Netflix Comes To Linux Via Silverlight On Patched Wine

Netflix video streaming is now available on Linux through the use of Wine. When running a specially patched version of Wine in conjunction with the Microsoft Windows versions of Firefox and Microsoft Silverlight, Netflix can now do Internet video streaming to the Linux desktop.

While the Netflix Inc has toyed with the idea of bringing their popular movie service to the Linux desktop, they haven't done so yet -- either natively or via Wine. Netflix is presently available for Windows and Mac OS X and requires the use of Microsoft Silverlight for the Internet video streaming service. The Mono-based Moonlight as an open-source Silverlight implementation for the native Linux desktop hasn't worked for Netflix due to the company's use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) mechanisms and other issues. Without these new Wine patches, running Netflix through a Windows browser with Silverlight has also failed up to this point.

Through a donation drive that was going on, a developer managed to achieve getting the service running on Wine. Aside from using Wine Git, there's five patches that currently need to be applied to the open-source program's code-base followed by installing Mozilla Firefox 14.0.1 for Windows and Microsoft Silverlight 4. When that's all setup correctly under the emulated environment, Netflix should finally work.

Testing was done on 32-bit Ubuntu Linux. The developer, Erich Hoover, is also said to be putting together an Ubuntu PPA to ease the setup process. Steps for setting up the patched version of Wine and Firefox/Silverlight are documented on this web-page. The patches against Wine will hopefully be merged into an upcoming Wine release:

- advapi: Implement GetNamedSecurityInfoW on top of GetSecurityInfo.
- server: Create directories with the specified security attributes.
- ntdll: Inherit security attributes from parent directories.
- server: Return more security attribute information.
- wininet: Fix InternetCrackUrl parsing URLs containing a semicolon.