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Niklas Terki

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Aug 2, 2024, 12:59:07 PM8/2/24

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I was going to post this question, but then I figured out the answer, so now I'll post the question and the answer for anyone else who searches how to do this. This is for windows but may work on other OS idk.

Netflix detects that I run a browser which is supposed to have html5 DRM support, so it goes straight to using the html5 player. So I disable DRM in firefox, and set Widevine to never activate. But then when I try to watch a netflix video, instead of it using silverlight, which I have, it plays nothing and tells me to Enable DRM. That's pretty much a bug with their system or firefox, or just a poor design choice imo.

To fix it and force Netflix to use Silverlight, you just have to install a User Agent switcher and pretend to be a slightly older version of firefox (for example 40). Then Netflix will think your browser doesn't have html5 drm capability and it will use silverlight.

If silverlight was not being phased out, it would clearly be poor design to not fall back gracefully so the user can still get at the content. The phasing out is really the only excuse not to want to do that.

As it is, since silverlight performs more efficiently than the html5 player, this design choice (or oversight) is basically making a bunch of computers obsolete 5 months sooner than they need to be. (While a much much larger amount of computers are not affected lol.)

I did not know that happened. I would have presumed Netflix just no longer supports Browsers using Silverlight. I do not think it is a bug or poor design, you are just managing to exploit their loophole that allows support of legacy browsers.

I will mark this solved. There is not anything more we will be able to do to fix this issue for you. Solved threads show up in internal and external searches so your post will be found and seen by more people.

You can't because Netflix uses DRM technologies to protect its content via Silverlight (available for Windows and OSX), more specifically Microsoft Playready, and since Novell doesn't pay the license fee for the DRM controlls to be included in Moonlight, sadly you'll never be able to watch streaming movies on Linux unless Netflix decides to do something about it.

For a while now we've had a computer hooked up to our large screen television and stereo system. A couple months back I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and memory so that we could start using the Windows 7 release candidate and Windows Media Center on it. The new hardware also meant we could play back high definition video.

Aside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight).

Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. It used a lot of CPU too. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system.

It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning.

I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in.

I find your blog entry interesting, because IMO the Silverlight netflix browser plugin is unusable in full-screen mode due to screen tearing issues under both Vista and Mac OS X. This was never a problem with their previous version that I believe was flash-based.

Flash also has built in H.264, so that shouldn't matter too much. I'm curious if this is a Win7 thing, or just a Microsoft thing, because it's the exact opposite situation on OS X. Flash video runs great, Silverlight video makes me want to shoot myself in the face.

Hulu desktop isn't exactly what it should have been, I believe they're love hate relationship stems from Hulu wanting to make it an open platform but being tied down by NBC and other major broadcasters who want more draconian type restrictions.

I tried Hulu Desktop too on my Mac Mini connected to my TV. I did not care for the black UI and small thumb nails, I much prefer using a hand held mouse (gyration) and enjoying Hulu through a browser.

I had numerous issues with the Hulu Desktop. While Flash may look good because of the H.264 support, it is a horrible technology. Flash cannot make use of multiple cores (I hear that is changing in future releases... I hope it's true), and it's CPU utilization is through the roof. The instant I start watching Hulu shows (through the browser or the new Hulu Desktop), the temp goes through the roof and my fans start running like crazy. When watching Netflix movies, CPU utilization and heat are not an issue. I wish people would give Silverlight more of a chance and not hate it simply because it's a Microsoft Product, in 2 releases they are where Flash was in 5 or 6.

Another note, I am currently using XBMC on my computers, and it was nice when Hulu was working with it. It drives me nuts that they want you to use an entirely different program (that doesn't work very well) just to watch their content. I had no problem with them playing their ads when watching in XBMC, that's fine, but since they removed support for XBMC, I just use the NBC-Universal plugin to watch TV programs and they don't have commercials.

I found that removing the check from the box labeled "Enable hardware acceleration" under SETTINGS in Flash inproved performance quite a bit, both in the Hulu desktop app and through the Hulu website.

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!

You realize how bad DRM is when you try playing a bluray dvd on a computer with a bluray BDROM drive.
It requires your BDROM drive to be DRM compliant, your graphics card to be compliant, and your monitor to be compliant(Imagine that). Even though I own a legit bluray dvd, a legit BDROM drive and a legit computer+monitor, I still havent been able to play a single movie on my BDROM drive (even after buying a new dell monitor that was supposedly compliant).
Its stuff like this that makes you pull your hair out. These RIAA/MPAA/Industry people are insane.

Unfortunately, YouTube switched to a later version of Flash, which Gnash does not yet implement. Saving YouTube videos to your hard drive worked for a while, and will work again when Gnash catches up again.

The individual amount of power used is small, however when you add up all of the devices using DRM in North America, the total amount of power used, and therefore fossil fuels consumed is quite large.

i really enjoy sita and i like the overall stance against drm but put me in the group who doesnt care about drm on streaming content. i as a netflix user have no problem with the fact that i cant save a stream and if you could im sure they would want way more then my 8.99 a month.

Another interesting case has come up, via Cory over at BoingBoing. EZTakes an online video service that offers free streams of 5,000-plus films with no DRM; users also have the option to purchase the films and download the full DRM-free files (for anywhere from $2 to $10 each). However, with the free streaming option, you are unable to save the streaming file itself.

I just installed 12.04 LTS on my mother's Dell Inspiron 660s (all standard hardware straight from the factory except some extra RAM). I did this because she hated the Windows 8 that came standard on it, and it had become super buggy/corrupt and experienced BSOD's, freezing, and general crashes about three times an hour. The computer is in her kitchen and is used almost exclusively for Facebook games and watching Amazon and Netflix videos, i.e. It needs flash.