Blank screen with Pipelight crash without.

Asked by William

First of all when I initially installed it it didn't install Firefox. That was solved initially by copy Firefox directory from .wine directory into .wine-browser, but then it got the black screen the first time but only crashed after that. Seeing Pipeline mentioned here I looked that up. It is a Later adaption of this by Micheal Muller.

Since then I have added pipelight and apt-get dist-upgrade 'ed so everything is new.

Now Netflix-desktop works buts gets a black screen on playing. Additionally I get the same result launching firefox or Chrome directly and applying an user-agent mask to identify my browser as a Windows browser. (Although I had trouble installing it in chrome due to their big brother policy of deciding what is kosher and what is not.) Any now it all doesn't crash anymore, but I still get the blank screen. To test it I added the --nopipelight option and it crashed on launching the movie again.

So it seems it has been outmoded, but still can't play. I was planning on a star trek marathon through the end of the year and then canceling before my free month was up. =p

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

Hi William,

First of all I really recommend you to install any updates that are available, since we had some problems with a wine-compholio release recently (the one with the version string 1.7.8 is broken, we've already released 1.7.8-1). Please run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

As you experienced some crashes thats most probably caused by bad graphic card drivers. You can either try to update your graphic card drivers, or alternatively disable HW acceleration.

* To get Netflix-Desktop running (with or without using the Pipelight libraries): Just start it with
wine-browser --disable-hw-acceleration

* To get Pipelight running: Run the following command
/usr/share/pipelight/configure-silverlight
and type "disable" to disable HW acceleration. Restart the browser and set the user agent approprietly. We recommend to set it to:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1
You can check with http://fds-team.de/pipelight to verify that its set correctly.

Sebastian

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William (feiwuzei) said :
#2

Well I have found for my computer If I upgrade my system anymore it quits working all together. It has some serious health issues failing Hard Drive being the foremost.

Anyway I got it to work under the straight Firefox and pipelight, under wine it probably is to much drag on my system. Fiddlying with the Netflix playback settings under account. I took it off auto select video quality and put it on medium. Voila! It loads. The sound is hacks and skips but that is the other major issue with my computer. I need a new netbook.

There is another thing, in the options for playback it has "Prefer HTML5 player instead of Silverlight" and it is currently set on. I need to a search for HTML 5 player, but whats the difference?

Revision history for this message
Sebastian Lackner (slackner) said :
#3

Hi,

When you say it works under "Firefox and Pipelight" but not under "Wine" this cannot be completely valid. Are you trying to install just a regular firefox + Silverlight plugin in ~/.wine ? This will definitely not work, Pipelight and Netflix-Desktop only works because of its very specific patched wine version which is installed in /opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine (the regular one would not work!).

Pipelight also uses (the patched) Wine to run the plugin, and is just a bit more ressource efficient since it doesn't need to run a whole browser.

Since you seem to have a lot of different other performance issues with your system this is probably the main reason for the remaining problems and laggy playback. Did you have to disable GPU acceleration to get it running?

Concerning your HTML5 question:
HTML5 theoretically is a method to stream videos without any third party plugins directly in the browser (and without having to use Silverlight) - but in practice the videos are still DRM protected and the used DRM protectection is only implemented in Internet Explorer and closed-source. Unlike Silverlight there is currently no way yet to use these closed-source DRM modules in Linux, which means it isn't really an option. By the way: HTML5 DRM is only available for Windows 8 and newer.

Sebastian

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William (feiwuzei) said :
#4

YEah that is what I meant that Firefox is a straight install and pipelight is running under wine to translate the silverlight. That is why I called it an adaptation of netflix-desktop earlier.

The sound problem is any application pushing out sound. I just turn on the close captioning. I am trying the decelerated pipelight now. Nahh it is to choppy. Forced is ok but it has a jerky start.

To bad watching Netflix can't pay for a new computer.