Notices

I was jealous of my fiance's ability to watch Netflix on her iPhone. Why do they get all the love!!! Ugh.

Anyway, I was researching how to do it on the N900 out of curiosity. I finally came to the conclusion that PlayOn.tv may be the simplest way. So I downloaded the trial and have it running. The N900 sees it over UPNP, but I experienced the same buffering issue mentioned in other threads here. Dang it!

So I proceeded to try PlayOn.tv on my Wii. The Wii uses a Flash 7 player interface with PlayOn to play content. This works great. I figured if the Wii can do it with old Flash, then so can N900. So I used "Hide User Agent" from extras-devel to make my user agent the exact same as my Wii. PlayOn, however, somehow still knows this is not a Wii and I get 403/forbidden when actually playing a show.

Next, I tried the Google TV user agent as PlayOn now supports GTV. I changed my user agent again to GTV and hit http://gtv.playon.tv on my local network. Voila! I get the Flash version of the PlayOn interface. I watched some CBS.com Star Trek and even a couple TV series from Netflix on the N900.

I have not tested 3G! I'll leave that to someone else until I have time to do it myself.

Since PlayOn is paid software, I emailed tech support and told them how I got access on my phone by changing the user agent string. I expressed my concern that PlayOn may block GTV from non-GTV devices in the future has they have apparently done for Wii.

I got a response from PlayOn and they said they have no plans at this time to change the way the GTV settings work as they don't want to break compatibility with older GTV and other GTV-based devices.

So, it seems it may be safe to try PlayOn this way if you don't mind risking it possibly breaking in the future. I may just take the plunge once I finish tweaking my settings and testing 3G over the rest of my 14 day trial period.

I can confirm that this trick does work.

However, playing Netflix movies is still a bit jerky. The CPU is pretty much taxed at 100% all the time (overclocked at 900MHz). I tried even 1100MHz and it was a bit smoother, though still jerky at at scenes with lots of action/movement.

I tried changing the video quality from Auto to Low in Playon server settings, but I don't think it made any difference.

Finally I found a solution that that works perfectly with Playon and N900

When I use MediaBox and change the MPEG video to MPlayer in Player Backends setting I can stream videos fine. However, it seem that you need to overclock the N900 to minimum of 805MHz to have smooth playback. (Mine runs at 900MHz so it is not an issue for me.)

Finally I can now put the Playon into full use I purchased some time ago.