iFlix on Ubuntu LTS

If you are interested to use the new iFlix service on Ubuntu, you will need to install pipelight, since iFlix has decided to use Silverlight instead of HTML5 for it’s video streaming platform.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin --update
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight
touch $HOME/.config/wine-wininet-installer.accept-license

After that, do an about:config on Firefox and the silverlight plugin should show up. It works fairly well on Firefox. However, there are some issues. For one, the player does not position itself properly when the window is resized. As a result, I cannot watch it in a small window.

Issues

1. I would like to see a popup-window option enabled for iFlix as I like to watch my videos in a small window in the corner while I do my work on the laptop. Hulu had this great feature. As it is, iFlix requires me to either watch a show or work. It does not allow me to multi-task.
2. They spelt capacity wrong – as “capasity” – on the player settings. This appears when I try to adjust the streaming quality.
3. Quality wise, it is quite obviously heavily compressed. Both the audio and video quality isn’t great even on the “High” settings.

As this is my first 30 mins of using the system. I shall reserve judgement until I get to try it out more extensively. However, for RM8/month, I think that I will most likely subscribe assuming that they can supply me the latest shows.