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Raspberry Pi Netflix – How to watch Netflix on Raspberry Pi?

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Raspberry Pi Netflix

Raspberry Pi is an affordable device, which lets you do a lot of things. One of the simplest and most useful ways to use the Raspberry Pi is as a low-cost alternative to the Roku or Fire TV. You can also load programs like Plex and Kodi onto the Raspberry Pi to create an affordable media centre device, but even those simple projects aren’t strictly necessary if you are looking to watch Netflix on the Raspberry Pi. But the Pi can’t stream the Netflix, when its right out of the box, So that you have to give your Pi the power to stream Netflix. It is straightforward, just follow the given steps to watch the Raspberry Pi Netflix:

Raspberry Pi Netflix
Raspberry Pi Netflix

What we are going to do is use the Raspbian operating system to run the chromium browser and open Netflix in the Chromium on your Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspbian disk image has included the PIXEL desktop. The PIXEL stands for “Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight.” The image comes with the Chromium, an open-source browser which is developed by Google. Chrome is based on the Chromium, So that it can do plenty of the same things as the Chromium does, including some things that Epiphany, Raspbian’s old default browser, can’t do. Netflix doesn’t support the Epiphany, but it does support Chrome.

But the Chrome and Chromium aren’t precisely the same, and you can’t watch the Netflix using Chromium out of the box. If you try to, you will get the screen like this:

The error says that you are missing the required component to watch Netflix. That component is called Widevine Content Decryption Module.

That may seem like some third-party plugin, but it’s not it’s included in the Chrome out of the box. If you have ever used Chrome to Stream Netflix, then you have already used this plugin without even knowing it. It’s just what while this plugin is standard with Chrome, it is not standard with the Chromium. So that you have to get a version of Chromium which includes this Chrome plugin. Let’s do it!

Related: How to Backup Your Raspberry Pi SD Card?

How to watch Netflix on Raspberry Pi | Raspberry Pi Netflix

Raspberry Pi Netflix
Raspberry Pi Netflix

Step 1: Install Raspbian, We are using the Raspbian operating system in this entire project So that you can downloading the Raspbian disk image and writing it to the MicroSD card to use in your Raspberry Pi if you don’t have this already. If you are not familiar with this process, Just check out this guide to Install the Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi

Step 2: Install Chromium with the Widevine Support

Just download and install the version of Chromium which has already been compiled with the Widevine Support. Open up the terminal window in the Raspbian and enter these two lines in order:

  • wget https://github.com/kusti8/chromium-build/releases/download/netflix-1.0.0/chromium-browser_56.0.2924.84-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.1011.deb
  • sudo dpkg -i chromium-browser_56.0.2924.84-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.1011.deb
Raspberry Pi Netflix
Raspberry Pi Netflix

Step 3: Now we have got the plugin installed, Try to play something on Netflix and this error will greet you:

Now we have to do one more step and install the Chrome extension called “User-Agent Switcher for Chrome.” That is because we need to lie Netflix a bit and have it believe that we are using the Chrome OS.

Now open the Chrome Webstore and install the extension. Next, we will just need to enter some values in the extension.

Step 4: Create a new user-agent string

After installing, open the extension’s options and create a new user-agent string like this:

New user-agent name:
Netflix

New user-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS armv7l 6946.63.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36

Group:
Chrome

Append?
Replace

Indicator flag:
IE

Then click the extension’s icon and select the Chrome > Netflix.

That’s it! Now you can watch Netflix without any hassle.

Related: How to Connect Raspberry Pi Camera Module? 

Alternative

Raspberry Pi Netflix
Raspberry Pi Netflix Alternative

If you open the Netflix from Terminal using Chromium browser https://www.netflix.com, then you may get an error message that says something like “Failed to call a method: org.freedesktop.UPower.EnumerateDevices.” To fix this issue, you can install the UPower, a piece of middleware that deals with power management on Linux systems. To install UPower, Just go back to the Terminal and type studo apt-get install UPower. You can remove the .deb file we downloaded to save some space.

Thank you for reading this post.

Related: How to Connect Raspberry Pi to WiFi Network?

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