I would like to be able to watch Netflix on Ubuntu, but on the website it doesn't let me do so. I also attempted to download netflix-desktop but when I click the icon it doesn't do anything.
Thank you.
I would like to be able to watch Netflix on Ubuntu, but on the website it doesn't let me do so. I also attempted to download netflix-desktop but when I click the icon it doesn't do anything.
Thank you.
Clearing the wine browser directory and then re-installing as described by chargedPeptide in the comments for the previous answer worked for me.
The commands are:
rm -rf ~/.wine-browser sudo apt-get install --reinstall netflix-desktop
I'll provide the solution, which worked for me. First, to get a terminal output from netflix-desktop, you should launch it like this:
netflix-desktop --showdebug
Second, when you install netflix-desktop from the ppa, it not always downloads and install a Windows version of Firefox. This installation is handled by the wine-browser-installer package, so one solution would be to remove ~/.wine-browser directory and reinstall the package, as recommended above. Sadly, it did not work for me, and terminal output was still stating:
wine: cannot find 'C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe'
What helped is that I've downloaded Firefox for Windows manually, using the link, that displays, when you install wine-browser-installer package (in my case it was this version). Then I've installed it, using normal wine. It was installed under
~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Mozilla Firefox
After that I've ran
cp -R ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Mozilla\ Firefox/ ~/.wine-browser/drive_c/Program\ Files/
That solved my problem, hope it'll help.
The same people who brought you netflix-desktop
(which really works very well, you might want to run it from terminal and post the output) just released pipelight
to integrate silverlight into linux native firefox - thus allowing netflix.
Instructions are found here.
But for those in a rush:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mqchael/pipelight
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pipelight
And start firefox.
This is a beta release though so nothing is guaranteed yet.
As said previously you might want to give netflix-desktop
a shot in the terminal and post the output.
I have had this problem over several versions of Ubuntu from 12.04 to date (currently on 14.04) This happens without fail when netflix pushes a requirement for a new version of microsoft silverlight. What always works for me is:
Close the browser netflix-desktop opened.
Open a terminal and issue the first command mentioned by @sickgemini
rm -rf ~/.wine-browser
which eliminates the entire contents of the .wine-browser folder in the users home directory which is where netflix-desktop keeps its settings and configuration. to be specific the content is:
dosdevices system.reg wine-browser-installer.sha256sums
drive_c userdef.reg wine-silverlight5.1-installer.sha256sums
profile-settings user.reg wine-version
If you see something else there you may wish to save it elsewhere because it will be gone after running the remove.
After eliminating this directory and it's content the next launch of netflix-desktop
performs exactly like the first launch and recreates the necessary information. At this point it operates as advertised. There is no need to reinstall, nor install additional plugins (assuming the original installation isn't corrupted)