Netflix, Pipelight, Firefox, 14.04, and "you must enable ActiveX"

[Roasted]

Hello friends. I just installed Pipelight as per these instructions:

http://www.itworld.com/software/4140...ht-ubuntu-1404

But when I go to Netflix and try to play a video I get:

The Netflix Movie Viewer requires ActiveX to be enabled. Please verify in your Internet Explorer security settings that ActiveX is enabled, then reload this page to try again.
You may need to disable firewall or anti-virus software to enable ActiveX.

If I use Chrome, everything works. Any ideas?

[monkeybrain20122]

What did you set your user agent to? I always use Firefox Windows and it works.

BTW, it won't work in Chrome after the next Chrome update and google will drop support to all NAPAI plugins, pipelight included.

[David D.]

The instructions you followed installs Pipelight, but neglects to have you install the User Agent Overrider add-on for Firefox.

Here is a link to that add-0n. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ent-overrider/

[Habitual]

I installed User Agent Switcher 0.7.3 for Firefox
pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight
choose Firefox15.0a1 Win7 64 for your Agent.
Test it at http://fds-team.de/pipelight/

[Roasted]

User Agent Switcher did not work. I only had options for IE 6, 7, 8. Didn't have many other options. Tried all 3 and none got me past the ActiveX error. I installed User Agent Overrider and that worked wonderfully. Also, good to know about the Chrome thing. Not to get into a Chrome vs Firefox debate but I've been growing increasingly frustrated with Chrome, so you telling me they're yanking that capability isn't exactly a surprise. I wonder though... will there be some sort of work around for it? After all, I *never* suspected that there would be a work around for Netflix/Silverlight on Linux to begin with, and here we have one. Maybe a new Chrome add-on will pop up that works?

Also, you guys out there who have used Pipelight/Netflix/Ubuntu since the beginning of time... How reliable is it? I'm thinking of doing a dual boot on my HTPC. Ubuntu for primary, and Windows 7 for a backup... just in case I'm away at work or whatever and my wife calls saying that Netflix is broken, she can reboot without me getting an earfull - ha! But anyway, has it ever 'broken' for you guys via updates? Or is it typically a set-it-and-forget-it thing?

Thanks for the quick assistance!

EDIT - Now this is going to get irritating. I closed Firefox a few times and reopened to Netflix to test, but now it's giving me the system requirements page each time. In the preferences of User Agent Overrider, it looks like it's just a text file with a bunch of entries in it that I didn't touch. What on earth changed - already?

[David D.]

Is the User Agent Overrider icon in the upper right of Firefox blue or grey? If it is grey (i.e. turned off), left-click on it to turn it on. If it is blue, it is on/active. If User Agent Overrider is on/active and you are still having the problem, I no ideas on a fix right now.

[oldos2er]

Moved to Multimedia & Video.

User Agent Switcher never worked for me, but User Agent Overrider does, see https://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight/+faq/2351

[SeijiSensei]

I got dumped to the System Requirements page when going simply to www.netflix.com, but I discovered that if I go to http://www.netflix.com/WiHome, I can watch videos with pipelight installed. I have UAControl installed with this User-Agent string associated to Netflix: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:23.0) Gecko/20131011 Firefox/23.0.

I also told pipelight to install the Windows version of Flash Player. Some places now check for Version 12 of Flash which will never be released for Linux.

[Roasted]

Is the User Agent Overrider icon in the upper right of Firefox blue or grey? If it is grey (i.e. turned off), left-click on it to turn it on. If it is blue, it is on/active. If User Agent Overrider is on/active and you are still having the problem, I no ideas on a fix right now.

Ah, derp. I hadn't noticed that it added that icon there. Thanks for that.

Man I hope the inevitable Netflix/HTML5 future brings a better experience to Linux. While I was troubleshooting this, I simultaneously booted up Android X86 on a spare desktop, and even there Netflix wouldn't run. It would open but just insta-crash.

I'm starting to wonder if Netflix on the computer is just an epic fail. I mean, I know it's kind of a fail, but I'm giving more thought about just buying an Android stick/box/gizmo to utilize at a HTPC. Most of my tech friends I speak to don't understand why I fuss with Netflix the way that I do, but they all have Roku/PS3's/etc. I'm glad that I have Netflix working on my laptop and will use it, but I'm not sure I'll utilize it at the HTPC - but only because the fan in it sure sounded a LOT quieter in my office than when I set it up behind the TV in the living room... so either way I want to look for another gizmo to do that job.

I do have a Chromecast... but I retired it after it couldn't do local streaming over something like Samba. I have almost 2 TB of videos on my server and being locked out of that was a headache. Anybody know if the Chromecast supports local streaming yet? That alone would be a no-cost solution since I already have one...

[monkeybrain20122]

Man I hope the inevitable Netflix/HTML5 future brings a better experience to Linux.

Well but it is not plain html5, it has drm modules that don't work on Linux, so something like pipelight will still be necessary.

You asked how reliable pipelight is, I have been using pipelight for five months and it has worked very well and reliable on two of my computers (intel and Nvidia), I mean as smooth and reliable as watching videos on Youtube. Neither of them are high end. Now I am setting it up on an amd netbook for a friend, it doesn't work as well (machine is weak) but good enough after some tweaking (even fast action kung fu films play ok, though not on full screen) So I am quite confident to recommend it if you have not too out of date hadware. Next I will try getting netflix on my roommate's 8 year old hp laptop which I have installed lubuntu on.

Actually I am more interested in pipelight than netflix. I pay a monthly $8 just to play with pipelight, the selections on netflix are quite forgettable IMO. I watched only a few films from beginning to end and none of them are very good. I can find better films on Youtube, at least before they got reported and taken down.

Now that XP is dead and a few friends are inquiring about Linux, pipelight helps a lot in converting these computers to *buntu as many of their owners watch netflix.