doesn't work for you out of the box, it may be something specific with your setup, you may want to ask a different question here.
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Feb 28, 2021 at 16:48

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .