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Netflix on Ubuntu: Try this PPA

Netflix had been a bugbear of Ubuntu in the USA for a while now. I’ve long suspected a conspiracy was at work in Netflix to stop Ubuntu and other Free Desktops having access to their watch instantly service. Since ya know, they seem to have no problems with ChromeOS, Roku, Android or a bazillion other Linux distributions that don’t sun silverlight.

Only Saturday I was installing Ubuntu for someone and the one question that added doubt to their experience was Netflix watch instantly support.

So onto the good news. Over at iHeartUbuntu they’ve packaged up their wine implementation of Netflix running through Firefox. Really it doesn’t matter what wrapper or other crap is used for this, having support that is easy enough to install and quick enough to execute is the main point.

This package sorts everything out and puts an icon in the right place. That’s exactly what we needed. The performance on my machine is 80% of what it needs to be, but I’m confident that with a little more work it can be improved into something that really helps Ubuntu adoption and get over that chasm.

Have you tried it?

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2012 at 15:13 and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Netflix on Ubuntu: Try this PPA”

  1. A. User says:
    2012-11-19 at 18:23

    It’s hardly a conspiracy, it’s an economic decision. Roku et al. pay netflix for the privilege of shipping a Netflix client. Are you willing to pay for a Netflix client on your platform of choice?

  2. doctormo says:
    2012-11-20 at 00:30

    @A. User: Yes

    There is no technical reason; no economic reason either, since there are more Ubuntu users than ChromeOS users. This is a clear case of Netflix choosing to be obstructive.

  3. thiebaude says:
    2012-11-21 at 10:39

    I just can’t understand why Netflix would not want many millions more subscribers. It works very good on my Desktop and Laptop. This is a start to get native Netflix running in Firefox, Chrome etc. The only reason I had used Windows was Netflix, now I don’t need to anymore. I do see a day when Netflix will be on the browser without wine, I don’t that time is far away.

  4. Aldo Nogueira says:
    2012-11-21 at 10:44

    I have tried netflix-desktop and it works perfectly. Much better than the MacOSX-on-Virtualbox that I was using before. :)
    My machine is a Phenom II X4 3.2 with ATI 4770 (fglrx) running Ubuntu 12.04 64 bits.