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Watching native Netflix on Ubuntu 14.04

on in Linux

As reported Netflix now works natively under Linux.

However, some people (including me) reported some troubles under Ubuntu 14.04. After following the described steps by Nathan VanCamp I got an error when opening a video: Error Code: M7063-1913.

When going back to the thread on Google plus Malte Batram reported that Ubuntu 14.04 needed a newer version of libnss for Netflix in Chrome to work.

Therefore I backported the newer version of libnss in Ubuntu Utopic (14.10) to Ubuntu 14.04. This way you can just add a ppa and get the right version of libnss to make Netflix work under Ubuntu.

The steps for getting Netflix to work on Ubuntu are now:

Step 1

Install chrome. I did this by creating /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list and adding this to the file:

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#  # # THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

Then do an apt-get update and an apt-get dist-upgrade. And finally install the Google Chrome beta: apt-get install google-chrome-beta.

Step 2

Upgrade the nss library:

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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:leonbo/nss
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The above command should upgrade three packages:

  • libnss3
  • libnss3-1d
  • libnss3-nssdb

If you know what you’re doing step 1 and 2 can be combined.

Step 3

Launch Chrome beta and install the the User-Agent Switcher for chrome.

Step 4

Add a custom Chrome agent:

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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2049.0 Safari/537.36

I used the values for the other fields:

  • New User-agent name: Netflix
  • Group: Chrome
  • Append?: Replace
  • Indicator Flag: NF

Step 5

Switch your user-agent to the new custom one, and go to netflix

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