I just saw a set of posts fromNathan VanCampon Google Plus showing how to stream Netflix natively (no Silverlight, Pipelight, wine etc) using HTML 5. I had not seen this before, so I tried it and it works on OpenSUSE.
Getting a browser user-agent to be recognized by Netflix as being ready for HTML5 is tricky. This agent-switcher Chrome app does work . Use the append method to create a custom new user-agent, the indicator flag can be upto 3 characters I used IE, name can be anything. Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win 64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36 .
There is also a player preference setting in Netflix - [LEFT]Prefer HTML5 player instead of Silverlight
[/LEFT]
.
It uses a lot less CPU than the SilverLight on Pipelight plugin - which is nice.lol!
Hi Malcolm, great to hear you got it working. The HTML 5 preference is in the Netflix “playback settings” within your Netflix account setup. I don’t have rights to add attachments for a screenshot on the forum, but this link will get you there for your account https://www.netflix.com/YourAccount .
After you get things working, the user-agent switcher app mentioned also has a “Permanent Spoof List” setting, so that you can ensure the correct user-agent string is always used for the Netflix.com domain.
Biizarre symptom: Works on my Netflix profile, but not on my wife’s. This is true for both her computer and mine. Hers is the primary (billing) profile. If I selet her profile, then play a movie, I;m prompted to install silverlight.
I have two Netflix profiles, one for me and one for my wife. I just checked the settings and it looks like the playback settings can be set separately for each profile. Try logging in to your wife’s profile and make sure that the playback settings are to prefer HTML5.
Online chat with Netflix tech support last night. Thankfully, the rep didn’t tell me to buzz off just because I use linux, even pasted in some boilerplate about how Netflix is working hard to support all platforms. She knew nothing about linux but helped me investigate the profiles and found nothing to cause the difference. Then she spoke to “her engineers” and reported that they’d seen the problem before but hadn’t tracked down the bug yet. -GEF
> Online chat with Netflix tech support last night. Thankfully, the rep
> didn’t tell me to buzz off just because I use linux, even pasted in some
> boilerplate about how Netflix is working hard to support all platforms.
> She knew nothing about linux but helped me investigate the profiles and
> found nothing to cause the difference. Then she spoke to “her engineers”
> and reported that they’d seen the problem before but hadn’t tracked down
> the bug yet. -GEF
That’s really encouraging to hear - thanks for this information.
Makes me glad that I’ve stuck with Netflix that they’re giving Linux
users a little love these days.
Quick update- Chrome 37 has now gone to a “stable” status (google-chrome-stable) which means that the unstable build is no longer required to access Netflix and other HTML 5 Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) streams.
(1) Does this mean Chrome 37 Beta can be deleted and google-chrome-stable can be installed instead? I’ve been getting a lot of untrusted key messages from apper lately.
(2) Is this stable version truly linux friendly at this point or do we still need to use an agent switcher?
Well, I did remove the beta version of chrome, and installed the latest stable version, which is 37.0.2062.120 as of today. However, I found out the user agent switcher is still needed and version 38.0.2114.2 is what is used in it. I tried substituting version 37, but it didn’t work. Hopefully, once version 38 is reached, the user agent switcher will no longer be necessary.
Here are the instructions again for the user agent switcher:
Name: Netflix Linux
String: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36
Group: (Chrome is filled in automatically)
Append: Select ‘Replace’
Flag: IE
(1) Does this mean Chrome 37 Beta can be deleted and google-chrome-stable can be installed instead? I’ve been getting a lot of untrusted key messages from apper lately.
(2) Is this stable version truly linux friendly at this point or do we still need to use an agent switcher?
Yes - for NetFlix HTML 5 streaming Chrome 37 stable works, so if needed you can switch to google-chrome-stable. And yes - the agent switcher is still required (and I guess this probably won’t change ) by Netflix - otherwise they give you the “un-supported browser” message.
To get rid of the “unexpected error” problem in Netflix, error code M7063-1913, make sure that all Network Security Service libraries are the latest version. As of today it is version 3.17-1.1.
In Yast Software Manager just search for Network Security Service.
The packages are mozilla-nss, mozilla-nss-certs, libfreebl3 and libsoftokn3 - and perhaps the -32bit compatibility packages too if your system is 64-bit.
Googling around I see a lot of people have this issue, it had me stumped for quite a bit…
Do we still need to hack Chrome/Chomium to use a different user agent?
I got error code M7357-1003 while trying to play.
I then added the following User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36
It still gives me the error code, but with a little more text. This time it cannot find the component WidevineCdm.
I have Chromium 38 and the latest mozilla-nss for openSUSE 13.2
NetFlix now allow Chrome + Linux as a platform - so no user-agent switching is required.
I have not tried Chromium with Netflix, and I don’t know if it includes the digital rights stuff that Google put into Chrome - interesting question. Chrome 39 is working for me without any errors on OpenSUSE 13.2.
I just installed Google Chrome and Netflix worked, right out of the box.
It also installed along a few new dependencies. Should like to get it working in Chromium instead.
