Posted: 3/4/2011 5:55:30 PM EDT
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Netflix won't stream instantly to my laptop because I'm running firefox on Linux Mint. Isn't there a way to make it think that I'm running windows? |
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Won't matter, at least the last time I checked. Your best bet for netflix on linux is a WinXP virtual machine. One way I have managed to get it working is an elaborate and way to involved WINE setup with FireFox+silverlight. (I have never gotten "moonlight" to work) I haven't tried recently as there is a playstation 3 about 6 feet away from me. |
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Having a similar problem, wanting to run Ubuntu 10.04 and watch Netflix streaming without rebooting into Windows. I experimented with doing Netflix streaming in a Windows XP virtual machine, using Virtualbox 3.2 on my Ubuntu 10.04 host machine.
No dice. Video was choppy and jittery, quite unwatchable. It was probably about like watching on a laptop with a crappy Intel GMA video device, rather than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ video card I have in my desktop. Or like trying to do Netflix streaming while running bittorrents. That was a surprise. I can watch DVDs through a virtual Windows machine on a Linux host, no problem. It wasn't a question of resources, as I gave the virtual XP machine plenty of RAM (2 GB out of the host machine's 4 GB) and had no other applications running. I don't like Silverlight in general. It has constant updates which often require restarting my machine, performs worse than Flash (which is a feat!), and isn't available in a native Linux version. Performance is maddeningly variable. Sometimes video will be jerky every few seconds for the first few minutes of a show, then settle down. Sometimes it never stops being jerky throughout a show. Occasionally, it's smooth as glass for the duration of the show. Seems to depend completely on ISP network conditions at the time. I never had that problem watching stuff via Flash at Hulu.com et al. Here's the really weird thing: I have Virtualbox 4.0.4 installed under Windows 7. When I use it to host a virtual XP machine similar to the one I have under Ubuntu, Netflix streaming works fine. Completely watchable. It might have to do with the crappiness of Nvidia's Linux drivers. Or maybe Virtualbox 4.0.4 is simply way better at video than Virtualbox 3.2 was. |
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for you guys having stuttering issues in a VM try lowering the resolution of the HOST OS and then try it.
Also if you're rocking out multi-core processors give the VM a single core to work with. Quoted:
Netflix requires Silverlight. If you figure out how to get that running in Linux, please let me know. Who needs silverlight when there is moonlight? still won't matter though. Netflix doesn't work on linux because of DRM specifically Microsoft's "playready" luckily with things like Wine & VM's there are always ways around it. |