Netflix supports Ubuntu out of the box

Netflix now supports Ubuntu in conjunction with Google Chrome out-of-the-box. HTML5 video streams with DRM are used for this purpose. Until now, users had to perform a number of actions in order to watch Netflix streams.

Netflix has quietly enabled support for Chrome in conjunction with Ubuntu, users report on Reddit. It’s not clear yet about other Linux distributions. What is certain is that Ubuntu in combination with Firefox is not yet supported by default.

Until now, users could watch Netflix streams, but then they had to manually upgrade a library used for the digital rights management protection of the streams. In addition, they had to spoof their user agent. That is no longer necessary: ​​the new version of the library is now standard in the Ubuntu repository at Netflix’s insistence, and the user agent of Chrome on Ubuntu has been added by Netflix to the list of supported browsers.

For a long time, users of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions could only watch Netflix using Wine, which allows Windows software to run on Linux. That was because Netflix only supported Silverlight in the browser; although it is also a Linux implementation, it is not suitable for playing Netflix videos.