

Netflix on Linux with Chrome - callumjones
https://plus.google.com/104912707432334684242/posts/1gnbmo63xVa

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finnn
In other news, bittorrent continues to work on all platforms, without placing
any restrictions on what viewers can do.

~~~
themartorana
Including participating in massive copyright infringement.

I struggle with the sentiment that if offered no other way to legally consume
media, BitTorrent will show them! I can't find "The Money Pit" anywhere but
BT. Does that make it ok to download?

I don't know. Morally, legally, etc., I've never been quite so torn for quite
so long.

~~~
DrJokepu
I think OP's point was that DRM pushes people to pirate content, regardless of
whether this is morally acceptable or not.

~~~
rakoo
I think his point is rather that DRM asks more from the user (a specific
browser, a specific plugin, a specific string to enter in a box) for
essentially the same experience.

Oh and you can do less things with a DRM'd media than with a non-DRM'd. Even
though you technically have the same rights.

~~~
josteink
_Oh and you can do less things with a DRM 'd media than with a non-DRM'd. Even
though you technically have the same rights._

None of the big streaming-services supports the HW I have in my home-stereo
rig. All of them supports H264 video and HDMI.

Not offering me H264 content uncrippled is leaving me, as a potential
customer, no reason to sign up.

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nmjohn
Firefox + pipelight + UA switcher has been working flawlessly* for me for the
last six months or so.

It doesn't work on chrome anymore unfortunately after the update where they
disabled NPAPI plugins.

Native support still can't come soon enough.

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aroman
i don't think the explanation as to why this works is correct. the poster says
it's because Google and Microsoft "have been working closely with Netflix to
get the needed DRM code required for HTML5 streaming", yet:

1\. the user-agent switch involves adding a Safari identifier (rather than IE
or a new Chrome one)

2\. at WWDC 2014, Apple announced that _it_ had been working closely with
Netflix along those lines, and that the upcoming version of Safari would be
able to play Netflix without Silverlight. (And indeed Safari on Yosemite can
do just that in the developer previews)

~~~
fafner
What they mean is that the "Digital Restriction Management in HTML5" proposal
is pushed by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix into the W3C spec. Apple has
simply followed the proposal and implemented it as well. AFAIK Chrome, IE,
Safari ship with it. Firefox will follow suite by adding a Restriction Module
from Adobe (given Adobe's track record it will certainly be an amazingly fast,
flexible, beautiful, efficient, and nice way of viewing videos...).

So Web-Restrictions is kinda unstoppable now. Instead of having a plugin-free
future with HTML5 we have an even worse situation.

~~~
Karunamon
"No DRM" was never an option. The option was between 1 DRM standard and 50 (so
silverlight and widevine and....).

The W3C made the most pragmatic choice, here. I think DRM is still crap, but
one system is unambiguously better than >1.

~~~
girvo
Except Flash was at least used for stuff other than just DRM, so there was an
incentive to get it working across all OSes. Linux is going to struggle once
this is adopted, at least open browsers will, and that makes me sad

~~~
jiggy2011
The openness of the browser has nothing to do with it, the browser provides an
interface to the DRM mechanism which could be open or closed source. Open
source browsers like firefox already support proprietary plugins such as
Flash.

If anything this makes Linux support easier, because you no longer have to
provide support for an entire virtual machine and all APIs such as Flash or
Silverlight. The only software required will be the DRM module itself as
everything else can be provided by the browser.

~~~
fafner
The DRM mechanism can't really be open source. You could simply change it to
write the unencrypted video data to the disk if it were.

A plugin DRM module will also have to do all of the video rendering and
displaying. Because if it just hands the unencrypted stream back to the
browser then you could change the browser to simply write it to disk.

The relevant DRM mechanisms will come from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and
Adobe. Both Apple and Microsoft have no interest in supporting GNU/Linux. You
won't get their DRM on GNU/Linux no matter how simple it is. Google seems to
ship their DRM now on the GNU/Linux version of Chrome. But I don't know if the
license allows using it in other browsers. Which would be hindered by the fact
that Google uses their own unspecified PAPPI. Adobe wants to provide a DRM
module for Firefox EME mechanism. But we all know from enough bad experience
how well Adobe does GNU/Linux support. Flash on GNU/Linux was even worse than
on any other system until they simply stopped it. They recently even stopped
distributing Acrobat Reader for GNU/Linux. So yeah, great hope there. Even if
they compile the module for GNU/Linux because Mozilla asks them to then we can
expect the typical Adobe software safety and quality... Remember HTML5 was
supposed to rid the world of Flash, Silverlight, and such things. Not force
those binary blobs into the spec.

~~~
jiggy2011
Having an EME spec allows for competition in the DRM market, it creates a
business opportunity for a company (or potentially a solo dev) to develop a
cross platform solution.

EME means you rely less on Adobe code than you did previously as they are no
longer shipping an entire runtime, just the content protection module.

~~~
fafner
You are completely wrong here. Please note that the EME proposal does _not_
specify a plugin interface for the Restriction module! It only specifies how
the Restriction module is exposed to JavaScript. How the Restriction module is
implemented or connected to the browser is up to the browser developer. Both
Google and Microsoft are involved in the creation of the spec and Apple is
also supporting it. All three companies make up a large share of the web
browser market. And all three companies have their existing DRM solutions
which they are using for their EME implementation. None of them have announced
a plugin interface to allow other companies to provide a DRM module.

The only browser vendor who wants to implement EME via a plugin is Mozilla.
Simply because there can't be a free software Restriction module
implementation (and consequently due to the W3C's efforts there defacto can't
be a fully free software web implementation). And Mozilla already made a deal
with Adobe to provide the Restriction module.

So no, there won't be a market. It will actually close down the market.
Content providers will have to support those four DRM solutions if they want
to offer their content on all those platforms. They won't have any choice.

~~~
jiggy2011
That browser vendors will bundle their own solutions doesn't really close down
the market and I don't understand how it would necessarily hurt cross platform
adoption?

~~~
fafner
Of course it closes down the market. There won't even be a market. There is
not going to be a plugin interface (except for Firefox) to provide a different
Restriction module.

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batram
If you use Ubuntu 14.04 (like me) you have to install a newer version of
libnss3 (at least 3.16.2) and than it works.

Runs smoother than pipelight + firefox at least for me.

~~~
revasm
Full instructions for reference. Run:

    
    
      wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/n/nss/libnss3{_3.16.3-1ubuntu1_amd64,-1d_3.16.3-1ubuntu1_amd64,-nssdb_3.16.3-1ubuntu1_all}.deb
      sudo dpkg -i libnss3*.deb
    

Create a new Tampermonkey script:

    
    
      // ==UserScript==
      // @name         Netflix HTML5 for Linux
      // @namespace    0d0a3443-cc79-4f86-bf62-2dac581d2b3a
      // @version      0.1
      // @description  Enables HTML5 video support for the Linux host platform
      // @match        *://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?*
      // @user-agent   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.68 Safari/537.36
      // ==/UserScript==

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Retr0spectrum
I tried this, but I just get prompted to install the silverlight plugin. I am
using Lubuntu 14.04.

~~~
tyleregeto
In your account settings, try turning on the HTML5 Player. Its opt-in.

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frabbit
CentOS-6.5 and later with Pipelight and Firefox 24.7.0 ESR works flawlessly.
God knows what it's installing and what security holes I opened up by
downloading it though.

Looking forward to any native solutions.

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pit
I can confirm this works on Chrome on OpenSuSE 13.1:

    
    
        Version 37.0.2062.68 beta (64-bit)

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RexRollman
Really, it's more like accidently supported on Linux.

~~~
fractalsea
But I thought that Netflix required Silverlight on the client to work. What is
this using then?

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pilif
The HTML5 encrypted media extensions. Chrome has support for that

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focus
Doesn't work for me. Error Code: M7063-1913

lsb_release -d: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS

uname -a: Linux x230 3.13.0-32-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 03:51:08 UTC
2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

chrome://version: 38.0.2114.2 (Official Build 287444) dev

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Slix
Does this work with only Chrome and not Chromium?

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azakai
Chromium is open source doesn't ship with the proprietary, closed bits of
Chrome, like the EME DRM module which is used here. So this is Chrome-only.

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captaincrunch
If anyone gets it working, my start-up is doing some interesting things with
Netfix: turboflix.com

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jaredsohn
Your website seems confusing a few ways:

* You only list TV shows in the examples, despite the service offering both movies and shows

* I actually do have all of those shows (or at least most) on my Netflix. Although I see on your Facebook page that the service is perhaps targeted to people in other countries.)

* I am wondering if what your service offers will be legal, especially if you are charging for it (my best guess is that it is some kind of proxy that lets you access international Netflixes, perhaps a little more convenient than existing Chrome extensions in that it might list movies allowed in different countries together.)

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rakoo
Fantastic.

What do you use to watch movies and series on-demand ?

Why, a web browser !

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Hengjie
It works perfectly on v37 on my Mac OSX machine (running Mavericks)

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marcelocamanho
Anyone tried it on a Raspberry Pi?

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yeowMeng
google-chrome not supported on arm

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lutusp
Say what? The majority of Android devices have ARM processors, and Chrome is
available for Android:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.chrome&hl=en)

