PPA for Netflix Desktop App | Hacker News Reader

PPA for Netflix Desktop App

iheartubuntu.com

58 pointsvectorbunny17 comments

I wish Netflix would come out with a first-party native app for the Mac platform. Silverlight never gained any traction, and if it weren't for Netflix I could get it completely off my Mac.

There's also an Arch PKGBUILD on AUR for anyone using Arch. Seems to work on my 64-bit Arch installation.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/netflix-desktop-bin/

Does anyone know if this will mess with my existing wine setup or install side by side? I'd like to try it but I use other wine apps and don't wanna break them.

It looks like it installs a separate non-conflicting package called wine-compholio with the necessary patches, and leaves your current wine installed. I don't really have any current wine apps to test against, but you should be able to try and uninstall everything to get back to your current set up.

From the initial post:

'This build is not compatible with "vanilla" Wine, so installing this custom package will uninstall any existing Wine installation you have. Back up your current WINE folder to be safe.'

http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/netflix-on-ubuntu-is-her...

<edit> A peek in Synaptic shows both wine 1.4 && wine-compholio installed. Perhaps the PPA resolved the necessity of the uninstall. In the interest of public safety, I would definitely back up before proceeding.

I tried it on my kubuntu i386 netbook earlier today. The ppa installed ok and when I ran 'netflix-desktop' for the first time the wine installer downloaded and installed mono, then proceeded to install firefox. I noticed some errors but didn't look at them very carefuly.

I ran 'netflix-desktop' again and it said 'firefox.exe not found' at which point I gave up.

Off-topic:

In this image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R2DPjmtAo3E/UKkcVxeORZI/AAAAAAAABK...

I see an elephant icon that looks like the Evernote icon. Anybody know what's going on there?

A quick search of google returns this http://www.webupd8.org/2012/09/everpad-integrates-evernote-w...

Damn, it wants to install a thousand i386 packages on my system. Too much to ask for an x86-64 build? :D

> Too much to ask for an x86-64 build?

Yes, based on the fact building Wine on x86-64 Ubuntu requires a chroot environment and using debootstrap to set the arch to i386. Wine implements the Win32 API, which apparently relies intimately on i386 and can't be done using pure x86-64 code.

http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOn64bit

Runs choppy for me. What can I do?

Now this is cool. I wasn't particularly impressed with the article that went around about using Netflix with Firefox in WINE but now that someone took that and applied it like this is something I can get behind.

> the article that went around about using Netflix with Firefox in WINE

I'm not aware of any previously existing solution for Netflix on Linux using WINE. You mean the article from just a couple of days ago? This is the exact same thing, except provided in an installable package....

Works on Ubuntu 12.04 64bit. Installed, watched a part of a movie.

One thing is, it starts in full screen mode just press F11 to exit it out of it.

I hope the PPA doesn't contain MSFT code and instead downloads it on first launch from MSFT servers!

> I hope the PPA doesn't contain MSFT code and instead downloads it on first launch from MSFT servers!

It downloads both a 32-bit Firefox for Windows and the Silverlight plugin. (The Firefox is entirely contained in its own little bottle and can't conflict with anything else.)

Glad to see the legalities were taken care of. =)

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