Netflix is a well-known streaming platform that specializes and provides online video streaming as well as video on demand. The media company has recently expanded its business reach in the film industry by becoming television series producers as well as online distributors.
Netflix provides all sorts of streaming media content including movies, shows and so much more. On Linux, if you are looking to stream any content via Netflix, you are going to need either Opera of Google Chrome web browsers but it is a different case when it comes to Mac or Windows as several other browsers including Safari and Firefox support Netflix online streaming.
It almost feels like Linux distros are always attended to last when comes to support for apps like Netflix as the platform isn’t even mentioned on the official Netflix website meaning if you are looking to use the program, you are stuck with either Opera, Google Chrome. or Vivaldi.
For those who are looking to stream content from Netflix but prefer using other web browsers like Vivaldi — which is based on the open-source Chromium project, there is a simple script created by one of Vivaldi’s project member Ruarí Ødegaard that you can run in the terminal to get Google Chrome and extract the Wildevine Media Optimizer plugin.
Wildevine is a browser plugin created to be used on various web browsers allowing users to stream and watch video contents online.
According to Ruarí Ødegaard, “The widevinecdm component is something that Google only licenses for the two other platforms Windows and Linux, so in Vivaldi, we have a symlink that uses the copy from Chrome (if present),”
He also added, “It occurred to me that not everyone wants to have Chrome, so I just wrote a little script to download Chrome and rip out that one part similar to what the distros do with pepper flash.”
The script is available on GitHub page.
If you want to use Netflix in @vivaldibrowser for Linux and don’t want to Chrome installed, this should do the trick https://t.co/wBu4W3lCFI
— Ruarí Ødegaard (@ruari) July 15, 2016
Sorry about that Joe….we’ll correct that right away and give credit wherever necessary from now on.