ChromeFlix - or Netflix Watch Instantly for Google Chrome on the Mac

Submitted by Steven on

Netflix Watch Instantly should work fine in Google Chrome. After all, it is using the same rendering engine as Safari, so it should just work, right?

The answer is not that simple...

Google Chrome for the Mac is 100% capable of running Netflix Watch Instantly, but the web-geeks at Netflix are bad programmers.

The Netflix geeks did a very bad job of detecting Watch Instantly capable browsers. They are looking for the word SAFARI instead of looking for the word WEBKIT as an identifier in the browser's user-agent. Because of this, Chrome users get an apology instead of streaming movies.

Tsk, tsk, tsk... sloppy programming Netflix!

Here's the work around:

First, the easy way:
Download ChromeFlix which launches your currently installed version of Chrome but makes it pretend to be Apple's Safari.

Leopard Users (OSX 10.5.x) click here.

And here's the geeky way:
In terminal issue the following command:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1 9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.19"

Or, the uber-geeky way:
Open terminal, edit .profile, and make an alias to the geeky command above.

Until Netflix decides to hire competent web-geeks, the choices above are your only solutions.

Tags: 

Comments

For linux, the problem is

Submitted by Steven on

For linux, the problem is that Moonlight implements Silverlight WITHOUT the DRM that made Netflix choose it in the first place. And, without DRM support, it can't play the videos.

So, the only way to use Watch Instantly on linux is to run VirtualBox and run a whole Windows instance.

Wish I could help,

Steven

THANK YOU so much for this.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

THANK YOU so much for this. Google needs to thank you also, because literally the only reason I didn't switch from firefox was that I couldn't play netflix instant videos on Chrome. Now with Chromeflix, I've totally made the switch to Chrome, deleted firefox off of my mac.

Though I have only tested on

Submitted by Steven on

Though I have only tested on 10.6, this should work on any OS capable of running Chrome (dev or beta). The app, ChromeFlix, is simply a wrapper around the command also mentioned here in the article. Quit Chrome. Start a Terminal. Enter the command and test it that way.

You forgot the final quote

Submitted by Joe H (not verified) on

You forgot the final quote mark the whole command should be:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1 9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.19"

All the best!

Joe

Now if only chrome ran video

Submitted by Dave (not verified) on

Now if only chrome ran video well on macs - streaming netflix on my computer via chrome causes it to heat up twice as fast and get twice as hot as it does with safari. An chance you can put pressure on google to be a little less lazy like you did with netflix?

I am no expert on the alias

Submitted by JmS (not verified) on

I am no expert on the alias command, and I'm a little confused. Since it is typically enclosed in quotation marks, and there already are quotations within the command, could you please spell out how the shortcut should look like in .profile or .cshrc? Thanks!

Enclose it in single quotes.

Submitted by Steven on

Enclose it in single quotes. This is how it looks in my .profile:

alias netflix='open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.19"'

I am new to Mac's and love

Submitted by Lee (not verified) on

I am new to Mac's and love them. When I mean new I mean NEW! My question is: could making chrome appear to be safari could be bad in some cases? I dont want chrome with a identity complex do I?

Thank you for helping me understand.
Lee

No, it won't cause a problem,

Submitted by Steven on

No, it won't cause a problem, Chrome and Safari use the same rendering engine. And, since you will only start Chrome with ChromeFlix when you want to watch netflix, it won't affect you the rest of the time.

Hi Steve, I think there's a

Submitted by Malcolm (not verified) on

Hi Steve, I think there's a mistake in the leopard package. It wasn't working for me, but once I went into the script file (Contents>Resources>script) and removed the "open" at the beginning of the script it started working fine. (I'm running 10.5.8).

Thanks for putting this together.

Malcolm is correct. I'm using

Submitted by BlueWeaselBreath (not verified) on

Malcolm is correct. I'm using 10.5.8, and as I don't normally use Macs (this is a roommate's computer) I was stumped on how to fix the problem. When I first downloaded the file, it opened for a microsecond then closed again without ever launching the Chrome window. When I removed the "open" from the script file, it worked as intended.

Thanks for this!

Another 10.5.8 user here, and

Submitted by Jonathan (not verified) on

Another 10.5.8 user here, and I had the same results as Malcolm. ChromeFlix would open, but it wouldn't cause Chrome to start up. Removing 'open' from the script file resolved the issue, and I'm watching Netflix problem-free now :)

Hi Steve:

Submitted by R. Kevin Hill (not verified) on

Hi Steve:
I can confirm that (1) your non-Snow, Leopard version has the "open" command in the script, (2) it does not work as advertised on 10.5.8, (2) that if you delete the "open" command it works like a charm. Thanks for your work, but you might want to delete that "open" command.
K

Just wanted to thank you for

Submitted by dougefresh91 (not verified) on

Just wanted to thank you for this. I've been using Chrome for a few months now, and whenever I want to watch instant watch I have to open Firefox. I saw this fix floating around, but never knew how to implement it on the Mac. Worked great once I realized that I had to move Chrome to my app folder.

[...] can copy and paste into

Submitted by How to enable N... (not verified) on

[...] can copy and paste into the Terminal. If mucking about with that makes you queasy, you can download Chromeflix (one version for Mac OS X v10.5, one for v10.6) which, after a simple double-click, does the same [...]

[...] can copy and paste into

Submitted by How to enable N... (not verified) on

[...] can copy and paste into the Terminal. If mucking about with that makes you queasy, you can download Chromeflix (one version for Mac OS X v10.5, one for v10.6) which, after a simple double-click, does the same [...]

[...] can copy and paste into

Submitted by How to enable N... (not verified) on

[...] can copy and paste into the Terminal. If mucking about with that makes you queasy, you can download Chromeflix (one version for Mac OS X v10.5, one for v10.6) which, after a simple double-click, does the same [...]

[...] can copy and paste into

Submitted by Apple Rumors &a... (not verified) on

[...] can copy and paste into the Terminal. If mucking about with that makes you queasy, you can download Chromeflix (one version for Mac OS X v10.5, one for v10.6) which, after a simple double-click, does the same [...]

[...] can copy and paste into

Submitted by How to enable N... (not verified) on

[...] can copy and paste into the Terminal. If mucking about with that makes you queasy, you can download Chromeflix (one version for Mac OS X v10.5, one for v10.6) which, after a simple double-click, does the same [...]

[...] can copy and paste into

Submitted by How to enable ... (not verified) on

[...] can copy and paste into the Terminal. If mucking about with that makes you queasy, you can download Chromeflix (one version for Mac OS X v10.5, one for v10.6) which, after a simple double-click, does the same [...]

The big question now, though,

Submitted by Tad (not verified) on

The big question now, though, is now that there is Netflix for iPhone and iPad, what codec are they using? Probably not Silverlight, though for sure there is some manner of DRM happening.

There has got to be an avenue to do this, somehow and in some way.

Well, you could compile a

Submitted by Steven on

Well, you could compile a WebKit browser for linux that identifies itself as iOS. You would have to add some player that can play QuickTime content (VLC maybe?) and then wrap all of this up as a single app. Essentially, you would have to reverse engineer the entire iOS app.

If you are serious about trying this, I would recommend building it as a KDE application since KHTML is the original source of WebKit and I can see how one might use KDE bindings to simulate the calls you would need. Good luck!

Thanks again for doing this.

Submitted by R. Kevin Hill (not verified) on

Thanks again for doing this. I recently noticed that in the most recent builds of Chrome and Chromium that the programmers seem to have built a spoof in to get around Netflix's sniffing, so ChromeFlix is no longer necessary. However, it was a very nice workaround for awhile there, and very much appreciated!

Actually, NetFlix made the

Submitted by Steven on

Actually, NetFlix made the change.

Pages like this one shamed them into realizing that they should not selectively enable browsers.

Once Hulu learns the same lesson, Google TV and Boxee will be happy.

Add new comment

More information about text formats

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
By submitting this form, you accept the Mollom privacy policy.