Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Netflix on the Acer Iconia a500 Works without Root!

at Wednesday, October 05, 2011 Posted by Jeremy 2 comments
It's no secret that the only feature I am lacking in my Acer Iconia a500 is the ability to stream movies via Netflix Instant Streaming.  This afternoon I was doing my usually weekly Google search for a solution.  I was even open to the idea of looking for a way to root my Iconia a500 to get this ability.  But to my surprise, I accidentally stumbled across a great discovery (which requires no root, and since 3.2 isn't easily rooted on the Iconia a500 I figured it was worth a shot).  I will go on record to say that I did not come up with this solution, the hardwork belongs to ezterry and snickle at the XDA Developers forums.

I found a link to the XDA Developers forums which provided a promising solution patched by ezterry and refined by snickle on the forums.

Apparently, ezterry made the initial edits allowing the Netflix apk to work on the Iconia a500.  But according to snickle's post, screen rotation didn't work (I didn't try ezterry's apk first).  So snickle did a little refining to it and got screen rotation to work.  

I can verify that snickle's version of the apk does work.  When I initially ran it, after logging in to the service via the app, I got a white screen with some errors in the top corner.  I closed out of the app and relaunched and it worked just fine on my Acer Iconia a500 running stock (non-rooted) Honeycomb 3.2.

For ezterry's solution:
And for snickle's solution (the one I tried): 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some old episodes of Doctor Who to watch!
Posted under : , , , , , , , ,

2 comments:

  • October 10, 2011 at 2:53 PM
    #
    Yamman :

    OK, I too have searched and searched. Voila the answer has arrived. Works great, and I'm in Canada too. Finally.....not sure why Netflix can't get there head out of their........3rd parties shouldn't have to come up with fixes.

  • October 10, 2011 at 5:17 PM
    #
    Jeremy :

    I know, I've been using it a lot since installing the apk last week. I know I've read several things about Netflix being concerned with DRM and their streaming client on Android devices. But I don't know how much of that is truth versus them just limiting what devices can use their client. Which is crap if we are paying customers. I also know there isn't a lot of room left for 3rd party developers to make a solution since Netflix keeps their streaming API's fairly close to themselves. The only other fix I found involved running the SplashTop RDP app from the Android Market and using RDP to forward the audio/video from the PC streaming Netflix to the a500.

    Which honestly sounded like too much work when someone could just recompile the official apk with device detection stripped out for a one time fix. So glad these guys figured it out.

    Apparently Netflix was to concerned about offloading the DVD rental side of the business as Qwikster than they were about existing customers. lol

Post a Comment