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Silvana Fleischacker

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Aug 2, 2024, 5:21:57 AM8/2/24

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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!

Since I update my setup this morning, video streaming (youtube/netflix/amazon on brave, jellyfin on personal server, etc...) does not work.
Video is charging but never start.
Here you can see the list off my recently installed/updated package:

I'm on Gnome-X11, 2 or 3 days ago after updating , might be one of these - malcontent, gnome-control-center, flatpak, xdg-desktop-portal, I found the same problem but solve the issue by install pipewire and remove pulseaudio.

So the problem is not pulsaudio itself but a side package having conflict?
I will test pipewire, if it works it only bypass the problem. I have no need to exclusively use pulseaudio but someone else may be.

on the problematic situation. This can happen if wireplumber is started with pulse installed as wireplumber will take devices away from pulseaudio. IF this only surfaced with the update log from your OP it's likely some changes in xdg-desktop-portal or so (or knowing GNOME they might logically hard require pipewire now)

It's not a bug but also not something to generally fix. You should be able to restore normal operation by masking wireplumber "ideally" wireplumber should be configurable to not grab audio devices and just handle screensharing but not sure whether that's possible

For the wireplumber case it happened to introduce a config that allows you to disable it from trying to handle ALSA devices where I'm not yet entirely sure whether that's sufficient, if you wanted to experiment with this copy your /usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua to /etc/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua and set alsa_monitor.enabled = false

Thanks it works !!! As a long time archlinux user (user not expert) i try to keep my setup as close as possible to rep and avoiding any hack that could mess any futur upgrade. So threre was wayland but i decide to use xorg until kde dev give a clear signal that wayland is 100% working (like turning it default) and now pipewire, wireplumber.... So what is the status of pipewire ? is pulseaudio legacy and you can go on pipewire with everything working 100% or is it still work in progress (like wayland) and in this case, i rather like to wait. In fact, i don't understand if pipewire is the successor of pulseaudio (an so will remplace it as default for kde) or it's just another similar project to adress some limitation.

Masking the service is a hacky workaround, not a solution in any way. You need to either go back to pipewire-media-session or switch completely to pipewire. Leaving your system in limbo with no pipewire session manager is not one of the options.

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.

Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this. Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.

Truth be told, I don't care very much about Netflix - the UX offered by BitTorrent is superior. On the other hand, I'm quite invested in the Spotify ecosystem, and while there are 3rd party open-source clients that run great on Asahi, I do prefer the official interface (which is a controversial take, I gather).

In the case of Widevine-in-Chrome-on-Linux, this CDM takes the form of a dynamic library called libwidevinecdm.so. This library is an opaque proprietary blob that we are forbidden to look inside of (at least, that's how they'd prefer it to be).

Graciously, as part of the Chromium project, Google provides the C++ headers required to interface with The Blob. This interface allows other projects like Firefox to implement support for Widevine, via the EME API, using the exact same libwidevinecdm.so blob as Chrome does. This is convenient, but it doesn't help us on aarch64 Linux - there is no corresponding libwidevinecdm.so for us to borrow from Chrome, because Widevine-in-Chrome-on-Linux-on-aarch64 is not an officially supported platform.

The short answer is: the DRM works differently on Android. Because of the differences between the Android platform and desktop Linux, the Android implementations of Widevine will not be useful to us, unless you're planning on losing the Do Not Violate The DMCA Challenge (this is left as an exercise to the reader).

Chromebooks exist, many have aarch64 CPUs, they run Chrome on Linux (more or less), and they officially support Widevine. At some point, somebody noticed that there's a perfectly cromulent libwidevinecdm.so available inside Google's Chromebook recovery images, and wrote tools to download and extract it from the publicly available images. As far as I can tell, the Raspberry Pi folks use scripts like that to obtain the CDM, and helpfully package it in a .deb file for easy installation on a Pi.

However, there's another catch: Although Chromebooks have aarch64 CPUs and kernels, they run an armv7l userspace. This means that the CDM blob is also armv7l. This is fine on Pis because they can also run an armv7l userspace (I think it's even the default still?). Unfortunately, Apple Silicon cannot run an armv7l userspace natively, the hardware simply does not support it.

Or rather, that was all true at the time when I first investigated Widevine-on-Asahi, several months ago. A few weeks ago, Google decided to enter the 21st century and started shipping aarch64 userspaces on certain Chromebook models. This means that "Widevine-in-Chrome-on-Linux-on-aarch64" does exist. The ChromeOS blob extraction process works as before, and the Pi Foundation conveniently packages it as a .deb for Pi users.