1181884 - Netflix HTML5 player is not working (even with Media Source Extensions enabled) in Ubuntu/Linux

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0
Build ID: 20150513191446

Steps to reproduce:

Add a User Agent Switcher addon (Netflix blacklists UA strings other than Chrome) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-overrider/

Add and activate this User Agent string (mimics Chrome 40) "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115 Safari/537.36"

Go to "about:config" and set "media.mediasource.enabled" & "media.mediasource.webm.enabled" to true

browse to Netflix.com and click the play button for any title


Actual results:

The video appears to prepare to play (red animated circle over a background showing a still from the selected title)

An error appears, asking "Is this an official version of Chrome?"

The video does not play


Expected results:

Video should play without errors

Comment 1

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

Attachment: fatal error in netflix HTML5 player.png

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Netflix's HTML video player does not support Linux yet because Adobe's Primetime CDM does not support Linux yet. We do plan to support Linux.

Comment 3

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

Netflix is actually working just fine now, in Firefox 49, using a brand-new profile, as long as the user-agent is then spoofed to claim to be Windows.

Working UA string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0

Comment 4

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

Reverted last-minute changes to this bug. Filed as a new bug instead. See bug 1317371.

Comment 10

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Is it still not working?

Comment 11

[Loic]

(In reply to Marco Castelluccio [:marco] from comment #10)
> Is it still not working?

Probably not according to this recent comment from Chris:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1315978#c14

Comment 12

[Parker]

I run into the same issue as before on nightly 53.0a1 (2017-01-18) (64-bit) on Linux Mint 18.1
It redirects me to this page: https://t.co/6EXT6HUOEH

Comment 13

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Can we spoof as Windows?

Comment 14

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

We can spoof as Chrome and it will work (I had to install libav-tool on my VM to get it to work, but DenSchub didn't... I'm not a linux user so I don't know how that translates to the real world).

However, Chris mentioned he was working with Netflix to get this fixed and has asked us to not spoof just yet.

See https://github.com/mozilla/webcompat-addon/pull/11 for a proof of concept patch that will allow us to get this to work once Bug 1308271 lands.

Comment 15

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

(In reply to Mike Taylor [:miketaylr] from comment #14)
> See https://github.com/mozilla/webcompat-addon/pull/11 for a proof of
> concept patch that will allow us to get this to work once Bug 1308271 lands.

(If we decide we want to go that route, that is)

Comment 16

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

I have not tested it myself, but supposedly this is fixed now!

http://techblog.netflix.com/2017/03/update-on-html5-video-for-netflix.html

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/netflix-finally-adds-support-firefox-linux

Comment 17

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

That's awesome -- let's close. \o/

Comment 18

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

I am unable to get it to work on Nightly but it works well on Release. Is there any difference between Nightly and Release in this area?

Comment 19

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Tomer, can you file a new bug in AV Playback? I don't know enough about our MSE work to know -- thanks!