Troubles with Hulu & Netflix on Linux Mint

Good morning/afternoon everyone,

I have been having some issues with video play back on Linux Mint for Hulu and Netflix.

Things I have tried:

Disabled Hardware acceleration

Followed this guide on installing HAL: https://www.howtogeek.com/239682/how-to-watch-hulu-on-ubuntu-and-other-linux-distributions/

Ensured Adobe Flash was up to date.

Have the latest version of Firefox installed on the machine.

Ads play on Netflix, but the actual content will not. Hulu I have the commercial free sub so I do not see ads on 99% of content.

I know that Wendell and this community are very high on Linux and support it to the maximum, so I figured this would be my best source of information to help me solve the issue.

Edit: Hardware wide its a Pentium G4400 with 4gb of ram for a HTPC. No dedicated GPU and no outside drivers other than that with Linux Mint and any updates it may have pushed.

I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that Netflix only played on Linux when using Chrome. Definitely don’t need Flash, Netflix only ran over Silverlight and HTML5, and I think at this point they’re all HTML5.

Not sure about Hulu though.

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This worked. Switching to Chrome solved the issue for both Hulu and Netflix… wow… All I read last night was that with Linux the only way was with Firefox… so I never downloaded Chrome, I tried Chromium, but not Chrome. Thank you.

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Netflix support was added to Firefox last year.

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Should be possible with Firefox but you may or may not have to install the Widevine plugin separately as it may not be included in your package manager (might be in a repository for proprietary packages).

Firefox only works with Widevine (in Windows too, but there it is installed by default) for encrypted media content.

Also Firefox is not the “only” way. You can make it work with any Chromium based browser, but there you have to install the widevine stuff yourself as well. It is included in Chrome as it’s proprietary anyway.

Watching Hulu on Firefox right now. I usually just use Chrome for Netflix because it just started supporting it when I was new to Linux and it has simply become habit.

The article says it links you to some ‘lite’ version of HAL. I always used the the so-called zombie HAL PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~mjblenner/+archive/ubuntu/ppa-hal

It works pretty well for me. Occasionally if I try to skip forward or backward it hangs and I have to refresh, which invariably starts off somewhere other than where I was at. Otherwise it has worked for me since I started using Linux in 2015. I just installed the PPA, update, and installed HAL.

I’ll also mention I have been doing this with a G1850 Celeron and have done it with iGPU as well as on an old Core2Duo with whatever integrated graphics the G31 motherboard had, and several Bay Trail and Braswell based Atom PCs.

The big thing with FireFox is that you have to change the Agent string to look like Chrome because some sites have Chrome hard coded as the only supported platform for GNU/Linux and BSD. That was the case for me. I use FF Nightly.

Idk about Netflix, but I got Hulu to work on Linux in the Mozilla Firefox browser on my desktop with some crap plugins.

For me the trick to getting Netflix to work in Firefox was to go to Preferences/Content and the select “Play DRM Content”.

Anyone know how to get HBO to play nice with Debian 9? Is pipelight the only option?