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Natasha Mulhearn
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.
Thank you, I was temporarily blind
But it is not enough, the same error.
I have only libwidevinecdmadapter.so in usr/lib/chromium, probably should also have libwidevinecdm.so copied from chrome and/or use some command line arguments. Unfortunately there are many reports with too many solutions on different platforms/versions etc., I'm watching from W10 now.
Chrome should work in BL but I prefer chromium from debian repo
- Use Firefox and enable Widevine in it; it'll automatically download the binary plugin. However, some people report that Netflix doesn't work for them. It doesn't for me either, but my FF profile is >5 years old and not clean anymore (Firefox Nightly).
- Copy the Widevine .sos from the google-chrome package. This is not a good way because there can't be any updates.
- Install Google Chrome and use that to consume Netflix (it's what I do). If required, Google Chrome can be jailed using firejail:
Just copied from chrome package 2 files as ad-hoc solution. These are binary blobs, copying is enough.
So one can use Chrome for Netflix or write a script which will download chrome periodically, extract those 2 files and copy them respectively.
What is interesting (or not here) is that in Xubuntu copying those files is not enough (also chromium had them both with strange small file sizes by default). Anyway before final handling of this problem I can use my BL more often...
Edit: problems in Ubuntu like are related to Ubuntu introduced user agent. In Ubuntu Chromium change of the user agent is additionally a must.
I tried with google-chrome, chromium and firefox, to no avail. The "best" quality I can select is 1.17GB per hour, and everything looks like crap. The same video shows a label "HD 1080p" or something like that in macos besides the time/time remaining text (nothing in linux), and the settings menu lets me choose more than 6GB per hour as "best" quality. It looks way better.
Amazon says HD is not supported in anything other than windows/macos, so I would assume that it cannot be done, but I see SO MANY posts in a lot forums from many people saying that they get HD streams without doing anything special in linux that MAYBE there is some way I'm not seeing.
Amazon states on their website that only SD video is supported on Linux. There are some discussions on reddit, just do a search for "amazon HD, Linux, reddit". There are some who claim HD is working for them on Fedora Linux. Some say to try user agent spoofing, which is something that I have used to access video, and audio service on Linux in the past. I have a Fedora installation, and I'm going to try when I have time. I have not been able to get Prime to work with HD video on Arch myself, but I'm still experimenting. Hope this helps.
After trying several things again to get Prime Video to work in HD, I have given up. User agent spoofing doesn't work for me, and I tried with Fedora as well, and no luck with that either. I don't know what the people who claim on other forums, to have it working, have done. I'm not sure if it does work for them, or if they think it does, and don't actually know the difference. I guess when Amazon says no HD in Linux, they mean it.
Yeah, I'm starting to think that the people saying they can play HD content in linux nowadays either a) can't tell the difference or b) tried in the past (before April) and still assume they can. I've also tried everything with every browser to no avail.
I've been trying to get the Netflix plugin for Kodi working. When I try to launch a video from the plugin, I get a dialog saying that inputstream.adaptive is missing. But it's included in Kodi, and I see message like this in the kodi log:
Tried using firefox with wine, amazon tells me I lack DRM. Tried to use Safari with wine, just shuts down, with Playonlinux, it does start and is stable, but when I go to amazon Webpage, I just get a black page, and only there. Really strange, all that.
Hey, cool. It works so far. Only thing is, it does not create shortcuts unter .local/share/applications - there is no "wine" folder there, nor are the Google Chrome shortcuts to be found anywhere on the system, naturally not the one for prime I created either. So I have to manually go into the .wine directory and access the chrome.exe there. Which means that I have a problem appending the Pulse-line to the non-existent shortcut, which means crackling sound. Any ideas?
I recently wrote a post showing how to get Netfix working on Ubuntu and its derivatives. That process originally involved installing the beta version of the Chrome browser and manually updating some libraries on your system. Further, you had to use the Useragent Switcher extension in Chrome to trick Netflix into thinking you were a Windows user.
Well, thankfully those steps are no longer required. The required version of Chrome has made it to the stable channel. Ubuntu has updated the nss libraries on currently supported versions. And finally, Netflix has updated their user agent filter to allow Linux users with the correct version of Chrome to use their instant streaming.
Got it working in Fedora 20 and openSUSE 13.1. I had to add the user agent switcher extension and, oddly enough, set it to 'chrome --> default', but it worked, watched Netflix without any additional tweaks or plugins.
Same as yours, that is without the extension. Funny thing is, it now works. Not sure why it didn't work the other day.
Not upset about that at all, seems like I can stream on anything with nss 3.16+ and chrome. Tested on Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Mint.
At one time, accessing Netflix on Linux was difficult. A specific version of Google Chrome was needed, complete with Encrypted Media Extension (EME) support. Chrome additionally required a specific version of Mozilla Network Security Services and a User Agent Switcher extension. (Changing the User Agent is a method of tricking a website that you're using a different operating system or browser).
Today, all you need to do is open netflix.com in Google Chrome and log into your account. Within seconds you'll be able to seamlessly watch Netflix content. Additionally, you have the option to turn Netflix into a Desktop Application via Google Chrome's Web-App tools (see below).
No additional software or plugins are available for Chrome to stream Netflix videos. Simply visit the site as explained above and enjoy. Other Chromium-based browsers should also work, but your mileage may vary.
If Google Chrome isn't to your taste, rely on it as a backup when your preferred browser won't play Netflix. Usually this is only a short-term hiccup that can be fixed a day or so later with a new update.
But if you need to access a Netflix library from another country (such as Netflix US), you will need a VPN. A virtual private network that supports Netflix lets you fool the website as to your whereabouts. So, if you're in France, select a VPN server in the USA to access Netflix's US library.
At one point you could install an app for Netflix. This unofficial tool was in reality a Windows app and came bundled with Wine. This no longer works, but you can create a Desktop Application on Linux using Chrome's "Add to desktop" feature.
Another way you can watch Netflix on your Linux PC is via the Kodi media center software. This comes with some limitations, however---there is currently no support for 4K streaming. You'll be limited instead to a maximum of 1080p.
If you have Kodi installed you can use an unofficial Netflix add-on to access your account. Note that this requires providing your account credentials to a third-party app---another good reason to be using a VPN.
To resort back to using the Silverlight plug-in, you need to re-enable NPAPI support in your browser (Dragon or Chromodo).
A temporary workaround to enable NPAPI plugins is to type chrome://flags/#enable-npapi into the address bar and enter.
Select enable of the highlighted entry and relaunch the browser.