Making Netflix playable on Ubuntu in Chrome (again)

by | posted in: HOWTO | 1

So I was watching 30 Rock and Episode 9 had just finished…Episode 10 was about to begin but then I got that dreaded “Your OS is unsupported” error.

I contacted support.

No help. They said it’s probably from an update on their end.

I tried using Firefox and saw a similar (yet slightly updated!) page. It advised that Chrome OS was playable with:

A Google Chromebook or Chromebox running Chrome OS 37 or higher

I had an idea… and it worked.

My idea was to use a User-Agent switcher to spoof running ChromeOS. I’m running Chrome version 40, so I’m covered on that. All I need to do is make Netflix think I’m running Chrome OS (which, incidentally, is Linux-based ._. ).

This is the User-Agent Switcher I use, available in the Chrome Store.

screenshot

Load it up, then go to your Extension settings, choose “options” for that extension, and look in the “Custom User-Agents” section.

screenshot

Enter the following details:

  • New User-agent name:  ChromeOS (Netflix)
  • New User-Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS i686 0.12.433) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.77 Safari/534.30
  • Group: Chrome
  • Indicator Flag: CR

Click “Add”.

Choose the little User-Agent Switcher icon on your toolbar and select this new User-Agent that you just created.

screenshot

That should do it!

Until they do yet-another-update…