I recently tried watching a Netflix movie on a data projector and it would not work. I have subscribed to Netflix, but my data projector is old and Netflix have a copy protection on their service that won’t let you play to older data projectors. Thankfully there is a way around this. You just need to set your web browser to an older version, and it will use an older piece of technology to play the movie which will work on an old data projector.
The error I was getting in Netflix was something like this.
The key to getting Netflix to play on an older data projector is to tell Safari to pretend to be an older version.
- Make sure the Safari Develop menu is enabled in Safari ( see this article on how to enable the development you in Safari).
2. Under “User Agent” type in the following:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; de-de) AppleWebKit/525.28.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.3 Safari/525.28.3
This is telling Safari to act as version 3 of the Safari browser.
3. Go back to the Netflix site and it will prompt you to install a plug-in called ‘Silverlight’. This is because older versions of Safari couldn’t play movies and they needed a plug-in. Thankfully, this older Plug in works with older data projectors that do not have HDCP data protection.
4. When you click ‘Install Now’ it will download the Silverlight installer into your Safari downloads folder. You will need to click on the Silverlight installer to install it.
5. That’s it! Now you should be able to watch the Netflix movie on your data projector.
If you quit your browser and then go back to Netflix and want to watch a movie on the data projector you will need to go to the develop menu again and type in the code. You won’t need to reinstall the Silverlight plug-in each time.
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