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Rachelle Kun

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Aug 2, 2024, 5:31:37 AM8/2/24

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My Teenager made some changes to Firefox settings to do some Roblox stuff. I dont know what she did and she is not sure either. since then, I cannot use Netflix. If I try to view a movie, then i get a page asking to install HTML5 or the silverlight pluginI have tried doing all the suggested workarounds but nothing worksI have Chrome as a backup browser, and Netflix runs OK on chrome. I prefer to have everything on firefox as, - up to now - it does everything i want or needany advice please

Thank you for your help. Roblox had, indeed, put some extra stuff into my useragent.I had no idea what useragent was but, I followed the link from TerryN21 and was able to follow the advice there without too much difficulty.Firefox is back working correctly with Netflix.cheers

I'm running Win XP and Firefox 45. I read an online article (DEC 2015) that indicated Firefox 38 and later would no longer need Silverlight to play Netflix because Mozilla has finally implemented HTML5. (which I'm happy about). So my system no longer has Silverlight installed. However, when I try to run Netflix, I still get asked to install Silverlight. I thought Firefox was now capable of running Netflix without the need of Silverlight?

On Windows XP, Firefox does not natively play MP4 video. Firefox uses the Windows Media Foundation to decode MP4s, and Microsoft never released WMF for Windows XP. So you can only play HTML5 media on sites that offer WebM or OGV or other compatible formats. Based on your experience, it sounds as though Netflix does not.

To start, I found an (admittedly old) post from someone at Netflix stating that their licensing requirements prohibited them from providing ways to control the player externally (everything needed to be wrapped up in a netflix-branded application, and providing ways to interact with the player externally would allow you to embed the netflix player in places it shouldn't go.) You can find that reply here (although it's four years old, I'd imagine not much has changed.)

I tried snooping around on the 'watch instantly' page myself, and there are objects like netflix.SilverLight and netflix.SilverLight.MoviePlayer (which has a getPlugin() method that returns some details about the plugin, and hookable events, but no methods for control,) but they mostly have to do with exposing the size of the player viewport, among other things necessary to place it on the page. I couldn't really find anything in any of the objects that suggested they interacted with the movie player that would seem to allow me access to it.

I also snagged the player binaries, and snooping through them I've found a ScriptInterface object internally with [ScriptableMember]-decorated methods in it called PlayMovie(), StopMovie(), ShowCurtain(), HideCurtain().

Then, I noticed there's another namespace in the player binaries called Netflix.Silverlight.CBPApp.HostedPlayer, which has its own interface - HostedPlayerScriptInterface. This has everything you want in it - data on play position, controls for increasing and decreasing play speed, pausing, playing, setting the play position, querying play state, etc. All of these are decorated as [ScriptableMember]s.

Now I break your heart - it looks like (for whatever reason) this interface is not exposed as a [ScriptableType], which to my understanding is a requirement for being able to access it from javascript. In fact, the only things that seem to be exposed this way are events that the player fires. My guess is that this code is for integrating with other partners, or left over from someone they inherited the original code for the video player from, but it seems intentionally that this [ScriptableType] parameter is left out. There may be a way to request a binary that's built to be 'Hosted', though I'm not sure what that means, and I also suspect it will be transparently obvious to the people watching what you're trying to do and have a stop put to it quickly.

Sorry for the long-winded response that ends in disappointment, but it appears as of right now there's not really a way to do this. I've seen some suggestions that basically amount to sending keystrokes to the browser window that emulate the keyboard controls, but this clearly isn't what you're looking for, so I'm going to go with 'no' as an answer here. :)

So, looks like you need to trick the Netflix player into thinking it's running in hosted player mode. There's some configuration options that can be passed in, but I'm not sure how, specifically, you would do that. It looks like that's all set up on player initialization - maybe some sort of bookmarklet could reload the page and inject a change? Or maybe just reload the player and change the settings.

Bear in mind I haven't done much of this javascript interop stuff so much of this is inferred from the documentation, but it does seem as if there is a javascript control API in there, it's just a matter of tricking the player into working in Hosted mode.

Going to have to stop here, but hopefully this gives you a good start. I've dumped the contents of that hosted player Javascript API file so you can see the methods that will be exposed once you manage to get the player in Hosted mode.

In Silverlight for a method to be exposed to JavaScript directly, it needs attributes [ScriptableType] on its class and [ScriptableMember] on itself. You could try opening up the XAP file for the Netflix player, disassembling the main assembly, and searching for any methods with [ScriptableMember] attached to them. This may not turn up anything useful at all, but it is something you can try nonetheless.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit, which I installed using the original release (not the newer 12.04.2 release), and have been successfully using netflix-desktop ever since the ppa:ehoover/compholio repository was made available. I never encountered any problems, whatsoever, until a couple of days ago.

For those that don't like messing with the console, you can just go to your home directory and either click on "View" and check "Show Hidden Files", or just press Ctrl+H, then scroll down until you see the folder labeled ".wine-browser", perform a right mouse-click on the folder, and select "Move to Trash" from the resulting menu.

I don't think it is the silverlight update which does it. It is Firefox update. So press F11 to get into window mode. Then press F10. Go to Options/Preferences ->Advanced-> updates, then disable the automatic browser update.

I recently installed Fedora 14 on my home PC so I have a dual boot system running windows and linux. I probably would primarily use Linux on that machine as its older and Linux manages its resources MUCH better than Windows does, BUT I'm a bit of a Netflix junky and from what I've read there isn't currently a solution that allows for Netflix to work on Linux. Evidently Moonlight (which as I understand is supposed to be like silverlight) is missing a key piece of functionality. So is there really no solution?

With Microsoft abandoning Silverlight, Netflix has made strong efforts to switch their video delivery software to HTML5. An HTML5 video player does not need a browser plugin like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight to work. However, in order to stream videos, Netflix requires their delivered content to remain secure. This is achieved in HTML5 via a browser plugin known as Network Security Service. Finally both of these components are mature enough.

The answers to your questions are here: -on-ubuntu-is-here.htmlBy adding a ppa you can get a special blend of wine and firefox that will run the netflix videoplayer (silverlight). It's 3 commands and although I personally have had some trouble on the 64-bit kernel it works well on a 32-kernel. If you have further questions or you get it running on a 64-bit kernel let me know.

You can watch netflix inside of a webbrowser simply by changing your user agent. Normally your browser sends a user agent to the server when accessing a website containing your browser version and your operating system. It looks something like this:

You can fake your user agent using a browser extension. When your user agent says that you're on Windows, you can watch Netflix inside of your browser even though you are on a Linux system. I'm not sure why Netflix doesn't want Linux users to watch their content but it works!

We want to watch netflix on the browser not the app. The login page appears but when we click on the Play button a screen appears talking about HTML5 and Silverlight. We know what HTML5 and Silverlight are but find it strange that the WebOS browser does not support this markup language on its player. Oddly YouTube works fine in the browser.

YouTube should run fine as it detects a compatible browser and then only uses HTML. Silverlight like Flash is pretty much dead in the water and no manufacturer if their browser does not support it now is going to bother building in support for it.

Yes YouTube runs fine but oddly not Netflix. I would have thought Netflix uses HTML5 for its browser and WebOS would display HTML5. No big deal just that we use the browser for everything else, email, YouTube, News channels, so we have simply got used to using Netflix from within the browser. Plus we have found Apps usually have limited functions, less security and more bugs so we avoid them. I would not want to get into a protracted discussion about whether to use apps or browser, just wondering, as you do, why a widely-used service such as Netflix would not work on a fairly-widely-used Operating System like WebOs and would there just be some simple setting that we are not aware of to enable Netflix to play content without leaving the browser.