Pipelight is a wrapper for Windows NPAPI plugins such as Silverlight, Widevine or Flash (the Windows version) which allows you to use these plugins in native Linux web browsers and thus, use services that aren't officially supported on Linux, such as Netflix (Silverlight), HBO Go (Widevine) and so on.
Pipelight 0.2.6 was released yesterday and it brings changes such as:
- added the ViewRight plugin which is used by some VOD services as DRM player. In this release the Caiway version of this plugin ("viewright-caiway") was added;
- added a new Vizzed RGR plugin which ships an emulator to play old games;
- 64bit support for the following Pipelight plugins: Flash and Unity 3D. According to the Pipelight changelog, the 64bit plugins tend to be more buggy than the 32bit versions but the Pipelight team is working on fixing them. For now, this is considered experimental;
- a work-around was added so it's no longer needed to change the browser user agent to be able to use Silverlight in Linux browsers. This might not work in all cases though.
The Pipelight 0.2.6 changelog also mentions that the Pipelight team is currently working on GPU decoding and they already have a working prototype which decodes mpeg2 on the GPU when using the windows version of VLC as player:
"There is still a lot of work left, but we hope that we can support GPU decoding for flash (and hopefully silverlight) in future versions".
For how to install Pipelight and its plugins in Ubuntu, see the following article: Pipelight: Use Silverlight In Your Linux Browser To Watch Netflix, Maxdome Videos And More
I didn't update our Pipelight article with instructions on installing 64bit plugins since this is currently experimental, but if you want to use this anyway, you can install the 64bit version of Windows Flash or Unity3D using the following commands (use them after installing Pipelight using the instructions from the link above):
Firstly, install the 64bit capable version of wine-compholio:
sudo apt-get install wine-compholio:amd64sudo pipelight-plugin --enable x64-flashsudo pipelight-plugin --enable x64-unity3d
