Streaming DRM protected content/Pipelight

Recently it has been made possible to use Netflix in linux via Wine with good performance.

Check the Wine “Compholio” github page & the Pipelight page for the latest information. The patchset will be updated continuously until all of the necessary features are upstream in vanilla Wine. At the time of writing Wine version 1.7.22 is the latest one.

xattr
File system extended attributes are used to keep the precious DRM working, so you’ll potentially need to add support in your kernel as well as having your file system mounted explicitly with the option.

Checking for support
Quick check (may not be indicative with recent kernel versions):

More thorough:

Adding support
In recent kernel versions there doesn’t appear to be an option for ext4 extended attributes, presumably meaning they’re always on already.

See Kernel/Upgrade for in-depth kernel rebuild instructions.

If you were only missing the option in :

Installation
Initially, pipelight is only keyworded on ~amd64. Stable users will need to keyword it. Otherwise, it is a simple emerge command:

Initialization
After the installation just initialize the plugin(s) you want to use. To use Netflix you have to enable Silverlight.

Press Y to accept the plugin license. Then run Firefox (or your chosen web browser) from the Terminal to check if the plugin will run, i.e. for firefox-bin:

and watch the startup in the terminal for any errors. The plugin installation either starts immediately, or when visiting about:plugins in your webbrowser. If there are some errors please check again that you really installed Wine and Pipelight according to this page, if not then proceed with the following steps.

Microsoft Corefonts (optional)
For Wine-Compholio < 1.7.14 this step was required such that Silverlight works properly (see this FAQ entry). With Wine-Compholio 1.7.14 or greater the patchset already includes a Arial replacement font, which seems to be sufficient for the Silverlight plugin.

To install the Corefonts you have to use Winetricks. Just download the Winetricks script (for example to your home directory):

Mark it as executable:

Then run it:

Then select "Select the default wineprefix" -> "Install a font" -> "corefonts" and click "Okay".

Netflix
Install an extension listed at http://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight/+faq/2351 such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-overrider and configure a Windows UA string, such as this one:* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1

Enjoy improved Netflix.

Troubleshooting

 * Try different UA strings
 * (Re)Move
 * (Re)Move  from
 * Check paths & other variables in  (or if nonexistant,  )

Audio
If you use Pulseaudio but find that wine32 is trying to load 64-bit pulseaudio drivers, consider the solution found in this here

External resources

 * Pipelight | News
 * FDS-Team | Pipelight: using Silverlight in Linux browsers
 * Gentoo Forums :: View topic - HOWTO: Install Netflix on Gentoo