Netflix Fixer for Linux

Note: Because this addon utilizes the latest WebExtention and ES6 technologies for efficiency, this addon requires Firefox >= 48. If you have different requirements, please contact me and I'll write a separate version for you.

How to watch Netflix on Linux (and other *nixes) Netflix requires additional media playing software called Microsoft Silverlight, which runs on top of the Microsoft .NET framework. In the past, the people at Xararin created an open-source implementation of .NET called Mono that ran an implementation of Silverlight, which they named Moonlight, which enabled you to play Silverlight files natively on any *nix environment. Unfortunately the project is no longer developed which forces us to install .NET and Silverlight in a Windows emulator and tell Firefox to play Silverlight files through that setup. Luckily, it's (usually) not as hard as it sounds!

1. Install Pipelight. Pipelight is an easy to use installer program for Silverlight and other Windows only browser extensions, automatically installing and configuring WINE, and using NPAPI to seamlessly integrate the extension into your browser. This does not work with browsers which do not support NPAPI, such as Google Chrome. And because this method uses WINE, you will only be able to use this method on 32 or 64 bit x86 platforms.
   1. Debian-like/Ubuntu/AV Linux/SteamOS, 64-bit: Enable 32 bit packages. On newer versions of Ubuntu, this is enabled by default but running this command will be harmless.

      sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

   2. Remove any previous versions of Pipelight (just in case):
      • Debian-like/Ubuntu/AV Linux/SteamOS:

        sudo apt-get remove pipelight*

   3. Enable / install non-free Microsoft corefonts.
      • Ubuntu/OpenSUSE: Already enabled by default, skip to next step.
      • Debian: Enable the contrib repository:

        sudo sed -i "/^# deb .* contrib$/ s/^# //" /etc/apt/sources.list

        This will enable Debian's contrib repository, which contains many non-free packages.
      • Fedora:

        sudo rpm -i http://sourceforge.net/projects/mscorefonts2/files/rpms/msttcore-fonts-installer-2.6-1.noarch.rpm

   4. Add the Pipelight repository key to your package manager keystore:
      • SteamOS:

        wget -O- http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/DarkPlayer:/Pipelight/SteamOS/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -

      • Ubuntu >= 10.04: This is handled automatically by the apt-add-repository command in the next step. See more