Greetings, this is my first contribution to this blog, this time I want to share a program that I found very interesting for those who view content with Silverlight in a different way
Silverlight is an application designed by Microsoft for multimedia playback and functions similar to Abobe Flash, it is used in various services.
In my case it bothered me to have to switch to Windows to be able to view content on Netflix and although it exists «netflix desktop«. On my Netbook, even though I was using XFCE, it didn't have a good performance, causing my computer to not respond or the video to freeze.
Pipelight works using wine-silverlight like Netflix Desktop, but unlike it, Pipelight No. It uses a modified windows version of Firefox, but instead installs a plugin in our browser that calls Silverlight from Wine.
It may not be very clear but basically we can see Silverlight content from our browser without having to emulate another from wine.
Its operation is more or less like this:
It is an alternative to Netflix Desktop but this is not only limited to that since it can play Silverlight content on any page that uses it
I will show a screenshot of my computer in which we can see that it is my native browser and not one emulated in WIne, despite this the video is shown at normal speed
Installation:
Ubuntu
We must add the following repositories that are necessary for the installation with the following commands:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mqchael/pipelight
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pipelight
Arch Linux
For these users we have available the package from AUR
yaourt -S pipelight
Once installed we must execute one more command (with the browser still closed)
/usr/share/pipelight/wine-silverlight5.1.installer
Other distros
The source code package is available and to download it we must use git
git clone https://bitbucket.org/mmueller2012/pipelight.git
Mirror
git clone git://fds-team.de/pipelight.git
It requires the following packages as dependencies:
libc6-dev, libx11-dev, mingw-w64, g ++ - mingw-w64, make, g ++, sed
For the installation we need to enter the following commands
./configure
make
sudo make install
Once installed we can test if it works by visiting the following link:
Try Silverlight
If we see the animation the plugin is working correctly
Notes:
1.- Always have the browser closed during installation so that our browser does not have errors with the plugin
2.- In some web pages (Netflix for example) it is necessary that the platform be Windows, for this we will modify the user agent (with extensions such as User agent Switcher or manually) of the browser by Firefox in Windows or Chrome in Windows
I use this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:21.0) Gecko/20130401 Firefox/23.0
And with this I no longer have problems when viewing content on that page
Hope it works for you.
Greetings and do not be too harsh with criticism this is my first contribution
Sounds good as an alternative. Thanks for the contribution 😉
Thank you Elav for your comment, I found this yesterday and decided to make a post 😀
Good alternative, but in terms of performance, it does not compare with HTML5 and I hope that Netflix will implement its HTML5 video player to be able to enjoy the good content it has on all platforms.
This will be possible only if firefox or chrome will come with drm implemented by default, as in windows….
The DRM, they say, would already come within the Netflix HTML5 player, something in which Richard Stallman is against our beloved oracle of paranoia.
From what I read, it is not exactly like that, that's why in windows, it only works with IE EXPLORER.
These sons of ...
For that I think they are waiting for me to accept the DRM standard for protected content in htlm5
But better performance than Netflix Desktop if it also has support for more Silverlight-based pages
Hello, is it necessary to have wine installed?
Pipelight installs you a special version of Wine with support for Silverlight
Too bad there is no nextflix around here.
It also works for other pages that use silverlight
I hope I don't spam 🙁, I recommend NuFlick, nuflick is a Mexican platform for the distribution of on-demand cinema on the Internet focused on Mexican, independent, alternative and festivals cinema. that also uses Silverlight, to watch the movies I used SMTHPlayer, which uses php and mediaplayer to see the videos, but sometimes the video would get stuck 🙁
Great! Pipelight is a good idea, at least up to a point
Hello, how such a friend, look at me personally I became interested in this project because simply the netflix desktop application has sound problems, I do not know if it happened to you that suddenly the sound is heard accelerated, I feel that maybe it is because the wine that uses the application is old, I hope this is not so many problems, I await your answer, I use kubuntu 12.04 lts.
Well, I already have it running without problems on archlinux 64 bits, the only problem is that it looks low as the lowest quality that YouTube gives, but I want to think that it is because my connection is 1 mega when it should be at least of 6, but well that's apart. Thanks for the post.
Hello, I am writing to you in case it has happened to you or you have any idea what could happen to me,
I have pipelight installed as an alternative to silverlight, the problem is when I try to play a video it gives me a pluying error, although when I go to the silverlight page to check if the pluying works it says that everything is ok, accessing the browser indicates that this installed and correct.
This happens to me on the gotv page of movistar.
I have also installed a program to make believe that I am browsing from windows and I have installed the updated pluying package (flash ..).
I am working with Ubuntu 12,04 and I am a newbie since I come from windows
I can not solve it so I get in touch in case there is someone who has happened to him or knows how to help me.
Thank you very much, greetings.
Hi Diego,
The go tv of movistar in OpenSuse 13.1 did not work for me either. I installed the pipelight from the OpenSuse repositories, I downloaded the rpm locally, I closed the browser because on the pipelight page it says that the installation must be done with the browser closed and even so it kept loading when I tried to access one of the channels of movistar tv and did not show anything.
On the pipelight installation page there are many international channels that work with pipelight and silverlight5.1 but warns that some channels only work with silverlight5.0, including Yomvi in Spain. I tried to enable the silverlight5.0 plugin and movistar tv worked for me.
To enable silverlight5.0 you must first disable version 5.1. With sudo or as root in a terminal window enter the commands:
pipelight-plugin --disable silverlight5.1
pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight5.0
When you enable silverlight5.0 you can get a message in the terminal telling you that you have to accept Microsoft's terms. You hit "Y" and that's it.
Hello friend, I don't know why this happens, if you could help me, I would appreciate it, I have a linux canaima one of those from high school when I put in the 1st command I get this: apt-add-repository: command not found
I would like to know how to solve this problem, thank you ...
First of all, thanks for your contribution that I found interesting .. I am a microsoft developer and silverlight is my weakness, before, I had the "moonlight" but in the end it only worked up to version 3 of Silverlight with difficulty (without problems on Mac )… I haven't seen this yet, I'm going to try it to see how it works. I repeat, thanks for the input.
Being entered as explained when I start section I get a sale saying that I have to activate the silverliht plugin, but I go and look and the plugin is activated and enabled so I have not been able to enter the page, I tried chrome, mozila. and exploer, but I always get the same
I see that everyone does a lot of post but it seems to me that they do not have much idea of what they do. here it is explained how it is installed but there are many things that are not known. the driver does not appear directly in browsers. a few steps must be applied
with this command we see the controller options
- pipelight-plugin –help
This will show us the options that we can use, for those who still cannot enable the controller when executing that command, they will see that it will give them an option that says create-mozilla-plugins with that they can activate it for Firefox.
I was suffering for several days and in all the posts they said the same thing, it seems to me that many people dedicate themselves to copying and pasting a lot.
I did everything as you describe, the routines are observed running, but no, the browser remains the same, it is Firefox v.40.0.3
Hello, good night. I would like to know if you can help me with a problem that I have, and that is, I recently bought a computer, and it does not have support for silverlight since it does not have windows and I do not want to change the operating system, it brought the operating system from Canaima, and I do not know If you know if there is a complement that is similar to this one to be able to install it, and that is supported by this system, since netflix does not open without it. I would appreciate a prompt reply, thank you.