NSS Updated On Ubuntu 12.04/14.04 To Allow Netflix Support

[nanonyme]

Okay, so will not work with out-of-the box Chromium but will eventually work with out-of-the box Firefox. Good to know

[liam]

Why the hell are they filtering user agent strings rather than capabilities? The browser either has the extensions or not. If not, it won't work anyway.

[Luke]

UA whitelisting is a good reason not to rely on a site or subscribe to it

So... They use the browser's UA to "detect" what version of NSS is used, and once their reference distro updates to the correct version of NSS, they'll whitelist the useragent string ? This is completely broken, there's no relationship between the UA string and the version of NSS.

Pushing for for majors distros to ship the required version of NSS is a good thing, but using UA whitelisting like this is a big WTF.

If you pay money to subscribe to a site using UA filtering, you don't know what they will block next. Don't risk your money, cancel your subscription today. It's one thing to hack UAs to defeat blocking by a site you can access for free, quite another to bet real meatspace money on winning a hacker war against their "security" team. This is literally as good a reason as principled opposition to DRM to dump Netflix.

Full disclosure: You cannot use netflix, Hulu, or any other DRMed content on any machine I own, that is by intentional design on my end not to support DRM. You can use Bittorrent just fine, though the only thing I've used if for is big distro disk files when the servers providing them are busy and asking everyone to torrent so as to take the load off the servers.

[FireBurn]

For those folk using Gentoo I've put an ebuild here: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523476 with the new widevine DRM support

[Daktyl198]

firefox does not support the needed DRM (HTML5 DRM thingy).
Untill firefox wakes up from its sleep netflix cant do nothing about it.
BTW i doubt firefox will support it anytime soon. it barely supports youtube video in html5, its missing so many codecs and stuff (even flash sucks on it... STILL FUCKING WAITING FOR SHUMWAY OR USE PEEPER!!!!) firefox is just... too slow...

PS: i used to love firefox thats why it makes me so angry to see it in this state.

It's supported Youtube HTML5 very well for ages (though, that may be because I'm on Nightly), and I don't know what you mean when you say it's "Missing so many codecs". On both my Windows 8.1 and Manjaro Linux installs, it supports almost every codec that is used on the web (h.264, mp4, ogg, wemb, etc).\

Also, Firefox isn't "sleeping" in relation to the DRM module "thingy"; they have to wait for Adobe to finish creating the module itself. After THAT, Netflix has to alter/provide new DRM binaries that will work with that DRM module.

[peppercats]

doesn't work with chromium, open bug on ubuntu's bug tracker about it.

[abral]

It's nice how many people always talk against DRM and then complain that an opensource browser built by a community that hates DRM doesn't support DRM since the beginning.

[droidhacker]

Works fine in Fedora 20 with Chrome Beta.

You don't need the beta any more. Chrome release (37) does the job.

[droidhacker]

On Windows, I use Netflix as standard on Chrome, getting the UK version. And I've got an extension in Firefox that gives me the US Netflix, meaning I can swap between them at ease just by opening different browsers (Netflix is pretty much the only thing I open Firefox for).

Until I can replicate this behaviour on Linux, I'll stick with Windows. But I'm happy about the progress non-the-less. Now, if I could just find a music player on Linux with a GUI that I like (like Media Monkey!)....

Personally, I prefer doing the netflix hack at the router level (openwrt). This lets you apply the hack to everything on your network. If you want to get fancy with it, you can rig up hack_on/hack_off/different_hack per-device or per-application via web page served by openwrt.

[droidhacker]

If you pay money to subscribe to a site using UA filtering, you don't know what they will block next. Don't risk your money, cancel your subscription today. It's one thing to hack UAs to defeat blocking by a site you can access for free, quite another to bet real meatspace money on winning a hacker war against their "security" team. This is literally as good a reason as principled opposition to DRM to dump Netflix.

Full disclosure: You cannot use netflix, Hulu, or any other DRMed content on any machine I own, that is by intentional design on my end not to support DRM. You can use Bittorrent just fine, though the only thing I've used if for is big distro disk files when the servers providing them are busy and asking everyone to torrent so as to take the load off the servers.

$9/month isn't a huge amount of money to dump into the pit. Sure beats paying your local cabletv provider for LESS content and EVEN MORE DRM (because its built into a black box sitting beneath your TV with HDCP on the HDMI.
Also, your theory about winning a hacker war is far out of touch. If they start winning, you vote with your wallet THEN and cancel your sub.

At least with this, the DRM is NOT fully end-to-end. At some point, it comes out of the drm libraries and feeds into your video decoder.



And that's not even mentioning the PRICE difference. What would a netflix-like level of content cost from cabletv? Probably $500/month or more.
In more interesting news, last night, Netflix told the CRTC to go f**k itself over an order for information. That actually makes me feel GOOD about Netflix, because they aren't bending to the will of governments.