[mythtv-users] OT: I'm streaming Netflix on my Linux box

Matt Emmott memmott at gmail.com
Sat Oct 4 18:58:19 UTC 2008


Hope I don't ruffle any feathers since it's not strictly Myth related but I
see so many requests around Netflix that I thought I'd share. Using a beta
piece of not-free software for Windows called PlayOn (
http://www.themediamall.com/playon) and XBMC on my Myth box I'm reliably
streaming my Instant Watch Netflix queue over UPnP.

My Myth box is Mythbuntu 7.10 updated to Myth .21. Using the instructions at
xbmc.org I enabled the repositories for Ubuntu 7.10 and installed xbmc
Atlantis beta 1 along with scripts and themes using Synaptic. I enabled uPNP
and was able to add my Windows box as a UPnP source. From there I was able
to stream Netflix as well as Hulu and Youtube on my TV without issue.

It's a kludge and requires Windows, but it does work.Plus, PlayOn is neither
free as in beer or speech. If you've got a Windows box on your network it's
a very easy one-time install (so long as you've installed the Netflix
player), so it could be thrown on some random machine and forgotten (if
you're like me and have such things at your house).  I wonder if one would
be able to virtualize an instance of Windows on their Mythbox and use that
as the 'backend' for the stream. I was able to streamline things a bit and
launch XBMC from within myth by modifying one of the Mythtv menu xml files
at /usr/share/mythtv/.

Again there's a lot of closed source trickery going on here and I don't want
to anger anybody on this list, i just thought it would be helpful for people
like me who want that magic bridge between the computer and the living room
TV. I also don't know enough about Myth's UPnP client capabilities, I used
xbmc because I've been using it for years and am familiar with it.If there's
a way to accomplish this without the xbmc piece I'd love to hear about it,
it would be awesome if you could create new channels for Hulu, Netflix,
YouTube, etc.

- Matt
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