Streaming DRM protected content/Pipelight

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

Check the “Compholio” Wine patches page & the FDS-Team Pipelight page for the latest information. At the time of this writing, Wine version 1.7.5 seemed to be targeted, which is not currently in portage.

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 :

Wine
Until wine-1.7.5 is added to Portage, it is necessary to install and patch wine manually. Up to date instructions can be found here

Pipelight
Since Pipelight is later than most current versions in overlays, the only viable way to install Pipelight itself is to compile it.

Setup crossdev
This will take quite a while: wget https://launchpad.net/pipelight/trunk/0.2/+download/pluginloader-prebuilt-v0.2.3.tar.xz}}

Compile Pipelight
First, get the needed tarballs for the pipelight source and precompiled binary:

Next extract the files:

And move the pluginloader binary to the pipelight src/windows directory:

Then cd into the pipelight source directory and build it:

then install it:

Initialization
Before you use the plugin, you have to initialize it, first run

Then initialize the plugin(s) you want:

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

and watch the startup in the terminal for any errors, if any are found, check that you properly installed Wine and Pipelight according to this page, if not, proceed.

Then you have to install corefonts in Pipelight (which isn't installed by default. To do so you have to use Winetricks, to get them, cd to your home directory and grab the script:

Mark it as executable:

Then run it:

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

The next section details a bit of extra configuration needed for services such as Netflix

Netflix
Install an extension listed at http://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight/+faq/2351 such as http://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/uacontrol/ and configure  to be sent a UA string, such as this one:* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:23.0) Gecko/20131011 Firefox/23.0

Enjoy improved Netflix.

Troubleshooting

 * Try different UA strings
 * (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

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