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Honorato Overmyer

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Aug 1, 2024, 11:35:28 PM8/1/24

to bimarpipaw

On my debian installation I installed chromium 39 and the latest version of libnss3, netflix failed to play. I tried on my ubuntu installation and it too failed. I tried installing chrome from the website and it WORKED. I looked at the version of chrome and chromium. They're both 39.0.2171.XY. AFAIK chrome 38+ works.

You will need that plugin installed to chromium for it to work. You might also add the google talk plugin and pdf plugin while you're at it, but if you do so you pretty much just installed chrome as those are some of the primary differences.

In fact, though, until late summer 2015 you couldn't install that component singly to chromium - we can chalk that one up to another (short-lived) win for Digital Restrictive Management, I guess. With some serious downtime and expert hacking you might be able to compile your own package (a chromium compile is no Sunday drive, by the way) - but you might have to hack the plugin out of chrome.

As of August 2015, though, you can now install the Widevine module separately as the chromium maintainer has patched the source to accept its use. For example, on an Arch Linux system there is the chromium-widevine AUR package. Have a look at its PKGBUILD script to see how it's done - it doesn't look very complicated. Essentially the chrome...deb debian package file is downloaded, from it are extracted only a few Widevine relevant files, their version numbers captured, and then these are copied into the relevant chromium installation paths.

There is also the Pipelight project which should enable you to use the Silverlight plugin (via wine) to watch Netflix video (and so not the HTML5 method which works with chrome) in chromium. It is a somewhat heavy-handed approach in my opinion, but it is a popular option.

There have been many tutorials posted on how to get Netflix working on Linux. Personally I've had limited success using the Pipelight plugins. There's good news for Linux users though. Recent development versions of the Chrome browser from Google include the required DRM code to allow HTML5 video streaming from Netflix. The goal of this tutorial is to provide easy instructions to get Netflix streaming working on Linux Mint 17, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 12.04.

The first step of this process is to install either the beta version or the development version of Google Chrome. In my case, I'm using the beta version. Go to the Chrome Beta download page and click Download Chrome Beta. Select the correct package for your architecture (32 bit or 64 bit). Click Accept and Install to accept the license agreement and download the installation file.

If you haven't already, shut down Chrome Beta and re-open it. Click the User-Agent Switcher icon and select Chrome -> Netflix as your user agent. Now go to Netflix and log in to your account. If everything went right, you can now use the instant streaming on Netflix. You may need to restart your system in order to get smooth streaming.

You may also want to add a setting in User-Agent Switcher so that your custom user agent is always used when you go to Netflix. Right click on the User-Agent Switcher icon and select Options. On the left side of the screen, select Permanent Spoof list. Under Domain enter netflix.com and select Netflix under User-Agent String, then click on Add. Your custom user agent will now be used any time you go to Netflix.

Your success with streaming may vary based on the power of your computer, the speed of your Internet connection, and your chosen quality settings for your Netflix account. I have nice, smooth streaming on my desktop computer with an Intel Core i5 processor. Streaming is a little more sketchy on my netbook with an Intel Atom processor. Streaming definitely works better using the lowest quality setting from Netflix, but obviously the picture isn't the greatest. It's still not up to par with streaming on Windows using Microsoft's Silverlight, but it's a major step in the right direction for streaming on Linux.

Couldn't get netflix working with Chrome browser in Mint 17.2 XFCE until I tried your tweaks. Now it works fine with the user agent switcher. Also turns out that I the packages didn't need to update thru the terminal commands. They already were up to date.

Since July 30 this does not work. I can auto login to Netflix, navigate the menu but when I launch a movie/show I get an "Whoops, something went wrong..> with an error code: M7121-1331-6037.
I've tried this with the beta release too and even rebooted my Mint 17.1 system. Did Netflix kill this hacks access? I'm now setting up KODI to replace Netflix but would like to have this resolved if possible. Thanks.

This works great. I have the current release of Chrome on Mint 17. I installed the agent switcher and didn't even have to restart the pc to get perfect streaming. This solution was simple, elegant and it works.
Thank you!!!!

I'm glad it worked for you. To be clear, you only need the latest version of Chrome now. There is no need for the useragent switcher. Netflix has updated their useragent filters to allow current versions of Chrome.

Works fine for me, thanks for the instructions! I'm running the 64-bit edition of Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon on my HTPC. As I live in Europe, I additionally installed ZenMate to get the U.S. only content. It seems there's no longer any need for me to use Windows on this computer now, as I've only needed it to watch Netflix. Thanks once more for the help, the instructions were thorough and easy enough to follow.

I'm having some issues with Chrome in Linux Mint 17 when GPU rendering is enabled under Advanced Settings in Chrome. In my case, Chrome doesn't behave properly when switching to full screen. This is independent of trying to stream Netflix. You could try disabling GPU Rendering in Chrome to see if that helps. I'm guessing you won't be happy with the way video looks in that case though.

Using a fresh install of Linux Mint 17 all I had to do was install mainstream Chrome and follow the user agent switcher instructions then it just worked. This was something that had stopped me moving to Linux as my main OS for some time...