Netflix Desktop provides a convenient tool that downloads and installs all of the components necessary to run Netflix Watch Instantly under Wine, including the Windows version of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Silverlight v4. This package also includes some convience settings to integrate Netflix into Firefox in such a way that everything feels like a native Ubuntu application.
Currently, Wine does not include all of the necessary patches to use Netflix "out of the box", so the PPA below also contains a custom build of Wine with the patches included (see the Wine 'Compholio Edition'). It is important to note that this build is installed side-by-side with "vanilla" Wine, so installing the package will keep any existing Wine installation. This was not the case a long time ago (when netflix-desktop first became available), but this is no longer a concern.
It's also important to note that netflix-desktop is integrated with the pipelight project. This means that installing pipelight will cause netflix-desktop to use your native version of Firefox instead of running Firefox under Wine, which generally provides better performance. Pipelight also allows you to use Netflix in your normal browser, though it requires some additional configuration to make Netflix happy.
Neither this package or its author is affliated with, endorsed, provided, or supported in any way by Netflix, Inc.
I have an Ubuntu PPA setup, so you can add ppa:pipelight/stable to your Software Sources to automatically obtain updates. To do that simply run the following in a terminal window:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable sudo apt-get update
Once you've done that then all you need to do is install netflix-desktop. More detailed installation instructions (including adding "Pipelight" plugin support) is available at the Pipelight project website.
On some systems it's necessary to add a special mounting flag to gain extended attribute support, to do that you'll want to edit your fstab to add support for the extended filesystem attributes. To do that you want to edit the fstab file as root:
sudo gedit /etc/fstaband modify the fourth column of your primary filesystem (designated by "/" in the second column) to have ",user_xattr". The result should look something like this:
UUID=94f7fc1e-fa27-4b24-99f3-4b461665a4a4 / ext4 errors=remount-ro,user_xattr 0 1 # /dev/sda1
After you've done that just remount your main filesystem:
sudo mount -o remount /
Netflix and Netflix Watch Instantly are trademarks of Netflix, Inc. Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are trademarks of the Mozilla Corporation. Microsoft and Microsoft Silverlight are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation.
