How To Rip Netflix ‘Watch Now’ Movies

original post by: DIzzIE [antikopyright 2007] (August, 9 2007)

At the beginning of 2007, Netflix started offering it's customers in the U.S. an on-demand video service called ‘Watch Now’ (netflix.com/watchnow). Subscribers may watch flicks and TV shows online at no extra cost. The limit is one hour per dollar, so if you pay $18 for your subscription, you get 18 hours of credits to watch shit online. All well and good, but the trouble is that Netflix doesn’t easily allow you to save the flicks and watch them at your leisure because the films are entrapped in some shittastic Windows Media DRM wrapper. Let’s see if we can fix that.

This guide will demonstrate how to save and decrypt the downloadable movies and TV shows from Netflix. The outcome will be unprotected WMV media files, suitable for conversion to XviD or whatever format you prefer.

Tools of the Trade

In order to run the Netflix "Watch Now" Service Hack, you need:

paid subscription to Netflix
Decryption Utility: FairUse4WM
Microsoft Windows Media Player 11
Web Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6+
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP (SP2)
or Windows Vista

The Step-by-Step

1. Log in to your Netflix account and browse on over to netflix.com/watchnow to pick a flick to watch (you can usually watch the trailer within Netflix prior to picking a movie as well).

2. Click the blue Play button next to the movie of your choice. If this is your first time trying out the Watch Now feature, the Netflix Movie Installer (Netflix_Movie_Viewer_Installer.msi) dialogue will pop-up. Click yes to go through the installation process.

3. You should now see a Windows Media Player (WMP) dialogue pop up, saying ‘you do not have the rights to view this file…would you like to connect to the website…’. Hit NO.

4. In your browser window you should now see an error message from WMP bitching about not having the license to play the file. Ignore that shit, and open the source code of the website (right-click in the browser window and select View Source, or go to Tools and then View Source).

5. Hit Ctrl-F in Notepad (assuming that’s what the website source code opened in) and put in ‘WNPlaylistMovies’ (type that without the quotation marks and hit enter). The bit of code you’re looking for will look something like this:

Code:

ar WNPlaylistMovies = {"movies":[{"id":"4937292","title":"Scat Girls From Space","streams":[{"url":"http://index.ehub.netflix.com/item/?x=sdjkdsjHDEFJKHE38DFAWKDJdjieEWIUiDWJIDWI.","bitrate":500,"dlid":473289292,"requiredBandwidth":700},…

You’ll see a few more URLs listed, each with a different bitrate. You can pick the last URL which should have the highest bitrate and will also have the highest filesize (upwards of a gigabyte for full-length movies). Despite the bitrate listed in the source code, GSpot always seems to show that the bitrate is 6154 kb/s for the flicks downloaded for the highest listed bitrate.

6. Copy the ehub URL that you picked (including the quotation marks), and open up a new Notepad window.

7. Here’s the template you can paste into Notepad to make a link to the file:

Code:

<html>
<a href=”http://index.ehub.netflix.com/item/?x=sdjkdsjHDEFJKHE38DFAWKDJdjieEWIUiDWJIDWI.">scat girls</a>
</html>

8. Still in Notepad, go to File and Save As. Type in something along the lines of netflixrip.htm and under ‘Save as type’ select All Files. Save the htm file you just made wherever you want.

9. Open the netflixrip.htm file and right-click on the link you made. Select ‘Save Target As…’. You should now see the usual save dialogue pop-up in Internet Explorer, asking you to pick a location where you want to save a file called data.wmv.

10. Downloading. The file should be about 1-2 gigabytes, depending on content.

11. Time to exorcise the Micro$oft DRM demon. Open the data.wmv file in Windows Media Player, and you should see the same alert you saw back in step 3. This time click YES to connect to the Netflix site and acquire the license. (In Internet Explorer 7, you might get a security warning about an ActiveX control, click on the security bar and select ‘allow ActiveX controls…’).

12. Immediately after you click Yes and are presented with a ‘media usage rights acquisition’ dialogue, launch mirakagi and click ‘Start’ as soon as you see the ‘Play’ button become active in the rights acquisition dialogue in WMP. Mirakagi should then tell you that it has found a couple keys and that it's done processing.

13. Back to the WMP player, which by now should now be playing the movie, and go ahead and close down WMP.

14. Launch FU4WM, click Next and click on ‘Add File’ to select the DATA.WMV file so that it appears in the list of files in the FU4WM window. Highlight the data.wmv file and click Next.

15. If you encounter an error in FU4WM telling you that the file “does not appear to be licensed to you”: Go back and click Recover Keys in FU4WM right after the license window pops up in WMP. When the ‘play’ button becomes active in the license acquisition window in WMP, click on Recover Keys in FU4WM and try again. The timing can be a bit iffy, so keep trying and you’ll get it. If, on the other hand, everything went smoothly, you should now see a conversion status bar in FU4WM, telling you to “please wait while your files are converted” :).

16. Wait a few minutes for FU4WM to do it's thing, or you might get a rather glitchy video file.

17. Once the conversion is done, you should have a duplicate copy of the data.wmv file (sans the encryption, that is ;)), in the default save folder of FU4WM (…\My Documents\My Videos\, or wherever you specified). Feel free to open the file in Media Player Classic, VLC, or whatever, or convert the file to another format. Close down FU4WM, and delete the yucky encrypted data.wmv file.

18. Rinse and repeat.

What about the Time Limit?

While the flicks you download don’t immediately show up in your "Watch Now" Viewing History (netflix.com/WatchNowViewingActivity), they do show up after 24 hours, no matter how much of the movie you view (that is, even if you watch only ten seconds of a flick, its full length will be recorded in your account after 24 hours). Other alleged ways of beating the time limit, like unplugging your modem, and flushing your cache/temporary files after downloading the flick also don’t appear to work as the time still gets deducted after 24 hours.