I’m trying to get netflix working on two computers, both running 12.3, one 32bit the other 64bit. I installed netflix-desktop (one click installation from the website) and pipelight (from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/rbos:/pipelight/openSUSE_12.3/), installed the user-agent switcher in fireforx, setting it to Firefox24 Windows.
The problem I am running into is that netflix insists I have to upgrade silverlight. Other’s have encountered this problem (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/netflix-desktop/+bug/1164453) but the solution offered there - to remove the ./wine-browser directory does not apply since there is no such directory (I assume because opensuse has 2.0 version of the netflix-desktop package whereas they are refering to to higher version).
Has anyone encountered this and fixed it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Brouwer2 wrote:
>
> I’m trying to get netflix working on two computers, both running 12.3,
> one 32bit the other 64bit. I installed netflix-desktop (one click
> installation from the website) and pipelight (from
> http://tinyurl.com/q4osaf9), installed the user-agent switcher in
> fireforx, setting it to Firefox24 Windows.
>
> The problem I am running into is that netflix insists I have to upgrade
> silverlight. Other’s have encountered this problem (see
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/netflix-desktop/+bug/1164453) but the
> solution offered there - to remove the ./wine-browser directory does not
> apply since there is no such directory (I assume because opensuse has
> 2.0 version of the netflix-desktop package whereas they are refering to
> to higher version).
>
> Has anyone encountered this and fixed it? Any help would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
>
pipelight depends on wine(windows emulator) to work. Hence you should
have a .wine folder in your home directory
Run this command from terminal or konsole to find the wine directories
Right, there’s a .wine and .wine-pipelight directory but no .wine-browser directory.
From what I gathered from the thread linked to previously the netflix-desktop packager for Ubuntu changed something and later versions (greater than 6 or 7) moved some stuff from the .netflix-desktop directory to a .wine-browser directory. The version available for opensuse (2) does not have this. His fix for this problem is just to delete this directory, and it seems to work for Ubuntu users who had this problem, but the solution does not apply to opensuse.
Since there aren’t any posts on the forum about this problem with netflix I am guessing that it is working for other people, so it either never came up for them, in which case I probably did something wrong in the installation, or they have had the problem and fixed it. Either way it’s not clear to me what to do next.
Brouwer2 wrote:
>
> Right, there’s a .wine and .wine-pipelight directory but no
> …wine-browser directory.
>
> From what I gathered from the thread linked to previously the
> netflix-desktop packager for Ubuntu changed something and later versions
> (greater than 6 or 7) moved some stuff from the .netflix-desktop
> directory to a .wine-browser directory. The version available for
> opensuse (2) does not have this. His fix for this problem is just to
> delete this directory, and it seems to work for Ubuntu users who had
> this problem, but the solution does not apply to opensuse.
>
> Since there aren’t any posts on the forum about this problem with
> netflix I am guessing that it is working for other people, so it either
> never came up for them, in which case I probably did something wrong in
> the installation, or they have had the problem and fixed it. Either way
> it’s not clear to me what to do next.
>
>
Try cleaning up wine folder as described here http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ/#head-9893ae50079ca7a959258f0bc9a17aaf2e69b391
Please correct me if I am wrong, but you are referring to section “4.5 How do I wipe the virtual Window’s installation?” If so, can I ask you’re thinking behind this? If I understood correctly, the .wine-browser is created by installing netflix-desktop and contains some silverlight settings having to do with updates. Deleting the .wine directory seems overkill.
At any rate I tried it (at least I renamed the directory), and it did not fix the silverlight update issue, while also making some other wine applications unusable.
Has no one else experienced this silverlight issue?
Yes, I linked to the launchpad bug report in my first post.
The two posts you link to are exactly why I was asking about the .wine-browser directory.
The problem is that the solution in both these posts is inapplicable to openSUSE because the netflix-desktop version is lower than on Ubuntu, and the .wine-browser directory is created by a version of netflix-desktop than the one available for openSUSE.
Do you mean have I tried watching netflix on a non-Wine browser? Yes. Pipelight installs silverlight 5 as a firefox plugin; I get nothing doing this. I select something to watch and the viewing part of the screen just goes black, no blue wheel while it loads, no red splash screen with a percentage counter, no circle with a back arrow. Nothing.
I have also tried launching the wine version of firefox directly (not through the netflix menu item), and the result is the same as described in previous posts, it asks for a silverlight upgrade.
I would say use piplelight as I have had way more success with it then the netflix-desktop.
The only issue I had after enabling and installing piplelight is that I needed this in firefox for it to work: http://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/user-agent-overrider/
You have to trick netflix into thinking you are using windows firefox not linux firefox.
I have also tried launching the wine version of firefox directly (not through the netflix menu item), and the result is the same as described in previous posts, it asks for a silverlight upgrade.
Netflix-desktop is just a hacked version of Wine using Silverlight in a Windows browser installed to its own wineprefix. Have you tried manually installing a newer Silverlight to that wineprefix?
Ugh nevermind on the sucess bit, a recent firefox update broke pipelight for openSUSE on both 32 and 64bit on my machine.
Netflix desktop wont work, and soon netscape plugins will nop longer work in chrome, konquer is a pain to work with, operas a dinosaur…
I guess back to crapbuntu or some debian varient again for me, and openSUSE 13.1 was doing so well…
Hopefully netflix will go html5 soon but bet trhat will cause new issues and will require a new workaround that will barely work in opensuse.
Have you searched the Pipelight forum? These two questions might be relevant
Thanks for these links, unfortunately nothing suggested worked there, at least so far. The problem for me seems to be that silverlight is just not working at all in firefox. The plugin shows up in firefox, and seems to be enabled, but when I try a silverlight test, or query the version (at www.silverlightversion.com) I get nothing. The version shows up as 0.0.00000.0. I guess I’m missing something in the pipelight installation or enabling. I’ve tried installing pipelight from different repos, but at best it doesn’t work, and at worst it makes all my browsers unusable - they just freeze while loading a page.
Ugh nevermind on the sucess bit, a recent firefox update broke pipelight for openSUSE on both 32 and 64bit on my machine.
Sorry to hear that, and I thought I was getting close! I might try downgrading firefox and seeing if that does anything (after I sort out the installation/enabling of pipelight, that is).
You’re mixing things. Netflix-desktop is meant to use a windu browser through wine, pipelight adds Silverlight support to linux browsers, by having it’s own patched wine version and a separate ,wine-pipelight environment. Netflix-desktop won’t even be aware that that one is there. I use both Chrome (with Useragent set to FF15) and FF (as is), browse to netflix.nl (YMMV) click an item and it plays.
No, I know they are different, though I have been so conditioned to thinking that netflix doesn’t work on linux that I did not find out about pipelight until I started searching for ways to fix netflix-desktop. So far I seem to have gotten closer with netflix-desktop.
Which version of pipelight are you using, and from which repo? Pipelight seems to make my browsers unusable, but I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling from different repos, so quite probably something got mixed up. Unfortunately the press of work means it will take me some time to sort it out.
I spoke too soon. The clue came from Knurpht – to try Chrome (which I haven’t thought of using since I stopped using window$). With the User Agent Switcher extension set to Firefox(Windows) (this one doesn’t give different versions by default, which is ff 21) netflix works, on both computers. Now there’s just one more practically limitless to avoid doing work :).