So I got Netflix Watch Now working on my Playstation 3, and I thought, why wouldn’t this work on Linux? So I started monkeying around and got it working. It’s not great, but it works. I see no reason this wouldn’t work on MacOSX either.

First you’ll need to download and install the Play On! Media Server on a windows machine. It costs $30, but has a free trial so you can figure out if it’s worth it for you. You still need a windows machine, you just don’t have to watch movies on it. Once it’s installed and working download djmount and install it using your system appropriate method. In my case:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Once it’s installed you can run djmount to mount your playon server in a directory:

mkdir ~/upnp
djmount ~/upnp

If you cd into the directory you should see your PlayOn server and you can navigate down the tree to your Netflix Watch Instantly queue. To watch a movie, try:

mplayer -ao none -vo sdl -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0 -cache 8192 -playlist myMovieName.m3u

That’s it. mplayer likes to bomb out if you try to fast forward past the end of your queue. There might be a player that’s happier with these streams, but I haven’t found it. Totem works, but seems to have too small of a buffer and so buffers constantly for me.

Sorry for all of you non-linux types reading this blog. We’ll get back to non-technology randomness at a later date.