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
If you don’t already have a local overlay (note this can interfere with Layman stuff):

Manual build instructions for pipelight can be found here

Setup crossdev
This will take quite a while:

Wine installation
This takes a bit, and produces a lot of output:

Pipelight config
Needs to be changed a bit:

At this point, double check your config "~/.config/pipelight" to make sure the paths are correct, specifically the Silverlight path. You may have have to disable the graphics driver check by setting graphicDriverCheck = /bin/true.

Firefox, etc.
Start Firefox (from terminal for output explaining whether pipelight is going to work or not), and go to http://bubblemark.com/silverlight2.html for a quick check for Silverlight support.

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