As y'all know, I'm not the biggest fan of Firefox; Chrome's my main 'squeeze', and has been for the last 8 years. But I'm well aware that many of my fellow Puppians abhor the incessant 'nosiness' that comes with the big G's flagship browser, and have been anticipating the much-hyped inclusion of the Widevine modules into FireFox 49.....which will enable the playing of, among other things, NetFlix.
I've been experimenting with the 64-bit version in Tahr64 earlier this evening, although there's no reason why this workaround shouldn't work just as well in the 32-bit version (though I have reservations about this, which I will explain later.)
So, without further ado, let's get to it!
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Obviously, you'll need FF 49 installed. There's not much to this 'workaround', although there's a bit of 'faffing-around' to perform.
1) Go into Preferences>Content, and check the box for 'Playback of DRM content'.
2) Then, from the Add-ons store, you'll need to install 'User Agent Overrider'. We've gotta make NetFlix think we're running Chrome for now, till they get their act together.....
3) Then, we need to go into Add-ons>Extensions>User Agent Overridrer>Preferences. A window will appear, containing the installed user-agent strings. You'll need to leave this box open for a few moments.
4) Courtesy of the askubuntu.com site:-
http://askubuntu.com/questions/828286/n ... ch-netflix
.....we need to copy the following string:-
Code: Select all
Linux / Chrome 53: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.34 Safari/537.36
Left-click on the 'User Agent Overrider' button on the toolbar. You should have an entry at the bottom for 'Linux / Chrome 53'. Click the radio-button for this entry.
That's it!
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The only reason I have reservations about this working in 32-bit FF 49 is because of this very user agent string. Chrome hasn't been supported under 32-bit Linux since version 48, so I'd be dead curious to see if this workaround applies there, too. I haven't yet had a chance to try it myself.
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Now, if you go to NetFlix, sign in, and choose summat to watch, you should, all things being equal, be able to watch NetFlix in Linux Firefox for the first time.
You may find that you have to refresh the page, when you choose to resume anything you're in the middle of watching before you get the big red 'spinner', followed by the movie starting to play. This is mentioned in the Askubuntu.com workaround. It does work.
Anybody who wants to try this, let me know how you get on with it, please. I can't be the only one to be able to get this working..!
Mike.