Netflix Desktop

No video on Mint 16

Asked by Kirk Gunderson

I (and several others) have been unable to get netflix-desktop (and pipelight too) to work on Mint 16 and Nvidia graphics. The problem exists on both cinnamon and mate versions of mint 16. Both netflix-desktop and pipelight work perfectly fine in Mint 15 (and all recent versions of Xubuntu too) on the same hardware and video driver.

my hardware:
MSI Z77A-GD65
Intel -i5 3570K @ 3.4 ghz
Nvidia (EVGA) GTX 660SC
8 Gigs RAM

Installation goes as expected (done many times before). When launching a video stream from netflix, sound plays but no video.

I have tried these several drivers for my Nvidia GTX 660 card: 330, 319, and Nouveau.

Using pipelight I have tried to disable hardware acceleration, and force hardware acceleration, without results. Through many attempts I have gotten these graphical results : black screen, bizarre artifacts from the previous "browse" page of netflix, and a transparent/no window at all (can see windows and desktop through netflix-desktop window).

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Netflix Desktop Edit question
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Kirk Gunderson
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Sebastian Lackner (slackner) said : 		#1

Hi,

the problem is that the Nvidia video driver shipped with Ubuntu 13.10 / Mint 16 are very crappy and don't work with 32 bit software. Some people reported that for pipelight it works when you disable "Embed into browser" by right clicking on the plugin and reloading the page - for some other people it just crashed with all configurations.

For both Netflix-Desktop and Pipelight it should be sufficient when HW acceleration is disabled (I guess you didn't correctly disable it).

For Netflix-Desktop or Netflix-Desktop with pipelight-multi libs installed:
wine-browser --disable-hw-acceleration

For Pipelight in the native linux browser:
very important: close all other browser windows first. then start the browser with for example:
PIPELIGHT_GPUACCELERATION=0 firefox
Its also possible to switch off HW acceleration permanently, if this turns out to fix the problem.

To get completely rid of this error without having to disable HW acceleration the only way is to update the Nvidia graphic drivers, but unfortunately there are no packages for such new driver versions yet. We got some reports about similar problems, and in all cases it was fixed after updating to newer versions, for example 331.20. I assume you probably didn't ensure that the drivers (INCLUDING 32 bit libraries) were installed correctly. Nouveau drivers should also work well.

If you want to do some more attempts, please update to a new driver version again and then check "glxinfo" and the terminal output when starting netflix-desktop/pipelight to ensure that everything is installed correctly.

Sebastian

Revision history for this message
Kirk Gunderson (iowabeakster-0) said : 		#2

Thanks for all you do.

I just came back to inform that I found out that Mint 16 apparently doesn't have 32 bit libs installed by default. Only to find you had already posted.

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

and all is well.

I originally downloaded and installed the Nvidia 331.20 manually, and instructed it to install the 32 bit libs included in the driver blob. But that didn't do the trick either.

Anyway. Thank you again for all your hard work.