Netflix "Watch Instantly" Doesn’t Work on Macs - Even Under Parallels
One of the reasons why I had been excited about setting up my MacBook Pro with Parallels was because I thought I would finally be able to take advantage of the “Watch Instantly” feature in Netflix, but it doesn’t work.
The one PC laptop we have watched things (a Lenovo ThinkPad m60) on doesn’t have a DVI connector, so we can’t connect it to our TV and have to sit and watch the movies on a tiny little screen.
I thought the Mac with Parallels (with Vista) would fix that. It has a DVI connector, but a couple of problems came up…
First, the TV had higher resolution than the monitor and I wasn’t able to drag a Parallels window onto the second monitor. Which meant I had to mirror the monitors which dropped the resolution of the TV.
But the big problem is that Microsoft’s DRM system requires that the playback be on an approved device. But Parallels’ video driver is virtual, so the device is unknown, which means the movies won’t play.
There’s really no way around this, that I can see… Until Apple gets it’s act together and implements more widely accepted DRM. I wonder if it would work if I ran Vista using Bootcamp since that would remove the virtualization - but I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort…
Update: I did some more investigation and at least some people who are running Parallels with XP (not Vista as I’m doing) are getting it to work. However, I haven’t found anyone who’s gotten it to work under Bootcamp, which is a bit odd since that’s less virtualization (if I understand things correctly).
